Meme Culture: A Machine to Produce New Culture
Due to the fast broadcasting speed of the internet, “meme” has become a new way of reproducing popular culture in the digital era. Instead of an abstract term when it first come out, the word “meme” can be heard and seen anywhere. From my perspective, “meme” is a conceptual way of repetition to build new culture which highly based on what most people are granted to be existed culture. Therefore, meme culture easily grabs people’s attention by applying something they are familiar with and everybody is talking about. In the presentation of meme culture, my group shows how Guerilla Girls advertise itself in a meme way and eventually become a meme culture. The guerilla masks that the wear in public become a visual symbol after repeated publications. In other words, people will think of this organization whenever they see guerilla head portraits. I’m also convince that meme culture kind of cater to the trend of “amusing ourselves to death” (Neil Postman) today. Most meme culture presents serious topics, such as politics or race, in a hilarious way. So does Guerilla Girls, who advocates a higher place for women in high art field. We can assume that seldom people will be interested in this feminism organization if it simply publishes papers and holds speeches like what former feminists do. The most effective way to gain public attention today is creating something FUN!
However, whether people pay equal attention to meme culture and the information meme culture want to disseminate? Moreover, whether those information contained in the meme are true? One of the problem that Guerilla Girls face is that little people really further involve in their activities, even though people are curious about their masks. In most time, people laugh at the meme animations yet never read the news or social media posts expanding the issue. Another thing is that meme culture always reflects individual opinions upon certain issue in a sarcastic way. Since it’s easy to be remembered and repeated huge amount of time, people assume such attitude as well-founded. However, pervasiveness is far from correctness. After one laugh for a meme, what he or she should do is carefully considering the position of its creator and the goal of producing this meme. The group that presents “Save Pepe” in class gives me a sense of how a neutral culture can be affected by its derived meme that is improperly used. In general, meme culture is a grass-root field that anybody can create new culture to state the assertions and get people’s attention, but the viewers should always make sure the meaning of the meme instead of swallowing all of them.
