Last time, we focused on the culture within memes, both trying to isolate the cultural features of the meme world, and examining how cultures meme differently.
Today, we’re going to look the opposite direction, and look at the role of memes in directly communicating, interacting with, and changing cultures.
As you’re answering these questions, think again about some of the cultural features we’ve discussed:
Now, with your group, you’re going to find and identify four different categories of meme interaction with these cultural features.
Hint: Remember that ‘meme’ means many things. In some cases, you might not find a classic image macro or TikTok dance which addresses the question, but some other form of meme might work great! Also, although mainstream US culture is an easy choice for memes to interact with, feel free to talk about memes which interact with others!
A big part of ‘doing culture’ is asserting and ‘teaching’ the features above. Presumably, memes and online language practices can play a role in that.
So, with your group, find a selection of memes or language practices which assert, teach, reinforce, or transmit (sub?)cultural practices.
Of course, culture is not monolithic, anywhere, and a part of cultural change and growth involves challenging the mainstream culture. Of course, memes and language play a role in that.
So, with your group, find a selection of non-satirical memes and cultural practices which challenge, object to, push back against, or attempt to cancel more mainstream cultural practices.
For this task, please try to find more serious, less comical examples. You’ll want to save the satire for…
Memes mock everything. That’s half the joy. And what’s more fun to mock than mainstream culture?
With your group, find a selection of memes and linguistic practices which mock, satirize, make fun of, or ‘send up’ mainstream cultural practices.
Finally, we’ll get to the really tricky one.
Reinforcing culture doesn’t cause change, and in fact, it tends to be conservative, and actively impedes cultural shift and change. Similarly, mocking and challenging culture doesn’t cause change on its own. Certainly, with enough time, satire and challenge can cause cultural shifts, but there’s a very strong network effect: if one person’s mocking an aspect of the culture, that person is crazy or ‘silly’, but if most people are mocking an aspect of the culture, it’s liable to change.
As you’re thinking about this, remember:
Thinking about the successful memes (and linguistic practices) which changed the culture, discuss: