I kind-of want to keep this week’s blog post hovering around my own interest in emojis. Though loosely, I would say memes are within the realm of my area of specialty. Emojis and memes both lend themselves to similar analysis. The difference is that emoji are closer to a linguistic unit as opposed to an element of culture. Or something like that. They’re both highly interdisciplinary modes of study for sure. In fact, before I began narrowing my studies to emojis, I started with research on memes. Reading Richard Dawkin’s The Selfish Gene proved that there is a cultural “gene” that moves laterally within a generation: the meme. Though this might be a bit outdated now, the concept of intra-generational movement is still relevant. When considering the alt-right in particular, this movement reverberates within the community as opposed to the generation writ large.
But in reading this module’s works, particularly the pieces of Pepe the Frog as an alt-right deity, I’m reminded of how words, images, emoji, and memes all gain new meanings (I call them valences in my monograph) through usage and appropriation. In line with the alt-right theme, an irrevocable shift in one emoji would be the “👌” emoji. This gesture was brandished by the Christchurch mosque shooter in one of his arrest photos. The emoji, gesture, etc. will be forever stained by his (and the alt-right’s constant use of the emoji on 8chan) Islamophobic residue.
But what might showcase the difference between emoji and memes the best, I reckon, is the frog emoji. Independent of another emoji, the frog is a simulacrum for Pepe the Frog, the chaotic God of alt-right circles. It is a keyboard free-hand of Pepe, an easily added reminder of deep Islamophobic, racist, and misogynistic sentiment. But, if one were to add a tea emoji to it then it becomes a representation of Kermit the Frog—a much more benign, if snarky, image. Both emojis recall memes, but the sentiment portrayed is vastly different. The context matters here to such a great extent. The clarity of a frog versus a frog-with-tea is not represented in the image-based meme. Emoji are facets of language that gain their meaning in conjunction with the other words they are surrounded by. The meme can be a stand-alone unit.
To shift the subject a bit, something in these particular readings triggered a deep anger I have. I grew up in a relatively Republican Long Island deeply immersed in gaming culture. If my parents weren’t immigrants (my dad from the Middle East, no less), and if I wasn’t raised Muslim, I might also have joined the alt-right cult. Then, to speak candidly, the thing that pisses me off the most is the hypocrisy of the alt-right. As explained in the “Explaining the Alt-Right ‘Deity’ of their ‘Meme Magic’” article, the second this worship of a cartoon frog is picked upon, it is dismissed as irony even though the evidence shows an occult following of the icon. It is an easy “leg-up” on the “libtards” who must be out of their minds to assume that a person could worship a frog. And yet, the alt-right acts like they legitimately worship Pepe. It is infuriating. This example isn’t the only example, though, of alt-right hypocrisy. But to go on any longer would leave me seething.
Hi Alijan,
I’m excited to see how you traverse the similarities and differences between memes and emojis. In usage, at times I would say they do have similarities, especially since memes often breed their own “lines” of emojis. The “OK” alt-right sign, which is also an emoji, seems memetic as well as you see it spreading and emerging in all kinds of situations. Same with the Pepe emoticon, which is extremely common on places like Twitch, and definitely not always used to incite hate speech, which makes the matter much more complicated. Like certain buzzwords, gestures, clothing items, in-jokes, and other cultural iconography, Pepe gives hate speakers a place to hide and they can use the more innocent users as a kind of shield against being outed. But overall, the Pepe cult as it were–the one alluded to in the readers–is one of the strangest online communities around. In recent years, the rabbit hole just keeps getting deeper (since the publication of the articles that I shared with you, even). In recent months I’ve learned more about ARGs (alternative reality games) and certain communities love of codes and code breaking, hidden messenging, numerical sequences, and different kinds of patterns, which communities get together online to solve a puzzle or achieve some kind of revelation, sometimes necessary to make the “game” go forward. I figure I’ll do a post about these soon, since this is a major find for me since I last did the course in 2018. In short, there is a real fascination online with patterns and hidden messages, signs and portents, probably related to some combination of new age “logic,” the sharing of irrational experiences online, religious experiences, science fiction, and knowledge of computer science in some cases. Pepe as both meme and icon is a very small part of a movement which seems to be creating its own language, not an entirely new language but definitely a multimodal one. As with any language, Pepe can have both innocuous and malignant meanings, but it always carries with it the full baggage of its various contexts.
It really is all confusing, I think. But the last thing you said is key, I think: even if an icon isn’t always malignant, “it always carries with it the full baggage of its various contexts.” At least, analysis will always be rich because of these attached valences.
This is a bit of a long anecdote, but on the topic of ARGs, I remember quite some time ago when Shadow of the Colossus came out on the playstation 2, there was a community of “secret seekers” who were trying to find the game’s last hidden secret. Since this was a time before data mining, it was mostly a series of forum members doing every last possible thing they could have in game in order to find the last secret. There was none, but when the game was remade a couple years ago for the PS4, the developers included a single clue in the credits of the game that references some shining points that could be found meticulously hidden in the game. When someone collected all of them (71? 54? some number like that) then a secret cave was opened with a true, final secret: a sword. There was no achievement tied to this, so it really was just this added on thing in reference to the “secret seekers” before. There was no counter or anything either or pings on the radar / map, so a player had to keep track of them himself and share his findings online to help the rest of the community to finally find each spot.
That was a bit of a long-winded, but its something that fascinated me when I was younger (I didn’t have the patience or consistent access to the internet to participate). I had remembered this recently after watching a youtube video on finding the last secret of the game and was wondering if there was a way to liken this community to “amateur DH.” They were making a pretty profound network, after all. Maybe I’ll talk about this for my blog on Digital Narratives next week.
Alijan,
I LOVED reading this blog post! The connections you drew between your own research and understanding of emojis to meme culture highlighted the circumstances in which emojis and memes do go hand-in-hand. When you pointed out the connection between the tea emoji and Kermit the frog in contrast to the highly valenced emoticon of Pepe, it made me think about all the other contexts surrounding emojis, specifically in relation to their constructed lexical-aesthetic association to an aspect of meme culture. Moreover, I’m brought to think of all the emojis themselves that have become so heavily charged that they blur the boundary between an emoji/lexical representation and social media/meme contexts. Some have become so dissociated from their uncharged, literal meaning/represenation and fully assumed a cultural social media context that are much less likely to be repurposed by the parents and grandparents exposed to the same visual-lexical keyboard.