Notes on Social Media, Memes, and the Internet
My distilled observations
The Revolution Shall Not be Tweeted
Meme culture: no revolution is possible on social media because everything on social media is a fad, a trend, a flame that will soon die.
A revolution (social or personal) can only occur off social media.
As Tony Ontita sagely said (I paraphrase), it’s all too ephemeral almost to the point of being inconsequential.
Thus the difference between a real artist and a content creator.
Art lasts. Content, no matter how good, is born to pass on and be replaced by the next piece of content. The chase for virality is the big thing. Hence a revolution is only a viral moment and thus, by that definition, is destined to be replaced by the next viral moment.
Social Media’s Amazing Capacity for Serendipity
As I said, social media cannot sustain a revolution because it is essentially concerned with trends. Every new trend is equivalent to hot gossip — it intoxicates everyone, but like a line of cocaine, it’s only for a moment, before the next trend kicks in.
But this is where social media draws its greatest power: serendipity. From the fact that it brings together diverse minds and personalities on one melting pot called a newsfeed and then in a comment section. It’s literally a community online. And gossip travels fast in communities.
So if something happens to be interesting to a sufficient number of people, it trends. And that’s how one person posting a picture of a man enjoying a bag of githeri while standing in a queue waiting to vote can create a viral moment during which said githeri man becomes, for a moment, a national topic of conversation — and it even changes his life.
That is serendipity. Something blowing up by chance like that (it certainly wasn’t premeditated). Such stories are common today: from the rise of Bonoko back in the day to the recent success story of Azziad and her Tik Tok twerk and smile video that went viral. Or the writer Charles Chanchori with the Uber story back in 2017.
Other examples of serendipity is when you connect with someone randomly on a comment section and they turn out to be your future spouse, or your new business partner. For instance, the two Uber founders connected on Twitter.
Serendipity is created by two things in this case:
1. Randomness
2. Network
Randomness — you never know what will go viral, you never know who you will meet on social media, you never know who will comment on your post etc. For instance, so long as your post is public, it is not impossible that Obama could comment on it.
Network — thousands of people sharing the same network. That is thousands of relationships. When these people share a post among themselves, it naturally goes viral in a big way, and in a very exciting and visceral way that a TV campaign cannot match because we the people are in charge of the campaign, we are not mere consumers, we are active participants, talking about it (commentating) and hitting the share button (distribution).
The fact that it is a social network and we are all linked by very few degrees of connection means that I probably know someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows Obama — online that is. So for Obama to see my post and comment on it is not impossible. If the post gets shared again and again across those degrees of connection, it will eventually land on Obama’s news feed.
Art vs Content
The difference between art and content is I make art for me but content is for the audience.
A true artist is a supreme egoist. But a content creator thinks like an entrepreneur: “what does the market/audience want?”
Art is about self expression. Content is about communication. Do you see the difference?
In art, skill matters a lot. In content, connection with the audience matters more.
A master artist can be a commercial failure all his life (Van Gogh and countless other greats). A master content creator is, as a rule, successful (his mastery is proven by his success).
You Tube has made art freely accessible, but it has also commodified it in a way commercialism never did. People don’t create art these days, they create “content”.
Art stands the test of time: a book or a song or a mixtape or a film that fans will return to again and again. Content, on the other hand, is like a stream: ceaseless and never-ending. Content cannot be too deep, or the well will run out.
When you make art, you are ready to go broke making something mind-blowing. So you can work on one thing for years, perfecting it, and live on the spoils and the high after you release it. Content, on the other hand, has to be posted urgently so you can’t spend too much time on it.
Art is experienced, content is consumed.
In a way, we are becoming more and more like machines, in that we have a desire to consume more and more information (new content). Yet all this content hardly transforms us, and like addicts we are jonesing for the next hit soon after.
Memes as Inadvertent Life-givers to Dead Brands
The uncanny power of memes to keep in the limelight celebrities who were in danger of approaching obscurity.
Millennials and the Rise of Meme Culture
What caused memes. Why did these things become so popular and evolve into a medium of expression? Was it a means to rebel against capitalism, a means to get relief from the same?
Consider that memes were popularized by millennials, a generation that was coming of age during the Great Recession of 2008, became adults in a time of scarce jobs, smartphone addiction, and intrusive tech companies.
Memes were their way to lash out and vent their frustrations. But millennials were not revolutionary: they wanted capitalism to work for them, they didn’t want to dismantle it.
So their frustration remained at the level of irony and didn’t become rebellion the way it did for the youth of the 1960s (hippies).
Millennials are capitalist to the core, but they couldn’t reach the grapes so like the hare in the tale they scoffed and said the grapes probably weren’t sweet.
That sense of irony borne of frustration became memes.
If capitalism was dismantled, would memes survive?
How Memes Curtail Revolution
Laughter is a drug. Keeps us from feeling discomfort. And so we don’t demand change. Memes about unemployment, corruption, and other injustices in society are dangerous because they get us high and stupid on laughter. Then we stop thinking about these issues as problems and start seeing them as a reality we’re incapable of changing. Memes and idle humour make us complacent. I say this as a self-aware hypocrite.
How Memes Connect Us
In the age of the internet, entertainment consumption has fragmented. We don’t watch the same TV channels. We don’t watch the same TV shows. We don’t care about the same celebrities. We don’t watch the same sports. The internet is littered with niches, so everyone has their own thing.
But one thing connects us.
Memes.
We all view the same memes.
Or at least the same meme trends.
When thousands of people, share, or comment on a meme, they are seeking community.
When a picture of a mere egg becomes the most popular image on Instagram, you know there’s something interesting going on here.
It’s not just that we want to be ironic. We want to be ironic TOGETHER.
We are social animals and yearn to be part of a group. The internet has isolated us. Memes are a way for people to come together and share in a moment.
If you’re a scholar who wants to understand millennials and Generation Z (or people on the internet in general), start with memes and how we interact with them.
The Reality Distortion of Memes
In the era of meme culture, real things are unreal and unreal things are real. Reality and unreality are blended.
Reality is distorted into a meme. Unreality (movie characters and cartoon characters) is treated as fact (in memes). Mix everything up and at some point one never knows what is true and what is a meme. A fertile ground for fake news.
Does this affect our brains? Scholars think it does.
Misusing the Internet
The internet is greater than the ancient libraries at Khemet and Timbuktu, but what are we doing with it? Memes, porn, and cat videos.
The Impossibility of “Deep Work”
We are living in an era where working for long, concentrated periods has become impossible because our attention is divided, thanks to the addictive apps that live in our mobile phones.
We keep taking breaks in the middle of work to check our notifications on Facebook or our conversations on Whatsapp. We can’t concentrate properly.
How the Internet Killed Boredom
Boredom is dead and we are its killers. Our weapons of murder: Google Search, You Tube, Wikipedia, Facebook, Quora, Reddit, blogs, Netflix, HBO, Marvel, Disney …
We are “amusing ourselves to death.” (Neil Postman).
But did you know boredom is the wellspring of genius?
Isaac Newton formulated the law of gravity when an apple fell on his head while he sat under a tree.
The idea of Harry Potter came to J.K. Rowling on a long train journey from Manchester to London. Her mind was wandering, and the idea just came to her.
“It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.” (Gertrude Stein)
Consider that boredom also refers to monotony of work. A typical workday nowadays consists of brief working and a lot of internet browsing, chatting, memeing …
Our low tolerance for boredom also explains the death of traditional hobbies.
“Most people can’t handle boredom. That means they can’t stay on one thing until they get good at it. And they wonder why they’re unhappy.” (50 Cent)
The death of boredom coincided with the decline of grit.
Call to action: unlearn addiction to instant gratification, learn how to endure or enjoy boredom, develop grit.
Here is a Pun for Taking the Time to Read the Entire Thing
I was queried why I post memes, and I patiently explained my intention was to induce laughter, which is a marvelous antidote to pain. You see, I said, you need not worry, for the end justifies the memes.
