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Here's an idea: we are gonna try to explain why people don't like internet memes.
Let's see how this goes.
So I'm guessing, that when we show an image like this or when I say OVER 9000,
the collective groan can be heard from space. Or. At the very least from Hoboken.
Even I occasionally wince at Idea Channel's use of All The Things or Zoidberg or Spiderman.
The quick and sometimes nearly-instant aging process of image macros, snowclones and videos
born of the internet has become one of their central features. Old Internet Humor is a
special kind of cringey, humorless pain.
And sure, all humor has a half-life 3 confirmed. But, as far as some corners of the internet
are concerned, the use of old internet memes--
--and sometimes internet memes in general, at all--
is unforgivable. The comedic transgression enacted by earnest use of a Willy Wonka macro
is less like telling a knock knock joke and more like continuing to quote Borat ...
"MY WIFE!"
The obvious and probably most correct explanation of WHY is the sheer volume of internet humor
that most of us see.
While we all eventually got sick of YO MAMA jokes and "ALLLLLRIGHTY THEN!" ...
It took people only a couple months to tire of Doge. It took the Harlem Shake about a week.
As literacy for and familiarity with funny pictures-plus-text and weird videos has grown,
so too has the speed and volume of their production. It's just a thing that... SOOOOOOOOOO many
of us do now..
By comparison, classically "over-told" joke cycles like blonde, knock-knock or viola jokes
seem downright RARE.
Which is probably why you might wince at the punchline, but the form itself doesn't aggravate
the way a Yo Dawg might. You could even be proud to know a good example of an old joke cycle.
So a violist and a cellist are standing on a sinking ship and the cellist falls into
the water and says "Help! I can't swim!" and the violists goes "Don't worry, just fake it."
But even with a "GOOD" Yo Dawg that's creative or clever or novel or whatever--you see XZIBIT's
face and your brain just says no. NO. Enough. I'VE SEEN ENOUGH. WHATEVER YOU HEARD, FRIEND,
YOU HEARD WRONG.
But I don't think the aversion begins and ends with ubiquity. Arguably we're over-exposed
to all kinds of things that don't age as poorly and, ironically, as quickly as YOLO.
Maybe their age has something to do with it? I mean, the internet meme itself, at least
as far as we know it, is in that awkward cultural adolescence of having been new and cool only
5 or 6 years ago when YT was only three years old, and Twitter and Tumblr were just born.
And as a quick side note, as far as I know, Mike Godwin was the first person to refer
to anything as an internet meme and he did that in Wired in 1993. So the idea itself
has been around for much longer than that.
Or maybe it's that we point our faces at the internet all day every day because of work,
community, entertainment, education, necessity, habit--
--and it can start to feel, especially with something that you've had enough of, like
it is INVADING YOUR INTERNET.
There is a tendency, especially online, to feel like the stuff ITSELF is wasting OUR
time by being in front of our eyeballs. We experience a mental and visual exhaustion
HAVING to see ANOTHER ... ermagerd.
At a certain point it's like you're not even seeing it any more, you're just being SUBJECTED
to it. It's kind of like if "MY WIFE!" replaced your ring tone, car horns and the sound rain
makes when it hits pavement.
Which also provides some context for people who, say, watch a Youtube video and then indignantly
comment something like "that was the worst ten minutes of my life"...MYLIFE!
There's a complicated compulsion to consume that's reinforced by tons of online platforms.
People talk about getting stuck in Reddit or Buzzfeed holes, endlessly scrolling through
Tumblr, binging on Youtube or reflexively hitting refresh on their favorite image board
for hours at a time...
If these are the places you go for entertainment or social interaction, that give you a creative
outlet or from which you derive a sense of community or purpose...
then the idea that you are fully "choosing" to view 100% of the media that pops up
onto your screen becomes a little more complicated.
Lots of online spaces function like public spaces, and well ... you don't *exactly* "choose"
to see everything you do out on the street, right?
Reddit enhancement suite, Tumblr savior, tag filtering -- they all stand as clear admissions
that even the places we love online can be sources of jaw-clenching, rage inducing content.
No! No! Take it back! Thank you.
Which actually, bring us to an important question: who ARE these people, that are still making
S*** Says Videos or, heaven forbid, a LOLCAT?
Well so for a while, it would have been fair, if not entirely accurate, to claim that this
kind of internet humor was made by a particular group of people on a few websites.
Something Awful, 4chan, and Genmay to name a few, all of which owe lots to The Well and
many corners of Usenet. But it wasn't like these people were just sitting around making
funny things.
It is through the humorous media that they made that they were able to outline something
of the core nature of the group--it's opinions about media and the world and people in it.
In Comic Relief, John Morreall makes a distinction between "prepared fictional humor" and the
act of "spontaneous humor," which is what most of us would call just "being funny".
Spontaneous humor," Moreall says "is not only more common than joke telling, but also more
important in bringing people together, allowing them to exchange experiences, information,
beliefs, and attitudes."
Morreall explains that spontaneous humor "arises from real-life experiences vs. humorous fictional
narratives", and has a natural place WITHIN conversation, not alongside of or interrupting it.
To me this sounds at least A LITTLE like the websites and forums that codified internet
humor as we know it; and as that humor has started to transition to something more closely
resembling PREPARED JOKES, might also shed some light on the resistance to it's growing
public presence.
I can't help but make a comparison to the recent fascination that the newsmedia and
blogozone has with "normcore": a style of dress that's characterized by being... well...normal.
Some high fashion practitioners became nervous that their steez was simply a way to BUY style--
meaning, you wanna be cool? Gucci Gucci Louis Louis Fendi Fendi Prada.
Normcore, as it has been said, says something about where the power of fashion lies. HINT:
NOT IN THE CLOTHES.
I wonder what portion of the people who see memes on their internet view them as an attempt
by the people making them to join the Internet Cool Kids Club. And I wonder how many people
making them actually want to be part of the "Internet Cool Kids Club."
...And how many simply see stock photo or movie still overlaid with bold-caps text as a legitimate
way to communicate THEIR experience with THEIR online community.
Maybe the internet humor backlash is that same old sub-slash-counterculture transition
to just plain-old-culture that will settle in however many years it takes for image macros
to be over, in the way that Doc Martins, tattoos and iphones are "over".
Which, for the record, I'm absolutely looking forward to, not because I want the multimedia
communication of personal experience to go away, but because I want it to be the norm...
core...sorry...would you have preferred a My Wife joke?
My Wife.
What do you guys think? How would you explain the quick and often times severe hate for
internet memes?
Let us know in the comments and I feel like any joke I could tell here would be dangerous
so I'm just going to be earnest.
If you are not already, it would be quite nice if you subscribed. But you don't have
to. It would just be nice.
So before we get started, Brady from Numberphile just happened to stop by. And he was, we were
actually talking about games.
And he was saying something about people voting on chess? Like chess games?
Brady: Yeah, I saw you were talking about people voting on the Pokemon game and it reminded
me that there was the whole, there have been times when grandmasters have taken on the
internet community and all the internet people have to vote on what the move will be and
then the grandmaster would make his or her move and then the internet community will
vote again.
Mike: That's crazy!
Brady: It made me wonder whether or not the internet community are ever, a bit nuisancey
like you were talking about.
Mike: Do you know anything about like... I'm sure, does the grandmaster always win? Do
you know anything about how the games turn out?
Brady: I don't know. I can't remember. We'll have to look it up.
Mike: Something to look up. That's really cool.
Brady: Do you know what? You all watch this on Youtube. You probably don't realize this:
Mike really smells of coffee. I'm just saying.
Mike: I can't help it.
Brady: I guess you don't normally stand this close to people. Just saying
I wonder what Twitch Plays the Stanley Parable would be like.
Let's see what you guys had to say about Twitch Plays Pokemon.
TallGuy61318 asks why the people who are stopping the progress of the game considered bad guys
when the only thing that is gained from the game is just simply beating a game. And I
think that this also sort of starts to touch on a larger point and the reason why I feel
a little weird about saying that this illustrates something about government or about direct
democracy which is that it's kind of a binary, right? People are either going to beat the
game or not beat the game and that the effect on your life on your community is, I don't
know. It seems to me like it's probably smaller than like political and policy decisions.
So yeah, the sort of binary nature of the endpoint is a very important factor.
Lockpeople suggests that for our upcoming hundredth episode, which I think is in 7 episodes,
that we do an Idea Channel about Idea Channel.
I think we'll take this under advisement.
Adam Weaver points out that though anyone could have played Twitch Plays Pokemon, the
number of people who were playing seemed to be surprisingly low. And yeah, I think that
this is true, right, for a lot of systems that are just open to the public. I wonder
how many people watching Idea Channel watched Twitch Plays Pokemon but never once typed
a thing into the chat board.
Jose Wolf makes two really great points, the first being that Twitch Plays Pokemon could
never reach true anarchy because the game actually has a kind of ending point, that
there is at the very least, a goal that everyone understands is the one to be attained.
And also that people might have found a reason to become involved in the game because of
the religion present, which is a whole other Idea Channel episode I think, the way that
lore and myth played into Twitch Plays Pokemon. But, yeah, these were great comments.
Deathhzrd and a couple other people pointed out that, in addition to Hobbes's rather sour
view of humanity there are also the views of Locke and Rousseu that come into play which
are both also, yknow, part of this whole constellation of things and really interesting. So we'll
put some links in the description if you want to read about those things.
Yoshirocks points out that there is definitely something of an effective commonwealth in
the Twitch Plays Pokemon community because of all of the strategizing that happened on
the subreddit that exists. And if you haven't seen that, it is really a testament to organization.
We'll put a link to that in the description too. It's really great.
Vexbatch points out that we glossed over the very important distinction between the body
politic and the body natural which are both required for the sovereign to be a thing.
So this is a really great and insightful comment. Make sure you check it out. We'll put, there's
a link to this and all the other ones in the description.
Total Philosophy, who also made a video about Twitch Plays Pokemon, says that Hobbes's government
is present in TPP through the program. And I would say that, to me, if I'm understanding
correctly, it seems like to me the program is kind of like physics. That like, as much
as you want something to fall up, there's no way for you to make something fall up.
Whereas the government can tell you that you should cross the street at the crosswalk but
if you want to cross the street in the middle of the road you can still do that. There is
nothing physically preventing you. So I don't know. For me, the program doesn't have the
same kind of authority as government does. That's just me maybe.
This week's episode was brought to you by the hard work of these authority figures.
We have an IRC, a Facebook, and a subreddit, links in the description.
And the Tweet of the Week comes from Dylan Chapman who points us towards a long, so I
haven't watched the whole thing, but from what I've seen very interesting discussion
with China Mieville about the state of narrative and the novel. You...get ready. Ready your
brain for this one.
And finally for this week's record swap we will be replacing Steve Martin's A Wild and
Crazy Guy with Tim Hecker's Virgins.
So long Steve Martin, and welcome Tim Hecker.