The Meme is the Massage | QMM #1
Or how I learned to stop doom-scrolling and escape the square-boxed jail cell I was trapped in.
Quixote’s Media Meditations #1
Assignment: “For the ‘message’ of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.” Make comments on this statement as it relates to zoom, computer, internet, webcam restructuring work, society, school, etc.
For the man in a literate and homogenized society ceases to be sensitive to the diverse and discontinuous life of forms. He acquires the illusion of the third dimension and the “private point of view” as part of his Narcissus fixation, and is quite shut off from Blake’s awareness or that of the Psalmist, that we become what we behold.
- Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media
Most internet users today will tell you that a “meme” is an online image that has been constructed, typically with a caption written over it to paradoxically link the content of the image with otherwise unrelated text in order to make light of a particular situation.
For example, a rather viral image entitled “Distracted Boyfriend” depicts the backside of a man and woman (who appears to be his girlfriend) holding hands, the man’s head craned backwards towards the foreground where another woman is walking towards the foreground in the opposite direction. The man appears to be looking at her backside or “checking her out” while his girlfriend, noticing this, with her head craned towards him, appears in relative disgust. The captions laid over this image have been diverse and often hilarious. Here is an example:
Memes are a relatively new phenomenon. In the 1970s,
originally“conceived of memes as the cultural parallel to biological genes and considered them, in a manner similar to ‘selfish’ genes, as being in control of their own reproduction and thus serving their own ends. Understood in those terms, memes carry information, are replicated, and are transmitted from one person to another, and they have the ability to evolve, mutating at random and undergoing natural selection, with or without impacts on human fitness (reproduction and survival). The concept of the meme, however, remains largely theoretical.”1
So, memes have come a long way since then. Even their titular grandfather concedes that internet memes are a version of what he envisioned. But while memes are no doubt the medium par excelence in the social media world today, what effect does that medium have on its viewers?
Memes are an image within an image, a medium within a medium within a medium (the meme inside of social media inside of the cell phone or computer). This relative metafiction provides us with an insight into our cultural myopia, which I would claim, is the mainstream media’s modus operandi (its online incarnations, at least). We become trapped under layers and layers of virtual rubble, of metamedia, and little by little we become what we ingest. We become what we cannot digest. As the quote that ushers in this assignment illustrates, even McLuhan writing sixty years ago understood the blueprint that would turn people into memes generations on.
As if it wasn’t consequential enough that smartphones and computers keep us locked into a screened-in worldview, effectively removing, if not stymieing us from our sensual relationships with more-than-human worlds, the internet meme further deepens that schism. From what I see in my social media circles, memes are currently the most widely shared and traded content, at least on Instagram, if not Facebook and Twitter. My friends and those whom I admire (and follow) share them up incessantly, even despite their own relative protests against the inundations of the internet onto our contemporary lives.
Instead of asking what to do or how to proceed otherwise, perhaps we begin by asking, how does it work? What are the raw materials, parameters and architecture of this tool that so grippingly, has me by the balls?
The meme often takes a reaction, reflection, or insight onto a complex topic (because the world is inherently complex and more complex, still, in our time) and reduces it into the most simple and concentrated form of media possible, typically using a few words or a single sentence to describe that very complexity which we seek to understand. In doing so, the meme compartmentalizes and oversimplifies, pushing the myriad and diverse realities of a situation or idea through the pinhole of the social media gaze.
And, as it seems, we love it. The languid light of the flat screen coaxes our eyes toward the simple, the superficial, into the void. Follow, the buttons implore.
What’s more, the meme is manufactured and meant to be consumed as quickly as possible. It is, for all intents and purposes, fast food (a synonym for junk food). Its context – a square box with a handful of letters demands as much (or in this case, as little as can be asked for). Because the images often have little to do, imaginally, with the caption being offered, they become interchangeable with any other caption. This, too, reduces all possible ideas or reflections to being meme-ifiable.
The meme permits and propagates a notion that the complexity of the world, of a cultural moment or a political issue is illegitimate because it can be reduced to this tiny square of information. As this happens to the content of the caption, so too does it happen to our capacity to consider, in complex terms and ideas, the issue at hand.
By its very nature, the meme doesn’t just preclude the complexity of the subject in question, but the possibility of it arising. While the meme, like all media, add to our ways of approaching the world, it also conceals other ways of approaching the world. Peering into this rabbit hole, we can begin to wonder whether or not we are arriving at a time when our media denies the possibility of approaching the world at all.
The meme produces and promotes itself as an inside joke, sucking us into its peculiar parameters and leaving everyone else outside. It is a microcosm of the digital flat screen. Still, it is a medium produced to fit another medium (the screen/cellphone) that is manufactured and sold to us to “pander to the lowest common denominator of awareness and taste,” as Martin Prechtel says. The inside joke is us, exponentially absorbed into the external extensions of desire constructed by marketing firms and algorithms. With each like, comment, and share, we become the meme, squareboxed and pigeonholed, assuming like all others that we’re not on the take (like those people, over there).
The meme is, at its heart, a reductionist tool, that, as far as social media is concerned and as far as I’ve seen online, has grave consequences for our ability to not only experience the world outside of the Russian doll multiverse mechanism that it conceives but for our very capacity to apprentice that world as anything other than a vastly oversimplified replica of itself. The meme, in all its simplicity and success, is a further harbinger of attention-deficit culture, of the reductionistic poverty of Western thinking, and of our capacity to turn the tables on a world getting sucked deeper and deeper into the virtual, which is to say a simulacrum. We return, then, to Marshall McLuhan’s piercing perspective and phrase to guide us back into the real: when the meme becomes the massage, remember, the medium is the message.
These QMM reflections on technology, language, media ecology & literacy are provoked by Andrew McLuhan’s mandatory, must-take Understanding Media Intensive. You can find out more about the course, here. Likewise, you can get the news straight from McLuhan’s mouth by reading his Substack, here.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/meme