So rachelfershleiser asked this:

Internet memes seem to be moving towards the smallest sub-cultural groups possible and catching on that way.

- I made Judgmental Bookseller Ostrich as a joke on how there was starting to be an advice animal for every possible field/major/career.

- People who didn’t care about Ryan Gosling care once there’s a blog of him talking about a field of stat-based library science all of 200 people have a degree in.

- Shit Girls Say became Shit every possible racial, religious, and sexual identity say or have said to them.

Like, now it’s not enough for things to be universally funny? If they are micro-funny I feel super-special that someone made them Just For Me and I’m obligated to share/love them?

So memes are getting bigger by getting smaller? The hyper-specification of internet humor? Identity-based memetics? Anybody?

And I responded on twitter:

@RachelFersh I think the “bigness” of a meme is determined by its possible permutations.

So I want to expand on that a little outside of twitter’s 140 characters.

There are two classes of memes, as I see used in conversation. There’s the Dawkins-defined idea of “unit of meaning” — “Jesus Christ is the Son of God” is a meme, in this sense, in that it’s a single idea that’s transferable and cannot be easily broken down into parts without losing something intrinsic. (This is also related to the example he gave of logical celibacy: Catholic priests have sublimated the overall human desire to pass on genes to the next generation into a desire to pass on an idea to other people — memes instead of genes as the driving motivation of an individual.)

What we’re talking about when we talk about internet memetics is something slightly different. A “funny picture” may be a meme in the Dawkins sense, but not in the sense that Meme Generator is using it. That is something of a different animal.

Consider the broader context of what Meme Generator is. Almost all of the generated memes on that site are of the form “picture in middle, setup on top, punchline on bottom.” But the contents of all three of those spots varies radically — sometimes so dramatically so that the only reason we consider them in the same though is because of the layout. (The site helpfully provides lineages for its more popular images — Paranoid Parrot, for example, is “another Advice Dog spin-off”, probably hailing from deep within 4chan’s /b/ from around 2009.)

Each of those individual base images is a permutation on the overarching meme of “character in center, setup, punchline” probably spawned by the Ur-meme, Advice Dog. That image is itself pretty specific, but it’s the mutability of the image that matters — ANY character, ANY text. Even Judgmental Bookseller Ostrich uses that format, and thus is not so much its own stand-alone meme but a sub-category to what Rachel (correctly) identifies as a category of Advice Dog permutations.

A quick digression to a larger point about humor. “It’s not enough for things to be universally funny?” Well, yes and no. We recognize the setup with this meme right away, for example, and part of the humor of things like Judgmental Bookseller Ostrich is to see that form repeated with variations. (Think a fugue.) But it’s probably a lot funnier to someone who has worked in bookselling than someone who hasn’t, even if they’re a voracious reader. In-jokes are generally funnier than a knock-knock joke out of a book, because they tie into a larger web of meaning that only we have access to. When JBO mocks a customer for asking for “Shakespeare but, like, in English,” I (probably) get more enjoyment out of that than someone who would actually ask that question in a bookstore.

As they mutate, memes will distill into formulas for every conceivable subculture, sometimes spawning just a handful of variations on a theme that are none-the-less extremely funny to a very small percentage of people. Socially Awesome Kindergartener is pretty specific, and I don’t think all that funny, but someone thought that was a perfect image to sum up their existence, and hey, all the power in the world to ‘em.

10:34 pm  •  16 January 2012   •  55 notes  •  Reblogged from rachelfershleiser
#memes #blogging #blogging #longreads #that went longer than I expected