Because Internet

by Gretchen McCulloch

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  Like how expressive typography and co-text doodles predate the internet, in-joke replication has a multigenerational cultural history. I, as a Full Internet Person, remember Blinkenlights as a chain email that my dad (Semi Internet) forwarded me in the early 2000s, but the Jargon File dates it back to 1955 at IBM, from the days when computers really did blink rows of LEDs rather than have a screen. The Jargon File also points to further roots in mock-German signs common in Allied machine shops during and after the Second World War. One such sign, although lacking the titular word “blinkenlights,” has several familiar phrases: “Das Machinen ist nodt for gefingerpoken und mittengrabben. . . . Das rubbernekken sightseeren und stupidisch volk bast relaxen.” My dad was definitely not around for World War II, but I mentioned Xeroxlore to him anyway. “Oh yeah,” he said, “your grandfather was really into photocopied jokes. Even after he retired, he kept a fax machine at home for years so his buddies could send him the latest jokes. He had a folder an inch thick with the best of them.” My grandfather couldn’t be said to have been an internet person: he had email for a while, but he never had a smartphone or a social media account anywhere, and yet there was an extended period when he was as into curating his own meme collection as any teenage denizen of Tumblr or Imgur.

  The next time I visited, my dad produced a nondescript brown manila file folder stuffed with loose papers. “I found this while clearing out Granddad’s office. I thought you might be interested.”

  My grandfather’s meme stash? Of course I was.

  Looking through the papers, the first thing that jumped out at me was how large the letters were. If I’d had any doubts that there were truly senior citizen memes, the font size—double or triple what I would use—would have confirmed it. These documents were produced by and for people who needed reading glasses. Alas, it appeared that the folder I held in my hands was merely a portion of my grandfather’s meme collection—no nineties faxlore was to be found. (My father pointed out that most of the fax memes would have been printed on rolls of shiny thermal paper, like many receipts still are, which is not at all durable.) Instead, the collection consisted entirely of oft-forwarded emails, printed out from Microsoft Outlook between about 2004 and 2011. It was clear, however, that “an inch thick” had been an underestimate.

  Only slightly daunted, I started reading anyway. But here I was disappointed. The jokes were unoriginal and repetitive—lots of professions and nationalities and public figures walking into bars and arriving at pearly gates, precocious children and human-acting pets making jokes that belied their innocence, stock figures like blondes and country bumpkins and old married couples playing to and occasionally subverting their trope. Experimentally, I googled “classic jokes.” Yep, here was the same genre, misattributed to the same few legendary wits or lacking attribution at all, listed by the hundreds on websites with bad graphic design, replete with groan-worthy puns and cringe-worthy stereotypes. If this was the legacy of my grandfather as memelord, I wasn’t sure I wanted to inherit it.

  But where’s the enjoyment in a meme if not from repetition? The first time I see a cat or dog with peculiar grammar, I’m somewhere between mildly tickled and simply confused. It’s around the third or fifth version that the humor kicks in, and it’s around the twentieth incarnation, when I think I’ve gotten tired of it but someone comes up with a truly spectacular reimagining, that I laugh the hardest. Memes are full of stock characters. That’s the entire conceit of the Advice Animals: they started with thematic animal mashups, like Philosoraptor and Socially Awkward Penguin, and expanded to humanoid stereotypes that come with just as much gendered and racial baggage as the “classic” jokes, like Overly Attached Girlfriend or High Expectations Asian Father.

  Stock figures and caricatures go a lot further back than classic jokes. Public figures and archetypes are found in political cartoons through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as the donkey and elephant of American political parties, which are found in cartoons of the 1870s. Martin Luther, in a pamphlet from 1521 designed to drum up populist support against the Catholic Church, commissioned cartoons which remixed iconic biblical scenes to comment on then current ecclesiastical politics. (Religious stock figures retain their appeal in meme form: in one repeated image, a Jesus painting photoshopped with hipster glasses contains the caption “I had followers before Twitter.”) Personifications of places and abstract ideas, like Liberty and Britannia, go back to Roman goddesses, while ancient Greek vases and theatrical masks also contained caricatures. Animal stories that make a point about the human world are perhaps the oldest of all. They’re found in Aesop’s fables, nursery rhymes, and all sorts of ancient myths and legends.

  What’s unique about memes, then, isn’t that they’re participatory, or that they remix visuals and stock figures. What makes a meme a meme instead of a cartoon, a joke, or a fad is the same thing that lends a frisson of irony to the claim that my grandfather had a meme stash: a meme is an atom of internet culture, and my grandfather was never really an internet person. Creating, sharing, or laughing at a meme is staking a claim to being an insider: I am a member of internet culture, it says, and if you don’t get this, then you aren’t.

  Like how typographical irony creates space for sincerity, jokes are also claims to cultural space. Laughing at an in-joke says, “I too was here when this happened.” Laughing at a joke about shared struggles says, “We’re all in this together.” Laughing at a racist or sexist joke says, “I accept these stereotypes.” Memes can be a linguistic recruitment tool: observers want to be part of the in-group that gets the memes, whether benignly (I’ve seen linguistics memes encourage people to read the linguistics articles on Wikipedia) or for more nefarious purposes (far-right discussion forums use memes and irony strategically to promote extreme ideology with a veneer of plausible deniability). Explaining a joke and explaining a meme fall flat for the same reasons, because “getting it” without explanation is kind of the point.

  If a meme is an atom of internet culture, then as internet culture becomes simply popular culture, memes spread with it. The linguist Erin McKean tweeted a dialogue with her teenage son that illustrates this point:

  KID: fidget spinners are, like, a physical meme

  ME: THAT’S A FAD

  The comparison between meme and fad is not entirely off base. Technologist An Xiao Mina has written about how the internet, and especially manufacturing-on-demand services in Shenzhen, China, has made it possible for physical objects to go viral and be remixed in much the same way as memes. It’s never been easier to get a custom design printed on a t-shirt or to collectively brainstorm protest slogans, which then spread and replicate again via photos on social media. When I decided to embroider the Behold the Field meme because I’ve seen photos of other people’s embroideries, was I participating in internet culture or material culture? At this point, is there even a difference?

  Any community that talks with each other via the internet now has its own set of memes. There are memes about videogames and parenting and anime. There are political memes for any persuasion. There are linguistics memes, which I’m partial to for obvious reasons.* (I conscientiously procrastinated on this book by making a linguistics version for every meme that crossed my Twitter feed while I was supposed to be writing.) The Library of Congress archives memes now, preserving things like the Lolcat Bible, Urban Dictionary, and Know Your Meme. It calls them, charmingly and also not entirely inaccurately, “folklore.” There are people with full-time jobs in advanced memology, like the academics I’ve mentioned already, the staff of Know Your Meme, and Amanda Brennan, Tumblr’s “meme librarian.”

  Our meme dissertators from 2014, Whitney Phillips and Ryan Milner, wrote a later book together about memes as a kind of internet folklore, drawing parallels to dirty limericks, ghost stories, and pranks. If a meme can refer to anything that’s popular, we’ve almost come full circle, back to
Dawkins’s original definition of a meme as an idea that spreads through cultural replication.

  But there’s still something that makes a meme distinct from an idea that remains obscure or merely becomes popular without spawning imitations. Often, it’s that memes are weird. Why do memes look like they do? In particular, why do they often involve distinctive and weird linguistic styles? Limor Shifman provides a tantalizing clue: she did a study of YouTube videos that spawned many imitations compared with videos that had the same number of views but few or no imitations. Surprisingly, she found that the more professional-looking videos were less likely to be memed. In Shifman’s words: “‘Bad’ texts make ‘good’ memes.” Or in other words, since memes are based on active involvement, “The ostensibly unfinished, unpolished, amateur-looking, and even weird video invites people to fill in the gaps, address the puzzles, or mock its creator.”

  Incoherent language or bad photoshop accomplishes the same thing. Just as slang or minimalist typography can convey that you’re approachable or invite people to understand your layers of irony, the playful language of many memes provides a clear route to participation. Formally constructed cultural items hide the patchwork and edits and labor that go into them, making the aspiring author or artist intimidated by the roughness of their first drafts in comparison to the polish of others’ final versions. Incoherence does the opposite: the meme as internet folklore is imperfect, constantly under construction, and something you could write, too. Release the meme into the world anonymously or from behind a pseudonym, as many people do, and it matters even less if it’s a flop. The stylized language signals their genre, the same way as “once upon a time” or “knock knock” signals a fairy tale or a knock-knock joke.

  Writing that builds on the universe of other writing is among our oldest forms of storytelling: the Iliad is attributed to Homer but started out as oral literature; Virgil’s Aeneid borrows a minor character from the Iliad, Aeneas, and makes him into a hero of Rome; Dante’s Divine Comedy then borrows the historical personage of Virgil and makes him into Dante’s guide to Purgatory and Hell. But building on another universe requires making assumptions about what your audience already knows, and that’s tricky.

  In a world of only print, I have to decide exactly how much of a source to quote, and as a reader you can’t see anything more than that without a lot of effort. If you’re lucky, you might have the original book on your shelf, and you can go look up a reference—as long as I’ve provided a page number, and as long as it’s the same edition. Otherwise, you’re making a trip to the library, and who knows if they even have a copy? With the internet, we often have access to the full text of the original source at the twitch of a finger. When I’m writing something online, I can use a potentially obscure term or a reference by just linking to an explanation or source, letting a text serve multiple audiences. People who already get the reference won’t bother to click, while people who don’t can click through for a fuller explanation than I could possibly provide by interrupting myself to explain. Even when I haven’t provided a link, people can discover the context by searching. Without hypertext and search, I have to consider my audience more narrowly, deciding at every stage whether to risk boring some readers with a definition or confusing others without one.

  The internet has been very good for shared authorship, and not just of the memeish kind. Take Wikipedia, which has used volunteer editing and the collaborative wiki format to create an English-language encyclopedia sixty times larger than any that’s ever been printed—plus a couple hundred encyclopedias of varying sizes in other languages. Take fanfiction: communities of people forming around a particular source text and rewriting it in conversation with each other. Though fanfiction existed before the internet (Sherlock Holmes and Star Trek being notable examples), the interest-based discussion-board structure of the early internet encouraged fans to find each other, especially fans of The X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Later waves of fans showed no signs of slowing down. They’ve gathered on blogs like LiveJournal and later Tumblr, and fic-hosting websites like Fanfiction.net, Archive of Our Own, and Wattpad, writing about Harry Potter, One Direction, and the trifecta of Superwholock (Supernatural, Doctor Who, and BBC Sherlock), at a volume of posts at least double that of Wikipedia.

  Our modern, Western notion that authorship should be solo and original is comparatively young and culturally bound, dating back only to after we had the ability to make faithful and exact copies at a mass scale. Copyright started evolving into its modern form in the centuries after the invention of the printing press made copying easy. In other words, we’ve had the right to adapt longer than we’ve had the right to prevent copying. I’m grateful for copyright and solo authorship: it’s what allows me, and all the other authors I’ve loved, to make any kind of living. But let’s not pretend that professionalized creativity is the only kind of creativity. There’s a joy in a joke well told, a wicked delight in a delicately stitched swear word, a burning curiosity that can only be quenched by rewriting one’s favorite characters in a new environment—and yes, an exhilaration in riffing together in perfect synchro-meme.

  Whether the memeish subculture is large or small, creating and sharing memes is an act of claiming space as an internet person, of saying that people like you deserve to be on the internet. Perhaps the final stage of meme maturity will be when we stop asserting that other groups are Doing Memes Wrong and instead recognize them as cultural objects that come in multiple and evolving genres.

  In the meantime, though, we’re still bridging the gap between people raised on internet culture and people trying to understand how the internet can even have a culture, so here’s an analogy. When I was a kid, I just couldn’t wrap my head around the crossword puzzles they printed in the newspaper. Sure, I understood how a crossword puzzle might be fun in theory, but in practice, I could just never get the clues. How was I supposed to know about events and celebrities from before I was even born? How was anyone?? Where was the hidden list of cultural references that everyone was cribbing from???

  I never found such a list. But when I happen across a crossword puzzle now, in an airplane magazine or a relative’s morning paper, something curious has happened. Somehow, now, I can solve most of the clues. Movies? I remember when they came out, even if I didn’t see them. Politicians? I remember them being elected, even when I wish I didn’t. As for the references from before I was born, they’re getting fewer and fewer, but the ones that remain have come up in conversation enough over the years that I somehow know which ones are fair game for the puzzling public.

  I couldn’t make a list of these references and how I know them all, but they’re there, waiting to be pulled out of me by a well-placed clue or a few key letters. I can now tap into the cultural conversation that crossword puzzles assume, in a way that was completely baffling to me as a child outside it.

  It’s the same thing with internet culture. I can’t make an exhaustive list of all the memes that I know, and I definitely can’t explain why a given meme tickles me in exactly the right place, any more than my grandfather could articulate to me what it felt like for his joke collection to feel new and exciting and worth preserving. We’re used to in-jokes and shared jargon out of the mouths of families, longtime friends, workplace buddies, even entire industries and geographical regions. It’s the written part that throws us off, because we’re used to written things being formal, and part of that formality is a cultural flattening to appeal to a general audience: a newspaper crossword puzzle is created for a mass-market newspaper reader. Informal writing is different, and the meme is the cultural atom of this difference. We’re still so delighted when we come across something that seems to have been written exactly for our own tastes. (Anyone who’s confused can google it.)

  Like all cultures, internet culture is referential, baffling to outsiders, relying more on shared history than explicit instruction. Like all cultures, it’s not truly a single culture:
it has some parts that are widely shared and others that occupy tiny niches. Like all cultures, importantly, it’s in flux, however neatly we archive our favorite parts and attempt to pass them down to our offspring.

  So where else might this state of flux be taking us?

  Chapter 8

  A New Metaphor

  When you think about the English language, what do you picture?

  I decided to consult the oracle of the contemporary human id to find out. In other words, I searched for “English language” in Google Images and twenty other stock photo sites.

  What I found was books. There were other motifs, too, such as chalkboards, speech bubbles, wooden letter blocks, and a couple inexplicably disturbing tongues with flags painted on them, but mostly, there were books. Books all alone, books with apples and pencils, books with people reading them, books with “English” on the front cover, books piled up in stacks with “English” and “Grammar” and “Spelling” on the spines, and especially books open to a dictionary entry for the word “English.” So very many photographs of dictionary entries.

  To dictionary editors, this is not surprising. Many will tell you that people think of “the” dictionary as the English language itself, as if there weren’t even multiple dictionaries, as if they weren’t made by fallible humans. Lexicographer Kory Stamper kept a record of the emails she received from Merriam-Webster’s Ask an Editor service, and many of them consisted of people wanting their favorite words added or most hated words removed, in the belief that a sanction by Merriam-Webster is what makes a word “real” or not.