Pedestrionics: Meme Culture, Alienation Capital, and Gestic Play

This presentation considers the rhetoric and poetics of meme culture and social media platforms.

Internet memes, in their essence, are methods of expression born from the attention economy of networked culture. At times they can be epistolary, aphoristic, polemic, satirical, or parodic; and they may take the form of performative actions and photo fads such as planking, teapotting and batmanning or iterative processes such as image macros and advice animals including lolcats, Bad Luck Brian and Condescending Wonka. In either case they are conditioned by rhetorical formulas with strict grammars and styles. In the case of image macros, the rhetoric is sustained through correlations between the image and its caption. If we line-up the thousands of Condescending Wonka memes side by side, we will find very little difference between them aesthetically – the same image is repeated, along with captions at the top and bottom of the image. In the captions we find a specific tone that is also repeated one image to the next.

For the Condescending Wonka meme this tone is sarcastic and snarky, which is a reflection upon Gene Wilder’s portrayal of the title character in the 1971 film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. The top caption presents what might be a sincere question, and in the bottom caption we get a snarky response. The completion of a truncated mock-dialogue circuit… To understand the context of the Condescending Wonka meme, one must have a generalized understanding of Wilder’s portrayal of the character to allow for the attitude of the character to operate as a sublimated vehicle for humorously couched insolence. In this regard, the meme is not simply an artifact, but a conduit through which cultural references are conducted.

It could be said that memes are not artifacts at all. As Dawkins defined memes, they can be "an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture." Though we can see how these operate in the Condescending Wonka example – the idea, style, and rhetorical behavior are clear, where we locate the meme as differentiated from the artifact is not so plainly defined. If we disregard the meme as any given individual artifact and start to examine their dialogistic function -- memes as sets of social relations, they begin to take on the additional aspect of social gesture, or what Brecht has dubbed the gestic. They present a framework for attitudes that must be shared, expressed, distributed, and put into circulation. For, as Brecht has stated, “…it is what happens between people that provides them with all the material that they can discuss, criticize, alter.”

Though we maybe tempted to think of meme culture as frivolous and disposable (and certainly meme constructions can lead rather short lives); that its content is fundamentally banal, puerile, or adolescent, it is important to consider their function as frameworks for the communication of human ideas and attitudes, along with their methods of persuasion.

(Source: Author's introduction)