By Serene Sbaity
Social media has consumed many important aspects of our lives, gradually munching away on our time and headspace, and what essentially gives it this agency is its versatility and diversity in platforms. Our usage of Twitter, Instagram, Tiktok, and other platforms has become second nature and the visual thread that ties this digital bouquet together is the meme. There are political memes, science memes, philosophy memes, literature memes, and many others. Thus, memes became an element of social media through which people from any field can communicate humorously in a relatable context. Memes are not tangible objects and are in fact challenging to define for exactly what they are, yet they represent today what Renaissance paintings represented in that period of time. As they analyze patterns of realism and changes of perspective from the Renaissance period to the age of digital media in their book Practices of Looking, Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright mention that “by the beginning of the renaissance, many painters labored to reproduce scenes as they would have appeared to observers” (Sturken & Cartwright, 2018). Similarly, memes are usually made to produce content that is relatable to viewers, either in a specific field or in everyday life. We scroll through countless memes per day, we relate to them or laugh at them, and eventually share them with friends who return the favor and thus they become a key element of modern-day visual culture and a primary form of both interpersonal and mass communication.
Considering the meme in the context of mass communication may come off as contradictory considering the simplicity of the meme in contrast with the complexity of the methods and applications of delivering a message to the masses, but the meme somewhat fits the description. This is mostly based on the concept of virality which allows the meme to reach millions of people worldwide within a very short period of time. What is particularly important to note here, however, is that most memes are not decoded on an individual basis where each person interprets them in their own context, but are rather received in a collective framework. That is because they refer to elements of the basic human experience according to the time in which they are produced. This creates a collective experience where people look at a meme and realize that millions of people in so many places around the world live a life very similar to their own. However, the reality behind this realization is questionable. To look at it through a more realistic lens, this realization must be accompanied with the consideration of the notion of accessibility. This collective experience created by meme culture is really only relatable to those with access to the technology required to view memes. This relates to the notion of the “separate pseudo-world” introduced by Guy Debord in Society of the Spectacle, which he defines as a divisive reality created by “fragmented views of reality” resulting from the dissemination of images that are somewhat disconnected from life as it truly is (Debord, 1967). In this case, these disseminated images are memes which create the illusion of an all-inclusive reality which actually remains exclusive to a certain extent. Similarly, to have been acquainted with Renaissance art and have an understanding of it, you would have had to belong to the elites. Another aspect which adds to the divisive backdrop of meme culture is the level of anonymity at which memes are produced. When a meme goes viral, social media users find it posted on several pages with no knowledge of who created it in the first place and, interestingly, with little regard to that either. As Arjun Appadurai suggests in the first of his three distinctions on The Work of Imagination, the imaginary has entered the realm of ordinary regular life and has become decreasingly idolized (Appadurai, 1996). Similarly, the mental effort put into the creation of memes has become so mundane that the modern media consumer almost totally disregards it. The question of who makes the meme or the page on which it is posted barely ever comes up.
Continuing this discussion on the visual culture of memes, I would like to draw on Walter Benjamin’s take on the “aura” of a work of art. In the process of tracing the history of visual culture from the paintings of the Renaissance period to the meme of the digital age, Benjamin’s observations on human perception seem quite relevant. He observes that humans’ ways of perceiving the world around them changes over long periods of time and claims that the channel through which human sense perception is delivered “is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well” (Benjamin, 1968). This means that it is not only the naturally evolving circumstances of human life that affect how we perceive things, but also how humans contribute to the changes in these circumstances. Thus, the process of digitizing different elements of the world we live in has caused us to be accustomed to perceive digital forms of art and communication as the norm. This is also particularly reflected in the rise of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), as some memes are being sold in their “original” form as digital collectibles. Before visual culture was largely manifested in the virtual world, forms of artistic expression and visual communication came in tangible forms like paintings, for example. Today, however, you can view and buy a meme which does not exist in the physical world just as you could view and buy a painting that is essentially a physical object. I do not find that this progress in visual culture reduces the “aura” of art as Benjamin would put it. Instead, it can be perceived as a way of adapting to the changes of visual culture that accompany the changes in everyday human life.
References
Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. University of Minnesota Press.
Benjamin, W. (1968). Illuminations. (H. Zohn, Trans., H. Arendt, Ed.). Schocken Books.
Debord, G. (1967). Society of the Spectacle. Rebel Press.
Sturken, M. (2018). Realism and Perspective: From Renaissance Painting to Digital Media. In L. Cartwright (Ed.), Practices of Looking (3rd ed.). essay, Oxford University Press.
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