Walter Benjameme

For me, there’s no form more perfect for an interrogation of the state of the aura in a post-digital context than our humble friend the meme. The meme is a powerful parallel to the photograph and film based media when historicizing and placing the works of Benjamin. The meme manages to complicate questions of authorship, originality, distribution, copyright and networked cognition. Richard Dawkins can claim the first known use of the word in print. However, his usage might be closer to our understanding of tropes (for example, those found on TVTropes.com) in that they are self-replicating cultural units not bound to a particular discipline or field. But, for this purpose I’m speaking of the text on image files that circulate internet communities, are altered, evolve, and eventually fall out of use. Afterall, except in service to irony, when did you last encounter a Good Guy Greg meme?

Memes employ a collective form of language that makes it possible for a decentralized collection of users to digest, archive and synthesize “takes” on the current historical moment. Memes can act as an index of memory (similar to the memex concept employed by Bush) but they can also have very significant impacts on popular culture, media and politics. This is where the question of the aura becomes useful for the study of memes. In more traditional philosophical terms, a meme might be understood as the transcendent model under which the actual collection of phenomenon is understood. The idea of an original is completely irrelevant when considering a form of distributed intelligence like the meme. There can be no “original” per se because the form is established, developed and eventually destroyed by a network rather than a single “author”. Like the advent of cinema, understanding memes requires a “phenomenological reduction”. This reduction is made even more important by the rapid reproduction made possible by technological advances.

To give more consideration to the form of the meme, could it be considered a collection of intermedia techniques? The meme does more than simply combining image and text...many memes (Batman Slapping Robin, for example) rely on tension and even the break down of the distinctness of the text and image to convey meaning or record a cultural moment. Memes in particular are poised to rework, or digest, the mass amounts of information available in digital contexts and produce knowledge based on positionality and discretion articulated by the logic and tensions found in memes. The recent Bird Box meme features Sandra Bullock blindfolded and paddling away from (content determined by user). However, the unique aspect of this meme is the recent discovery that Netflix directly gamed the attention economy when they bought and used fake Twitter accounts in order to boost the visibility of the film.

Moving beyond the nature of the object itself necessitates examining how reception and socialization collapse into the logic and narrative of memes. Attention has always been currency the infinite reproducibility introduced by new image compression, editing and storage techniques partnered with the libindal nature of social media mean that attention has more value than ever. The commodification of data and attention also means that a very clear hierarchy becomes apparent: attention, or, for example, how many times a meme is shared, become the most intuitive system of judgement for the success and relative value of a meme.