Last year, after hearing the students buzz about the post-AP Lit test memes, I began incorporating memes into my Google Slides presentation to help bring laughter into relatively serious lessons. The memes were posted on the SmartBoard as the students walked in, and inevitably, the students were talking about the daily meme before the bell rang. I loved having class begin before the bell actually rang. By the end of the year, when my seniors were counting down their last few classes, I assigned them a brief task: to make 10 memes about our class and the literature we discussed. Here was one example. I was shocked by the willingness to work on the assignment and–moreover–impressed by what they revealed about their takeaways from the class. So, this year after a full length text, I ask them to spend about 10 minutes to create a meme about the piece. I then use those memes to discuss the meaning of the work as a whole. This educational shift has brought me a lot of joy. Below are two students’ memes from a 10-minute meme activity I did with the class after reading Jean Paul Sartre’s No Exit.
In such a short assignment, the students were able to show me their level of understanding. I found that the payoff of this assignment was far greater than a question about characterization.
As I culled through through the sources this week, I became particularly fascinated with the Google Trend’s Search Interest on the Know Your Meme website. I’ve linked two memes that spurred me to consider the patterned interest in memes. Why are some short-lived in popularity ? Why do others recur in different conversations over the years? Why would a Trump meme spike in popularity for just a single day? Why would a meme about the improper order of toppings on burger emojis repeatedly pop up over a two year span? Isn’t a post about a president’s feelings toward members of our military more important than a post about emojis? My exploration of the site began to spur in me this question: Do memes spread knowledge and inspire change or do they destroy potentially powerful conversations about real issues by limiting them to a laugh?
Enter the discussion of Violentacrez in this article. Violentacrez, a single man with a sick online presence and an even sicker following, reminds us of the dark side of online anonymity. Though I at first saw memes as a unifying force on social media (something for us to commiserate about or something that makes our emotional state universal), after reading this article I saw the potential risks of the meme.
Before this week, I had only thought of the meme as a form of humor, a unifying form of mindless laughter to joke about the nuances of everyday life–I had no idea that the meme was something so profoundly important to our cultural identity.
It has its own language (e.g., visual template, ‘image macro’ or ‘stock character macro’). It has given us all a laugh provided discourse on racism and other divisive and destructive issues. I had never seen the Successful Black Man memes, and as I researched them after reading Milner’s article, I was introduced to the dark side of the meme, the side that –as Milner said– reinforces oppressive ideologies and represses minority value in the discourse. How could people be so okay with this form of hate speech? Because they are just trolls? Because they have online anonymity? I have of late seen many memes that highlights the ever expanding division in our nation’s politics and I worry about their effect on the upcoming election. Look at this meme that Trump shared in December. Memes like this one have the power to persuade–not only does the dark coloring makes the viewer feel an imminent threat, but the language itself is threatening. How can a viewer not feel threatened and then ultimately believe that this president could help them? I can understand how someone who doesn’t read the news and make his/her/their own decisions could accept this as the truth. Could memes be the digital form of propaganda? I guess my fear stems from the term Poe’s Law. Online it is very difficult to understand a person’s tone. Poe’s Law originated from a discussion about creationism on a forum. Nathan Poe said: “Good thing you included the winky. Otherwise people might think you are serious.” Poe’s seemingly flippant comment reveals much truth: it has become so difficult to decipher what is parodied and what is honest. It feels like it’s become trendy to become so vocal about one’s prejudices. Because memes are typically anonymously created (perk for the trolls out there) and can be so easily shared, I worry about the meme’s potential to worsen the American divide.
PS. The upvotes on Reddit (karma points for posters) discussion sounded like a premise straight out of BLACK MIRROR.
Lauren,
terrific post, first of all. Very rich observations here.
Have you been aware of the whole Pepe the frog meme culture and its supposed impact on the 2016 Presidential election? I believe I included some materials about it in the reading list (need to go back and check and make sure that I didn’t eliminate those) but there is plenty about it. That was part of a blog post I made back in 2018, if you care to read it. http://cynthiaanndavidson.com/blog/spring-2018/memes-and-training-regimes/
Memetics do, I strongly believe, have powerful political and social impact, especially with less visible youth culture that spends a good deal of time online and has a strong social presence online, especially on sites like 4chan, Reddit, Twitch, and Instagram (sites less likely to be inhabited by parents/grandparents). I certainly wasn’t aware of this until I began researching and teaching digital rhetorics. I became aware of it especially with the premiere of We are Legion, the documentary (2010). https://youtu.be/-zwDhoXpk90 It’s aging because so much has happened since, but it’s still a stunning introduction to online youth cultures for people out of the loop. I believe it more or less predicted what is happening now except that I don’t think it was evident that Anonymous would take a turn to the right (as many did support Trump, although certainly Anon does not have a singular political stance and was never a single coherent presence).
Maybe we need a revision of Poe’s law, for not only is it difficult to determine what is parody and what is not, but there are multiple forms of both parody and sincerity that seem informed by different degrees of irony and frankness. However, your experiences in the classroom illustrate the brilliance of these silly little things that emerge as memes. If you are a Shakespeare fan, maybe you can relate to this–memes feel like the presence of court jesters and fools in the plays of Shakespeare to me sometimes, humble and persistent, biting, sometimes hilarious, sometimes cruel, always triggering some insight, often in the background of everything “important” happening in the plot.
Hi Lauren,
I LOVED your assignment with memes in your classroom. What a fun way to use relevant technology and assess your students’ understanding of the texts you covered. I may or may steal that idea for my own classroom one day…
I agree with your points on the “dark side” of online anonymity, specifically with the Violentacrez scandal. Having never been on Reddit or 4chan or anything similar, I had no idea that such forums existed, let alone that they were perpetrating such content under anonymity. I think Poe’s Law is an interesting dilemma for a number of reasons. I can’t help but wonder if anonymity should be protected online if it could lead to real world harm. Where do we, as a society, draw that line? At what point is the safety of others or that of the collective more important than the privacy of the individual. And with technology advances at a rate that no one could have predicted, I think these questions are only going to be increasingly more important.
I just want to say I got a kick out of all the AP Lit memes, and I adore that assignment!