The Death of the Memer

     In 1967 French theorist and critic Roland Barthes published an essay entitled "The Death of the Author" in which he discouraged interpreting literary works in their relation to the personality and motivations of the author of said text.  Barthes argued that to do so was to limit the possible interpretations that readers may have of any given text.  Though the text was meant to be applied to more traditional works of literature, it is interesting to see how old concepts compare to modern "works of literature."  I emphasize the quotations around "works of literature" because it is clearly a stretch to claim that memes really deserve the classification of literary achievement but they have one important attribute that aids in making this comparison, memes are technically "authored" by someone and the author likely had some sort of motivation for creating the meme.

     So suppose that an author like Herman Melville had a strong personal motivation for writing a book like Moby Dick.  Maybe his motivations stemmed from a deep desire he had to write a book about a whale that was roughly as large as a whale, or maybe he wanted to warn people about the dangers of whaling ships, of which he had traveled on two.  In contrast to a memer whose only motivation is likely to get as many up votes as possible on reddit, Melville's motivation may be rooted in more valuable life experience but,  according to Barthes, any bias that may have influenced the book is unnecessary to a thorough interpretation of the work itself.

     So we've cleared up the issue that literary authors are typically more sophisticated individuals than the modern day internet meme enthusiast, sure, but what about fact that memes are typically images containing no more than 15-20 words and are therefore too short to interpret for anything more than face value?  If you see an image-macro while scrolling through Facebook you aren't going to ask a thought provoking question like: "What does this imply about the human condition?" What's interesting though is that you could ask these kinds of questions if you wanted to.  Although memes when taken as individual entities seem meaningless and cheap,  when viewed from the scope of the billions or even trillions of meme's that exist they become a bit more significant.  Most memes or meme-like images you see on the internet today are far from the original version of that meme, and this trend of tweaking, rewording, re-appropriating, and reposting has become the engine that fuels "new" content on the internet.  What the original poster of the first of one type of meme intended the picture to be used for may and likely does differ heavily from the intent of the millionth re-poster, or re-worder.  But nonetheless there are still a million variations on a single original entity and they all at the very least serve as a perspective of modern social culture.

    In the time that it takes a single author to write a single work of literature, there are probably more than 1000 variations on a single meme spread across the net through various mediums.  The sensational, sporadic, and viral manner in which meme content and culture pervades the internet is unlike any social phenomena I have ever witnessed and the irrelevance of the content that young people seem to care so much about is a disturbing.  It makes you wonder if anyone has made any effort to critique this new social norm and its hold on young generations.

     Enter the aumm.   Yes you read that correctly: the aumm.  Sometime in the past year I was invited by a friend to join the Facebook group entitled: "People that Aumm sometimes and are also... ooohhhh......"  At first I was confused why I had been invited to such a strange sounding group but I was soon found myself entertained by the musings of thousands of meme-like posts pertaining to no subject matter in general but all having one thing in common, they seemed to be mocking the very macro images to which the internet has grown so attached.  The group description emphasizes that you should "Post the things you've made here" and that's where the coherent explanation ends.  All of the posts combine some sort of irreverent joke about suicide or sex or any other taboo topic you can think of, and the playful simplicity of the memes we all know and love complete with aggressive banter between posters and commenters and discussions 200 replies long that end in users getting banned from the group and almost always bring to the table a comment about the group being "Too pretentious for me, i'm out."

    It's hard to say that this group is a particularly sophisticated intellectual forum, and although it feels like a critique on meme culture, the community that exists around aumm hardly feels any more refined than the mountain dew and hormone fueled anons for which the web forum 4chan is so well known.  The question then becomes, if we are to interpret this content as Barthes suggest and ignore the possible critical analysis these aummers are trying to make, do we arrive at an interpretation that is any more valuable than the one that we can make of the author-less meme?  It seems to me that we may have hit a dead end when it comes to trying to interpret the beast that is meming.  Web content reproduction has become so rapid and prevalent that is hardly a stretch to say that the memer is dead.  No meaningful and original work can be created using the template set forth by the meme.  Instead the macro image will continue to grow and change with the internet and although many will sit at their computer goofily smirking at their handiwork, the meme will be the same, their contribution will help to fuel the growth of the meme, and Moby Dick will still be a long, boring book.  And to conclude I will leave you with a quote from one of my favorite memes: "One does not simply meme into Mordor."