This was written primarily from my experience watching CNN and reading reddit during occurrence. While the entire thing was, to some, tongue-in-cheek, there was a mixture of "real" response by govt agencies, news agencies, feet on the ground, wrestling w/a confederacy of trolls
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Replying to @BLUNDERBUSSTED @eigenrobot
so what's interesting to me here is that we're effectively writing from two separate standpoints: im analyzing from the view of a participant in the meme, rather than as an outside (or media) observer. standpoint seems to matter a lot in meme analysis.
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Replying to @qorprate @eigenrobot
My god we're engaging in meme historiography. Analysis of "primary texts" from different temporal contexts.
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Replying to @BLUNDERBUSSTED @eigenrobot
it's extremely important! and another interesting part, which we have no access to, is the motivations of the individual meme creator. the evolution of meme conceptualizations over time is something that seems very hard to capture theoretically. attch image is all I have.pic.twitter.com/0x4fJ84gCm
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Replying to @qorprate @eigenrobot
This is fantastic. I've actually an essay being printed soon that's kind of a prose exploration of the idea of meme creation, but le morte d'author only begins to describe it. In many memes there's almost no creator. There is a drift of symbols that amalgamates once in an eddy..
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which is then, sure, Created! Usually with intention, sometimes with force, but which is immediately wrested from those hands, after which infinite disparate elements are introduced
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A meme is almost more a movement than a specific thing. At any given point you can pause it and say "this is a particle", but that instance isn't really the meme, just a permutation. The "wave" is more the meme but cannot be measured as an instance. You see meme-particle duality
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my god, and here's an instance of theory-generation Wave-Particle Meme Duality
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Replying to @BLUNDERBUSSTED @eigenrobot
This corresponds exactly with Saussure's notion of linguistics as requiring separate but complementary synchronic (static, in the present moment) and diachronic (evolutionary) analyses. Same for the language of memes.
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And similar to analysis of language, when discussing memes, we need to be careful both to avoid attributing too much to the "original moment" and to avoid over-reifying the "collective".
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No way I'm going to read this thread but i just want to say I'm glad you boys are enjoying yourselves :)
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