Glyphs in the Memetic Age

Comprehending Internet culture requires a person to have a keen understanding of how one connects with others on a social, cultural, and psychological level. Interactions within the online realm will often crossover to the physical world as discussions maintained through computers do not remain there. People bring their beliefs, values, attitudes, and behaviors from their daily existence to the various websites and services that make up one’s virtual personality and presence. These acknowledgements of the reality of modern communication and relationships mean that the way people express their realities and reactions online is worth the time of scholars and students of Internet culture to examine critically.

It is in this spirit that I wondered what future anthropologists and cultural scholars would say about these interactions. A person who goes by the Twitter handle @beach_fox looked at two generations of Internet content and created a series of minimalistic glyphs to represent the type of communication that occurred online. The first series (the “Elder Glyphs”) reflect the state of late 1990s to early 2000s popular online animated gifs.

Figure 1: Elder Glyphs by @beach_fox. They are (from top to bottom and left to right) “Dancing Baby,” “All Your Base,” “Hamster Dance,” Strong Bad from “Homestar Runner,” and “Evil Bert.” Source: https://twitter.com/beach_fox/status/1327133630439837698

It is the last of these graphics that began one of the classic works of media scholarship, Henry Jenkins’ (2006) “Convergence Culture.” Jenkins used “Evil Bert” as an entry point to describe the role that transmediation played in the media economy at the beginning of the 21st century. 

Bert is traditionally presented as a Sesame Street character that allows children to learn how to socialize in an acceptable manner. “Evil Bert” is a transmediated version of that Sesame Street character shown supporting Hitler, the Ku Klux Klan, and Osama bin Laden (Poster, 2003). It was that repurposing of Bert’s personality from a friendly character to a psychopathic monster that led media scholars to examine shifts in social messaging from the traditional broadcast medium of television to the adaptive communication system of the Internet. 

The common aspect among these Elder Glyphs referenced in the first figures is that all five works are performative. The presentation of those works is similar to other pieces of content shown on broadcast channels. The original content creator crafted the work, and the content entertained the audience. Audiences could not change the overall message created by that artist. The underlying message is static and essentially unchanged over the decades since the artists created these legacies of the original visual Internet.  

Another aspect to recognize in this grouping is how they all fit the criteria of a glyph. Glyphs are essentially pictographs that express an element of society as a snapshot of their cultural legacy. They are simple forms of expression with a limited range of significant meaning to the broader community. That broader community for these works is nothing more than a passive audience merely viewing the visual as the creator intended. Compare the passive nature reflected in these first works to the second series of glyphs selected by @beach_fox to represent modern Internet culture.

Figure 2: A collection of common glyphs of the poorly understood Memeorite civilization of the Second Silicon Age by @beach_fox. They are (from top to bottom and left to right) “Virgin vs. Chad,” “Ralph In Danger,” “Distracted Boyfriend,” “Lost,” “Me Explaining to My Mom,” “Woman Yelling at Cat,” “Daily Struggle,” “Is This a Pigeon?,” and “Drakeposting.” Source: https://twitter.com/beach_fox/status/1325668490431246336?s=12

A point to note about this collection of Internet staples is this broad interpretation of what those glyphs mean to the audience. The tweet reinforces this idea of a lack of comprehensive understanding by stating, “Memeorite glyphs possess multiple conflicting interpretations and a complexity of meaning impossible to capture in a few short words. These are rough translations only.” Meaningful communication and interactions use these various glyphs listed above as a starting point to address the day’s issues, express various opinions to the community, and react to events in real-time. That is the nature of Internet communication via social networks today. Interpretations of these symbols require a collective understanding of the complexity of the messaging. They are more than just the rough composite of various media forms superimposed on top of one another. 

Memes as Communicative Acts

Communication via online systems means that members of that social network place a collective meaning on the regularly used symbols. This meaning in the digital realm lacks the traditional non-verbals that make up most of the modes of engagement within real world interactions (Maloney, Freeman, & Wohn, 2020). These symbols maintain a collective meaning among the online community members to express a personal opinion, address the current state of the community, defend against conflict, or entertain others.  

“Meme Life: The social, cultural, and psychological aspects of memetic communication” is meant to be a critical overview of how these cultural pieces define modern online existence. A book of this nature needs to recognize the previous contributions to the field and expand on what we know. I am indebted to the past scholarship of Ryan Milner and Limon Shifman in their attempts to provide clarity regarding the significance of the digital works that some would call “silly nonsense,”  “a waste of time,” “a fad” or even “complete garbage.” They act as the digital guidepost of social discourses online and in the real world.

This attempt to ground memes to their social significance goes beyond identifying them as mere concepts that are virally transmitted rapidly within a community or broader society. Memes are rhetorical in nature as they express the logical, emotional, and ethical states of the people using them. They allow a person to condense a problem facing the world and reframe it to change the perspective on the issue or provide a moment of clarity. The Ice Bucket Challenge is one such reframing. It took a medical condition that was not widely understood and made it more accessible by allowing people to experience the muscle stiffness associated with Lou Gehrig’s disease or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). A by-product of this awareness was the fundraising that led to some treatments for this disease (Sherman & Wedge, 2017).

Memes as Sociological Acts

It is also fair to argue that memes are also sociological. They act as the platform for collective expression and maintaining the norms of a given community. Memes reflect the community’s social standards and act as signposts of acceptable and unacceptable interaction within the group. Suppose humor is a reasonable means of addressing the needs of a collective. In that case, memes can help members of a given community understand what modes of expression are appropriate and how to interact with one another (Gal, 2019). A simple example of memes’ sociological nature can be found in the Reddit group r/SpeedOfLobster, which uses the same snapshot of a show as a starting point for collective conversations. 

Figure 3: The primal photograph used for all r/SpeedOfLobsters memes. Source: https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/898758-drake-and-josh

The image acts as a canvas for others to display their worldly experiences. A number of the ten words are blacked out to reflect the content creator’s feelings and knowledge. This simple act reshapes a single line of humorous dialogue to manifest something from the vast expanse of the human condition. 

Figure 4: One of the r/SpeedOfLobsters memes. Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/SpeedOfLobsters/comments/k1up29/yeah_thanks_for_the_help/

Memes as Psychological Acts

The least understood aspect of memetic interaction is that they are psychological. Memes give the content creator some form of agency to address internal conflicts with society and themselves. The crafting of mediated works into memes online allows the community to understand community members’ needs, wants, desires, beliefs, values, attitudes, and behaviors. It gets to the point of personal reflection that the meme creator is not aware they are doing in public.

This in-depth of meme creators’ psychological state is not meant to be considered a form of treatment nor a critical analysis of a person’s mental state. Instead, this acknowledgment helps foster healthy communication techniques that psychological professionals can apply to their practices. Clinical practitioners of psychology (which I am not one of) should seek out additional tools for engagement with clients. I believe that talking about memes in a therapeutic setting could lead to more open dialogues.

Reflecting on Memetic Research

This book’s chapters will address the communication, sociological, and psychological perspectives of memes as the discussion point for further research, academic conversations, and public discourse about the subject. It was crafted to be a textbook for my Memetic Communication (now Memes and Society) course. One of the struggles I had when teaching this course was finding a book that could provide a foundational place to start classroom discussions. My plan for this book is to use it to supplement Limor Shifman’s (2014) “Memes in Digital Culture” and Ryan M. Milner’s (2018) “The World Made Meme: Public Conversations and Participatory Media.” I still believe that these two books should form the foundations of scholarship in the field of memes. My entry is this field will hopefully expand the scholarship beyond the sociological implications of this work. It seems fair to address the psychological aspects to develop additional branches away from the solid roots that Shifman and Milner laid down. I was hoping the classic text “Culture in Networks” by Paul McLean (2016) would fulfill some of those missing areas of focus from the other two books. It is a great graduate school level of review of the areas of network interactions. Sadly, it was too in-depth of a study of the materials. This book can not possibly do the justice that McLean did in describing network interactions that would relate to a class on memes. This book will refer to McLean’s text to enhance the descriptions within the various bullet points of my definition of memes. 

One of the reasons I think McLean’s work made sense to add to my class, and this list of scholarship was grounded in my previous research. Since most of my earlier research has dealt in the field of cybernetics, it seems logical that my definition of knowledge falls under the realm of cybernetic epistemology. Cybernetic epistemology defines experience through a system model, where learning is composed of the paths, nodes, and awareness of the environment. This cybernetic system evolved from a multidisciplinary approach where reality is perceived through a systematic lens. The tracks represent the nodes’ interactions, representing people, events, groups and/or some non-human sentient units (Russell & Ison, 2017). Memes in this model are the after-expressions of this knowledge within the community.

I will be presenting several case studies within this book that reflect the cybernetic epistemology related to meme studies. This focus on case studies should more critically apply McLean’s text to the realm of memes instead of the public networks of the Internet. All cases come from the last two years of teaching Memetic Communication. The book would not be in the form it is today without the students in that course. Their scholarship advanced my understanding of the topic and allowed me to be more explicit in my research on the subject. I hope the following ten chapters are a reflection of those past conversations of the nature of memes.

References Cited:

Maloney, D., Freeman, G., & Wohn, D. Y. (2020). “Talking without a Voice” Understanding Non-verbal Communication in Social Virtual Reality. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 4(CSCW2), 1-25.

McLean, P. (2016). Culture in networks. John Wiley & Sons.

Milner, R. M. (2018). The world made meme: Public conversations and participatory media. Information Society Series.

Park, S. K. (2020, February). Understanding usage of memes over social medias through semantics: A survey. In 2020 IEEE 14th International Conference on Semantic Computing (ICSC) (pp. 387-392). IEEE.

Russell, D., & Ison, R. (2017). Fruits of Gregory Bateson’s epistemological crisis: embodied mind-making and interactive experience in research and professional praxis. Canadian Journal of Communication, 42(3), 485-514.

Sherman, C., & Wedge, D. (2017). The Ice Bucket Challenge: Pete Frates and the fight against ALS. University Press of New England.

Shifman, L. (2014). Memes in digital culture. MIT press.