I’ve been thinking a lot about memes lately, probably because I have to give a class presentation about Mark Poster’s “Perfect Transmissions: Evil Bert Bin Laden” in a few weeks. Poster’s essay examines how the “Sesame Street” character Bert made a cameo appearance in a pro-Bin Laden poster that was widely reported by the Western media. Poster’s argument is primarily about how images and information are disseminated globally in often context-less ways that often create strange juxtapositions and produce new meanings.
My problem with the essay is two-fold. First, it treats the Bert is Evil image as a special case, rather than a fairly common online phenomenon - isn’t the Bert Bin Laden poster another case of the same phenomenon that gave rise to this Oolong the pancake bunny image or this Domo-kun image? Secondly, he doesn’t really provide an explananation for the overall phenomenon of replicating and recontextualizing images. Like the Bert Bin Laden poster, these images rely on cultural symbols that are placed into a new context, but in these cases it’s Japanese culture transmogrified into American (or at least Anglophone) Internet culture. Isn’t there a more universal process going on?
Which brings me to memes. There are even more things I don’t like about “memetics.” The theory wants to assign agency to information that I don’t think is warranted. People disseminate these ideas and images - I find it hard to believe they propagate themselves. Secondly, the theory was proposed by Richard Dawkins, a non-media specialist, and when people outside communications and media studies start theorizing about the media, reductionist folk theories start to propagate. (Noam Chomsky and, to a lesser extent, George Lakoff are examples of non-specialists making reductionist claims.) I know little about the psychological research that has followed Dawkins’ proposal of memetics, but I’d never be able to get away with claiming that “information is like a virus,” and I don’t think I would beleive it myself. I’m more interested in the social contexts of these “mash-ups” and how the symbolic power of the images persists.
I suppose the short-term solution is to use “meme” in a folky sense. Since that’s the term used online to describe artifacts like Oolong and Domo-kun, it make sense to use it. In terms of a larger research project, I imagine it’s possible to study the meme phenomenon online, while refusing to subscribe to any notion of memetics.
