By Raymond Seyouri
A good place to begin would be with Henry Jenkin’s idea of Media Convergence. Smart phones are prevalent in today’s society and has become an integral part of our professional and personal lives. Through smart phones, you have the ability to instantly communicate with others, look up information, and enjoy your favorite show in the palm of your hand. “Media convergence is a concept that became widely used in the twenty-first century to describe the coming together of previously separate media forms and industries through computing and digital technology.” (Sturken and Cartwright, 2018). Before smart phones, television was an “event activity” where people would gather around to watch the next episode of their favorite show and discuss it with their friends and colleagues. In today’s age, you can communicate your thoughts on an episode live, while viewing the episode, to countless numbers of people. Through this instant feedback on episode quality, the way in which we consume media and perhaps even the way it is produced has started to shift. “At the same time, the restructuring of the media industry through the rise of digital media had blurred many of the boundaries that had previously existed between forms of media. Media convergence had changed the nature of the movies and transformed television and the experience of the audience.” (Sturken and Cartwright, 2018). With this blurring of the lines, the way in which we choose what to watch and when to watch it becomes very much dependent on what your phone tells you to watch, in one way or another.
The relationship between television and memes becomes even more interesting when we look into the cyclical nature of propagation. As explained above, smartphones have become a part of the viewing experience, and one of the most prominent ways of expressing ideas has become through memes on social media. Combining these two ideas together, a cycle forms which involves watching a tv show, which then leads to creating memes about the show to spread awareness about the show, then more people watching the show, which then creates more memes. The recent surge in popularity of the South Korean Netflix show Squid Game is a great example of this. Many memes about the show came out as the show started gaining popularity. This led to the creation of more memes which further cemented the show in the public conscious. This is similar to one of the ways Guy Debord tries to explain the concept of The Spectacle, in that it is the never-ending war of trying to out-do one another and to always promote the commodity so it never becomes an unknown. “The Spectacle is a permanent opium war designed to force people to equate goods with commodities and to equate satisfaction with a survival that expands according to its own laws. Consumable survival must constantly expand because it never ceases to include privation. If augmented survival never comes to a resolution, if there is no point where it might stop expanding, this is because it is itself stuck in the realm of privation. It may gild poverty, but it cannot transcend it.” (Debord, 1967). This race to create the funniest meme and to send it to as many people as possible, pushes more people to watch the show and thus create more memes. This can have many effects that could include, television shows aiming to make “meme-able” moments for the audience to latch onto, television shows having less impact in general as people are constantly trying to find the next new meme format to produce, and finally, companies creating their own memes to try and sell their shows to more audiences. This phenomenon has already taken place in the fast-food industry. Chains like Wendy’s and Denney’s gained huge amounts of popularity after they shifted over to Twitter and Tumblr. Other chains caught on and began competing on a completely new front for the attention of their potential consumers. While memes can help the spread awareness about a show or product, it is still mostly based in humor, and since jokes are only funny for so long, conversation about television shows, for example, become akin to a candle burning at both ends. Twice as bright, but twice as short.
Another interesting aspect about the propagation of memes is how many different types of memes are created in a short period of time to cater to the largest possible audience. What is interesting about this is that because the show that the meme originated from might not have general appeal across large audiences, the memes themselves start to misrepresent the show. Shows with very dark messages and tones can have very lighthearted and silly memes without context because the juxtaposition of image and caption can create a humorous dissonance. This relates closely to Jean Baudrillard’s phases of images, in which images go from representing something authentically, to representing something inauthentically, to hiding how inauthentic it is, to just outright not representing the original object or idea at all. “Such would be the successive phases of the image: it is the reflection of a profound reality; it masks and denatures a profound reality; it masks the absence of a profound reality; it has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum.” (Baudrillard, 1994). While Baudrillard intended the phases of images to take place over long stretches of time, memes by their current definition cannot last for that long. Thus, memes meant to represent a show or an idea from a show, quickly devolve through humor into something completely different from the original context. Memes become personalized to different people’s tastes of humor, which does help promote the show, but the show they end up promoting is drastically different from the one they end up seeing. We can once again return to our example of Netflix’ Squid Game, in that while the show has dark themes about the hopeless spiral that those in debt find themselves in, the memes that have circulated on social media have no connection to that fact. On the contrary, the message gets coopted by the meme creator through coupling screenshots from the show and placing captions those screenshots, in an effort to recontextualize moments in the show with the creator’s own message. Could it be possible that this actually helps the show in question since it has the opportunity of surprising potential viewers? Or perhaps it becomes a hindrance since expectation and reality come into conflict.
There is no doubt that the inventions of the internet and the smart phone were turning points in terms of our culture and society. Those innovations changed how we communicated with others and how we consume the world around us. That change has led to us being able to find faster and more efficient ways to spread ideas quickly, and memes have been the most effective way thus far. The consequences of that though, is that those ideas may not arrive at their destination in the same form that they emerged from. Those who are already familiar with the origins of a meme will have their enjoyment enhanced, but to those being indoctrinated into a certain subculture, it can have varyingly different effects. We move between shows and movies at an unprecedentedly fast pace nowadays, and memes have both been a cause, as well as a remedy for that. Where that leads us though, we will have to wait and see.
Citations
Sturken, M. Cartwright, L. (2018). Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (3rd ed.). Oxford University Press.
Debord, G. (1967). The Society of the Spectacle. Rebel Press.
Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simulacra and Simulacrum. The University of Michigan Press.
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