The Theory of Memes: Art, Communication, History

Language is ever-evolving and complex. This goes without saying, but we often forget to factor the language of images into our theories of how we communicate; especially in the current age, this does a huge disservice to the generations of people who are coming up in an age where their visual vocabulary is perhaps even more sharp and nuanced than the words they write. To look at the meme is to look at a fresh format which blends art and communication into a textured, nuanced missive – brief and, at times, powerful.

Social media platforms encourage expression with images. Whether it’s a tweet, which limits the word count of what you can say, or an instagram feed designed to be scrolled through with the captions wholly secondary (or even tertiary after tags), image-based communication is everywhere. This internet-age explosion of the image as the message echoes the way we worked at the advent of printed mass media: although information was disseminated through the printed words, it was images people turned to in order to convey nuance and humour with their ideas. Magazines like Punch and Private Eye made political cartoons their bread-and-butter, and the medium of engraving gave us artistic greats like Hogarth and John Tenniel, whose careers were built as cartoonists and whose work was respected in their own time. Anybody who has ever studied even the smallest amount of British history will be acquainted with the way Georgian images lampooned public figures with pertinent images to make political points, or how Tudor protestant literature utilised images to create a religious and cultural identity, even in the face of persecution. Textbooks are lousy with old images, shared with the context that is considered essential to interpret them. What is to say that Lil Nas X’s incredible meme coming out* (pictured below) will not, in the future, be read as we read those images today? Like them, it is shortform, nuanced, in a dialogue with the existing norms of memetic communication, and, crucially, significant to the culture. His response to why he was disinterested in the some strippers who were photographed dancing for him blew up the internet without him saying a word, demonstrating the power of an image as an artefact for communication in a modern age. Like an ancient world emperor minting a coin with his portrait, Lil Nas X asserts his identity firmly, in a way that would lose impact if he did so in words.

Memes are a format that is popular on sites like twitter and reddit, because their formats lend themselves to long chains of ‘conversation’ that are really just speaking into the void, but also because the format demands short, snappy text but allows for (on twitter) four images. Alongside this, the functionality of mobile phones encourages image-based communication: typing for too long hurts your hand, but screenshots are easy to take and share.

Advertising has been utilising this language we can inherently understand for decades, making graphic design and photography more important than slogan in their campaigns. Advertising shows us that an image does not have to showcase the product itself, but can also advertise a brand’s ethos or project a desired market to an audience, even harvesting people from outside of their demographic to ensure that, when you do come to need this product, it is that brand you will associate with it. This is a sensibility that has been brought into the creation and decoding of memes: we ourselves can be ‘on brand’, and the curation of our online image through what we post has grown from a late capitalist culture attuned to advertising techniques since childhood. The sophistication of advertising proves that we inherently understand images, and demonstrates that they are culturally- and context-bound (if you don’t believe me look at a TV spot from 20 years ago or a book cover from another country), but doesn’t delve into the power that images can have when they are widely shared due to popular appeal rather than disseminated and put into our face. When we choose to share a meme, retweet something, or pin it on pintrest, we are choosing not necessarily to endorse an idea, but at least to put it to a wider audience.

Ultimately, there are two kinds of meme: the ‘traditional’ kind, i.e., the kind that might have existed a century ago, and the ‘tagged’ kind. The ‘traditional’ meme is an image that is shared as-is. It may have a caption or not, but it is an image (moving or still, photograph or illustration) which is presented as inherently having a meaning. The ‘tagged’ meme I am naming for the popular ‘tag yourself’ format, which in itself has become a shorthand applied widely outside of literal tagging. The origin of ‘tagged’ memes was, in fact, to tag others: on early facebook, the image with multiple characters or ideas was for tagging multiple people, each of whom meant a different thing to you which corresponded with the part of the image they were tagged as. This lead to joke tagging, such as tagging a random person in the background of your photograph as a friend who wasn’t present. A combination of social media moving away from being interactions with your IRL friends and people wanting to see themselves represented caused the form to move towards ‘tag yourself’, which remains popular. A ‘tagged’ meme requires interaction: it might be an image of yourself next to your favourite Pokémon or an image from your camera roll that describes your mood, but the role of the ‘tagged’ meme is different in every case. As such, the meaning is conferred upon it afresh when shared. What is clear from ‘tagged’ memes is the power of image to communicate an idea: whether it’s ‘the signs as fabric samples’ or a thread of a celebrity’s outfits next to an incongruous inanimate object (‘Harry Styles as sauces: a thread’), the creator and participant are both interpreting an image and projecting a version of their viewpoint outwards. In the case of both types of meme, a picture may not be articulated the same way by both the original poster and the feed viewer, but an image is sufficiently nuanced that, moreso than a wall of text, an idea, mood, vibe, and thesis statement can be put out into the world and extrapolated successfully, and enjoyably.

The point of memes is to engage in metaphor and artistic techniques. It goes back to the idea articulated in John Berger’s Ways of Seeing that somebody who is uneducated in a tradition can still understand and engage with nuances within the tradition, viscerally or instinctually. When we say ‘post a pic that has your energy’, we are encouraging both self-reflection and engagement with art. In order to find that pic, we have to analyse and engage with the infinite amount of images at our fingertips and assess how we see ourselves and how we want to be perceived by others. Like poets or musicians, people on social media are learning to distil their thoughts and articulate them in a fresh new vocabulary, one which is easily misinterpreted, without allowing their meaning to be lost or misconstrued. This is the power of art: it communicates in a vocabulary that is ephemeral and inexplicable. The power of narrative, images, and sound layer together to create an experience which could not be articulated in any other medium – poems are untranslatable, songs can only be a combination of lyrics and music, and memes lose impact without their images. We are raising a generation of people who, due to constant access to media, are inherently adept at decoding a number of languages and who create their own registers in which to communicate. To deny them is to deny the rich history of image-based communication whilst remaining blind to contemporary language use.

*Yes, I’m aware Lil Nas X was already out as queer at this point, but this was his confirmation that he isn’t into girls so I am considering it a coming out of sorts.

To-Do:

• Change my search engine. Ecosia might be good for the world but I keep hitting walls in my searching.
• Plan for Krakow trip. Comment any sights I must see below!
• Get used to exercising in the morning. It is the most efficient time to exercise.

Today’s Culture:

• Completing my dex in Pokémon Shield
• Banana pancakes. They are a surprisingly simple and versatile side dish.
• Having cheap flowers on my desk. A pretty treat for me!