Weekly 3
article response
Memes, Aesthetics, and Anonymity on the Internet
I really enjoyed both of these texts because the internet ugly-aesthetics in all of its forms have always been interesting to me. I could write about the topic for hours but I wanted to hone in on some of the immediate thoughts I had. In Olia Lialina’s text, she related the gamification of the internet experience to anonymity and war. I think in the same way that all users lose their “self” and become an anonymous entity on the internet, the same happens to its content. Nick Douglas touched on this when he talked about the troll face and the 4chan community but even when a work can be traced to its source, the author loses authorship and power in many ways.
The most notable example from my mind is Pepe, an iconic internet frog that was originally part of a comic drawn by Matt Furie. The frog has recently been “claimed” by alt-right, neo-nazi, communities to be their nazi icon. In Mike Rugnetta’s episode of Idea Channel, “Pepe: Rare, Racist, or Both?” he talks about how the author’s intentions do not completely define the character and that the input and context of this character cannot be separated with its original intent. Literature also has examples of this to a smaller extent: “The Outsiders” by S.E. Hinton have been analyzed by many readers as a novel about homosexual teens. Despite the author’s denial of these subtexts, the larger majority of readers, (the users,) would disagree. The internet is so wide and grants so much power to its users in specific subsets that a lot of the meaning and contexts have been separated from its owners try to fix. While the author and their intent can guide a creation, that creation is also dictated by how users interact with it. As much I originally loved Pepe, the meme has been tainted by communities that have tainted its image.
This is why I imagine there is so much outrage in reaction to Zara using Pepe in their new skirt design. There is already outrage from corporations using and trying to commodity memes. Most of these have been failures but this situation has an additional racist undertone. The commodification of “meme content” by large corporations has always created backlash from the internet community. There are notable exceptions like the Denny’s tumblr and the Arby’s twitter but the general feelings around corporate remixing of memes can be boiled down to the Social Media comic by webcomicname:
The success of these corporate social media platforms is the ability to understand the current meme aesthetic and generate new content while understanding the meme in its internet form. Even then, certain users on these platforms are hyper aware of the role of seller and buyer on sites like tumblr. A recent anti-meme that has emerged in defiance of Denny’s corporate consumption of memes is this addition from user leviathan-supersystem:
it seems there isn’t any meme that Denny’s won’t try to jack, so let’s make the new meme “John C. Miller, CEO and President of the Denny’s Corporation, is a capitalist running dog and his wealth must be seized and redistributed to the people” to see them try to use that for their marketing.
Within the few minutes of me discovering this meme on my dash, I had found it already had been remixed multiple times. There is a certain awareness in this meme that isn’t present in the discussion in Douglas’s text but Lialina talks about. The use of the internet aesthetic can be used in an almost satirical way to talk about serious issues and the strange tonal shift of memes in their remixes aren’t questioned because the “ugly aesthetic” is so embedded into the internet language. I think it’s fantastic.
Beautiful and Ugly
I was looking through my tags on tumblr and I found one neutral photo, one ugly photo, and one beautiful photo. I lined them all up together to create a semi narrative that somehow makes it, as my housemate puts it, "a plot of self discoverence."
I think the hot dog picture is ugly because of the flashlighting that's hitting the boy and the dog's face. The scene is happening at night and there is clearly a story behind it but no context is given. The photo reminds me of the "cursed image" photos that have been a trend recently which puts it into the meme aesthetic.
I think the dog photo on the far right is beautiful because it was clearly shot with the intention of highlighting the dog's beauty as if it were a person. The lighting is even and the colors are vibrant and fresh. If any creature or object were shot in the same way I think it would be equally as beautiful.
I included this cat image because I thought it wuld give a funnier narrative between all three photos. I like how it looks like the same dog in the last two photos. On the subject of beauty on the cat photo, I don't think it's particularly beautiful or ugly. It's a fantastic photo though.