Boyd/Dominguez (and a history of memes)

Andrew Boyd’s “Truth is a Virus: Meme Warfare and the Billionaires for Bush (or Gore)”, talks about using viral nature of memes to spread truth and start discussion about an issue. He alter talks about drawbacks from using memes to share a message as the meme’s meaning can be lost due to constant changes. Personally, I disagree with Boyd on the idea of using memes as an effective way to spread a message.
I believe most memes start due to as form of dark humor more than a political story. The entire article reminded me of a podcast with George “Filthy Frank” Miller (starter of the Harlem Shake craze) on the NeedleDrop that had talked about the “Meme Machine”, the concept that memes spawn at nearly the same rate they die. Memes reach “death” status after they appear on mainstream media (Ellen) or begin to be policed by netizens. I feel as though many people don’t care enough to find the origins of a meme, but original creators, not those who repost, show their care because the effort of photoshopping, cropping, and captioning shows care.
I kind of want to go into meme history for a bit. Early memes used to be quotable moments from popular media (ex: monty python jokes, television catchphrases). With the introduction of the internet people eventually began making their own memes from pictures they can add quotes to. This eventually got more advanced as video editing skills among people became more common and became more advanced with video and gifs. Now that memes have developed into their own subculture, mainstream media and corporations began to steal internet culture. Very popular cases of this was the show Tosh.o which stole jokes from reddit, Anti-smoking ads, and Ellen, but because people are aware of seeing it from the internet first, this established their “death” I need friends.

For Dominguez who wrote about electronic disturbances as protest, I do think that at the moment it’s effective for showing a message but with technology spreading more I think we need to be more scared of those who have power to hack mainstream media and otehr popular websites.

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