Meme, me me!
I think of meme ideas a lot, but I never make them, because they mostly suck. The meme is voluntary propaganda, and worse than “the sound bite” of television and radio. At best, it’s a bumper sticker. The meme is a social media invention that requires no actual taking-place-of-events, they resolve nothing and initiate no useful action. It is an abstraction commenting on abstractions. Thus memes make news obsolete, as people’s feelings are better encapsulated in the meme than real information: propaganda.
I once posted one in the Bernie Sanders dank meme stash, and it earned viral status. It compared Presidents Bush, Obama, and Sanders after their full terms (gray-haired and wrinkled), only Sanders transformed into Ziggy Stardust. It was a hit, as the shares and reactions swelled for days. I told the friend who suggested where to post it that I could see myself getting addicted to meme posting. He said in response, “Memes are my crack.”
This might be the most impressive ROI for social media investors: They have learned to profit on an abstraction, a mere sense of satisfaction through usage, like drugs. If you interact with a celebrity, for instance, there is some fantastic rush as you feel closer to someone who is essentially a media abstraction. Mostly positive interactions, I’ve had, but I also argued with Roseanne Barr about conspiracies and trolled Marc Maron when I had a beef with Stamps.Com. Stupid, I know.
The investor capital for social media comes entirely from the basis of farming traffic and herding together a mass audience, not unlike television, but its scope has been fine-tuned. Its access has widened so that users at the public library who can’t afford television can still receive ads, and to boot, it will be based upon every move they make in the web browser. They’ll probably get ads from Stamps.Com because they googled food stamps.
I like to think of Vice Magazine circa 2001, when I discovered the young media company. It was a free mag where fashion met counterculture to sell lots of ads. But Vice is a $2 Billion private corporation now. They are not sounding like the independent voice they got rich with. It has grown with every trend, cleverly, earning a loyal user base on their homepage while expanding into television. I’ve tolerated the extraordinary number of ads in free publications like Vice, but now, the barrage of ads online is overkill.
By the 1990s, every town had multiple weekly rags loaded with ads (examples: Portland Mercury, LA Weekly). These liberally structured semi-independent publishing outfits allow for alternative voices to seep through the cracks, funded by local business. In the late 1960s and early 70’s, there was a wave of community radio and television initiatives, funded by individuals. It was under Nixon that they passed. Prior to that, only corporations brought you television. Firebrand papers and zines go back through every social justice movement in American history, each of them speaking truth to power, however slanted they were and always will be.
I moved to Portland in 2003, when that era was crossing over into, basically, Myspace. Myspace gathered all the millennial punks and zines continued to flourish. House shows were exploding as Myspace could promote anything. Venues became unnecessary. I booked music festivals and took my avant-garde band on tour with that social networking tool. It was truly focused on showcasing your content while making it easy to find the people and places you needed to find.
The downfall of MySpace was Rupert Murdoch and his clumsy takeover from Tom Anderson. I wonder if he sabotaged it to save his traditional publishing empire, because the platform didn’t deal with problems that arose over time. Suddenly, YouTube grew in popularity and people were posting videos, plus the usual gifs and jpegs, down giant comment threads that froze pages all the time. Technical solutions lagged while advertising got more invasive, and MySpace became uninhabitable.
Today, most of the online media streams remind me of that last gasp at MySpace. Major news outlets like LA Times and sketchy tabloids alike are hosting widgets that are made to look like content from the site you’re on, but it’s clickbait crap straight to Virusville.
The Great Migration ensued circa 2011. Facebook dealt with the challenge of dramatic content overflow in brilliant ways, even encouraging it. Part of what makes that massive tumble ever increasing is the fact that it is only limited by the system itself. The behemoth has learned how to keep its users extremely busy while maintaining tight controls over traffic.
Facebook throttles your exposure, depending on how much you’re willing to pay. False scarcity for exposure enables paid boosting mechanisms to reach the mass audience that television had previously locked down.
People might have less friends or post less content if they have to go through the entire timeline to stay current. That would be bad for business. You need people to crave it. If you’re an entertainer, entrepreneur, or publisher, you have no choice, or else continue building that social network at a very slow pace. As the publisher of a blog, I’ve been very patient with growth, as I refuse to play their game.
The path I’ve taken with THRU, of slowly evolving into a magazine and eventually a media network, is soon to be roadblocked by Facebook’s new publishing tools. Why leave Facebook if you can get the content right there? Their traffic domination is astounding. The web is truly Facebook and Google, everything else passes through them eventually. Google led the way with YouTube monetization, giving users a small paycheck for clickthroughs, but Facebook led the way with enslaving its user base, making them pay for clickthroughs.
Social media is a real achievement of Millennials. It tethers to everything happening online and reflects the mindset of a digital native, that digital reality is reality.
People can post anything. People in war zones can post, people in floods can post; people in protests, people in long lines, traffic, concerts, and most of all, private bathrooms, where so many selfies occur.
The selfie, the meme, these are the most prolific products of social media. But what are they? What is their purpose other than filling the void with abstract expressions of the fragment of the self one is willing to expose? Memes are the half-truth we’re willing to embrace while selfies are the image of ourselves we want to become.
They are not appealing to me. Occasional selfies, great, but memes, almost never are they relevant. I am the elder millennial and I cannot embrace everything my generation creates.
Memes are the half-truth we’re willing to embrace while selfies are the image of ourselves we want to become.
There is a shadow cast over the technology, quite a big one. It aggregates people without actually bonding them as humans. The cold, distant text leaves it up to our personal insecurities to project into.
I’ve been on this “I hate Facebook” tirade for years. Like numerous high-minded creative rebels, “I only use this because I have to.” The truism continues today, as I post very little personally, but I can’t promote a blog without it.
I’ve tried numerous competitors. Twitter at least serves well as a headline ticker. I can more rapidly connect to what is happening right now than I can with Facebook. However, thanks to the hypertension of skittish investors who overvalued a headline ticker, Twitter implemented numerous generic changes, like filtering my feed, inserting increasingly targeted ads, and the “Like” heart button replaced the “Favorite” star.
Ello came on the scene, offering an ad-free, anonymous experience, where hate speech would be censored. When I joined, it was invite-only and hyped itself against Facebook, a worthwhile strategy, but the product wasn’t ready — it didn’t support video. Now that the whole thing is better developed and content is surging through it, I’m totally bored by it.
My boredom with Ello isn’t that it’s not full of colorful art, sexy photos, gorgeous video, and in general seems to be liberated from hate speech and nonsensical political diatribes. I don’t feel like I’m being shoveled misinformation there, but I want something truly honest. On Ello, I feel like I’m being shoveled candy, pure fucking candy. So I let go of my profiles at Ello.
Tumblr is one of my favorites. Lots of creative content, editorials, activism, and entertainment blend into the tumble. But I am tired of the scroll, so I don’t spend much time there. I think we can do something different than scrolling.
Reddit’s layout is stuck but all the content is there. Major news services are sourcing more from Reddit than I think they would care to admit. You can get pure candy, celebrity gossip, or direct transmissions from war zones, news, science, and it is all curated by the users. Its user base is hell bent against change and has the power to sway policy because those who control the Subreddits — the moderators — control Reddit.
Reddit is the shopping mall that replaced Main Street.
The whole up/down voting of posts democratizes the rise and fall of content, versus paid boosting. Comment threads are anonymous, so I get honest reactions, versus my posts on Facebook that get few reactions. Anywhere from “Author is a self-righteous prick” concerning my piece about Joyce Hotel, to real appreciation for being thoughtful and balanced in my analysis. Reddit is the only social media to provide viral traffic surges to THRU, because exposure is not throttled.
I have one big issue though. Reddit is the shopping mall that replaced Main Street. Subreddits are basically forums with additional features. It replaced websites that were independently owned or cooperatively managed in the first wave of the web. Most of the old popular forums appear to be cyber ghost towns, where once bustling environments lay to waste, bit-rotting as screen resolution and User Experience replaces expansionist conventions.
Then there is Google Plus. I’m grateful for numerous services by the Alphabet Inc. monster, Google. I was early on board their apps in 2009 and have been using them to organize projects ever since. I was hoping their social platform would catch on because it was more useful than Facebook, cleaner in its appearance, and the user base felt more positive. But nobody used Google Plus, probably because it’s just another homogeny. They eventually tied it into YouTube and Hangouts, so it holds on by sheer need to access those services. Today, one of its biggest users is the world traveling Tom Anderson (Founder of MySpace).
I think most people know what they know about Facebook from the biopic about its founder Mark Zuckerberg, The Social Network. Facebook basically emerged as a digitized public directory for elite university students, then crept into public universities, and eventually opened up to the world. At first it was clean and simple. It garnished an extraordinary wave of users from the aforementioned great migration from MySpace, gaining all the world’s online communities.
Community media once played many of the roles that Facebook plays today, from getting the word out about local events to exposing your music to a new audience. It was owned by the people, it was designed for them.
