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A discussion of your love/hate relationship with dumb memes.
Wednesday, 13-Apr-16 18:12:52 UTC from web-
@cawlliflower ...can I ask about your username.
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@cawlliflower I like the idea of dissecting and reassembling culture through destructive humour and counter-culture (I'm also just intermittently a sucker for "bad" jokes) but I also think the (not sure if pun intended here) mimetic nature and instant expiry dates of memes themselves (specifically internet memes in our current ostensibly post-internet revolution age) kinda turn me off from them. The relationship is complicated.
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@mrmattimation well it is a dumb meme so
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@narwhal i'm not sure if memes are by definition topical but can't recall one that isn't. They come and go. Much like culture itself; highs and lows or different ends of a spectrum.
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@cawlliflower Many memes these days tend to be topical, or more so emerge topically in regards to the internet as a wider group of subcultures, but I guess in the case of many memes my issue comes in the manner and speed in which they evaporate as cultural commodities. Their tiredness comes as quickly as their rawness, and the cultural economy of their existence becomes invoking said existence for its own sake. So for as much as their spontaneity enriches communicative cultural spaces, it also limits them.
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@narwhal that's as much to do with this stage of their being is still experimental in form as it does with being borne of topical, i think.
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@cawlliflower Oh yeah, it's a young medium still finding its footing, there's just also the oft received impression on my end that past the initial topicality the precedent to create and share memes is for their own sake. I should clarify that I don't dislike memes, it's like you said in that there's a love/hate relationship with them. I like (as you also said) that they are experimental in form, I'm just apprehensive about tautological jokes (which is to say so many memes quickly or eventually just become their own punchline).
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takeshitakenji likes this.
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@cawlliflower I certainly think there's a lot flexibility in the ways we can interpret them, they're very contextual in nature after all.
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