Each Wednesday in What Memes Mean, Kirk Bozeman questions the significance, humor, and subtexts of viral videos, memes, and other Internet fads.
A few years ago, a ragtag documentary titled Invisible Children made the rounds among college ministries and churches, and I attended a viewing at the time. This was right on the cusp of Africa-awareness, just before the general public began to learn about the serious social issues occurring on the continent. The film struck a chord, spawning an impassioned grassroots movement of the same name (as often happens) centering around the video’s central issue: the abduction of children into child armies on the African continent. I, for one, was affected and have thus always had an affinity for the organization (full disclosure).
Recently, the organization posted a video to the ‘net that has gone viral to the extreme. There’s hardly need to mention it: In the past few weeks, most of us have taken 30 minutes out of a day (the length of an entire episode of 30 Rockor The Big Bang Theory) to voluntarily watch and re-post a video about an issue of social justice (which is pretty amazing in itself). Created by filmmaker and organization founder Jason Russell, the video relates the story of Joseph Kony, a man who has kidnapped and enslaved upwards of 30,000 children in the past 20 years or more under the banner of the “Lord’s Resistance Army,” and attempts to call us to action through a number of (mostly viral) means.
And, of course, there has been much, much backlash. I personally take the stance that the video was done to create awareness, not provide final resolution, and should be dealt with as such — so I think we should see this video as a very good thing. Russell has already been able to do something most folks of his ilk are never able to do — hegot everybody seriously talking about social justice.
Sometimes this talking has become a discussion of the purpose of nonprofits and their budgetary practices, or a discussion of the public’s ignorance and avoidance of already-existing social justice issues, or maybe how social justice can even be meaningfully pursued by (so-called) rich, comfortable, entitled Westerners. And at its most serious, it has raised the question of whether (or how) government and military can (or should) get involved. This talking is taking different forms, but it’s seriously occurring. Russell is making us face issues most of us would prefer to remain ignorant of.
And at the end of the day, the harrowing injustice that this video presents to the world trumps all critics and contrarians to some extent; everyone will admit to that. Even the most hardened pragmatic ethicist feels ire over this: For heaven’s sake, there is a person in the worldkidnapping childrenand making them into killers and sex slaves. Solving the problem (atrocity) absolutely requires much, much further discussion (leading to action), but we certainly weren’t discussing any of this a month ago. And we will certainly find it hard to forget — this time the world of meme has imprinted on us a bit deeper than usual.
What really interests me: I wonder if in a decade or so some brilliant leader of another new, meaningful, effective nonprofit organization, deeply concerned with taking down some other form of social injustice, states in an interview, “I didn’t care about any this stuff until my friends and I watched that Kony video in college, you know?” Social justice has to start somewhere, maybe even with a video intentionally crafted to hijack the vehicle of meme for grander ends. I, for one, at least think it’s worth a shot.
Each Wednesday in What Memes Mean, Kirk Bozeman questions the significance, humor, and subtexts of viral videos, memes, and other Internet fads.
We are all victims, generators, and products of perspective. We bring a host of preconceived notions and assumed truths to all of life, including into our relationships with others — ideas about ourselves, people, and the world that affect the way we view and treat each other. This is not necessarily a bad thing, it’s just an unavoidable thing. We can’t function in reality without some type of a priori, it’s impossible to do. But whether our assumption is positive or negative, good or bad, we’re all stuck in skin and confined to conjecture, doing the best we can to try to understand each other, hopefully well enough to feel connected to someone somewhere and/or “just get by.”
Maybe it’s not as dramatic as all that (maybe), but we certainly all find ourselves feeling misunderstood quite often. It’s here that a recent meme picks up, the one that swept social media and inundated your Facebook and Twitter timelines in the past couple of weeks, the one with the black background and one square picture per “what” to elucidate the assumptions of others (and, briefly, yourself)…
What my friends think I do…
What my mom thinks I do…
What I think I do…
What society thinks I do…
What I really do…
Everyone seemed to find themselves in this meme. It evolved quickly and relentlessly. Most versions were specifically concerned with vocation, one of the main ways adults define themselves. There are now jpegs lamenting the (evidently) ill-understood lives of photographers, seminary students, professional artists, librarians, musicians, and countless other fields. Generally they all seem to say: “My friends think I party, my parents think I play, society thinks I’m weird, I think I’m cool, but I really just sit at a desk behind a computer all day.”
But, the “what I really do” meme (like most of our assumptions of misunderstanding) got a little whiny. Do your friends or parents really not understand you? Do they, perhaps, understand you a little better than you’d like? Is their criticism or commentary something you avoid by tacking together gimmicky joke posts in MS Paint instead of taking it, at the very least, into consideration? Does society, honestly, have at least some point in its assumptions and preconceptions of you, something you should at least give ear to and analyze for yourself? This is the problem of living in a world of conjecture — we fall victim to our own conjectures as well — perhaps our assumptions that we are not understood by others are not entirely true. Each of us is a friend, a family member, and a member of society — we are each in the jpeg, not just chuckling at it.
But feelings of misunderstanding, though they should be analyzed, are often legitimate. The biblical promise that we will “know even as we are fully known” has always resounded deeply with me, and this meme points to the fact that it resounds deeply in all of us. We feel misunderstood, we deeply desire to be “known,” and we desperately want to “know.” This is one of the problems of the Fall — this disconnect with others and the world — and only something that the coming Kingdom of the all-knowing God can fix .
Each Wednesday in What Memes Mean, Kirk Bozeman questions the significance, humor, and subtexts of viral videos, memes, and other Internet fads.
More changes to our beloved Facebook are being forced upon us by the trampling hordes of social media developers, the programmers who seek to uncaringly pillage our consistencies and set fire to our comforts. This time they call it “Timeline.”
If you haven’t checked out Timeline, you should. This update is big — perhaps the biggest one to date — mainly because of what it seems to signify.
Timeline represents a major shift in Facebook’s philosophy of what it is supposed to be and do. It will be moving our profiles away from a simple platform for share-as-you-go posting to a more ambitious attempt at encapsulating our entire lives from birth to now on a Web page. Instead of being a marketplace for haphazard interpersonal interaction, Facebook wants to be an intensive personal scrapbook for every human being, replete with all life events chronicled in multiple forms of media from birth to now.
When you turn it on, the obvious becomes obvious: Timeline is an actual timeline for each person — just like the timelines we studied and drew in eighth grade history class. It’s a line marked in years with dots pertaining to each of my inputs to the Facebook grid. If I already have school and birthday information entered, Facebook automatically adds it. If I keep scrolling down, Facebook is basically begging me to upload my baby pic. From recent new feeds, my friends are already beginning to key in their special extra “life events” as well.
This is pretty big. Thus far we’ve crafted our digital self-representations out of random Likes and Pages, school and work info, a few boxes for our own text, and a wall for posting our “whatevers.” But now we are being asked to create a history lesson of ourselves, a full presentation of “where we’ve been to where we are now.” The emphasis seems to be shifting from interaction with others through an online profile to an online profile through which we can potentially interact with others. That’s a pretty big shift.
I won’t say here whether I think this shift is good or bad or neutral, but I will say this: It creeps me out a bit. Facebook is emphasizing birth to now (reference the promo video at the Timeline link above), with the arrow happily continuing forward. But when you attach a timeline to a human being, that line will eventually end. There’s really no way to avoid that realization.
And to force us all to face life as beginning/middle/end every time we check our profile seems a tad morbid to me. I can’t imagine discussions of mortality didn’t come up during Timeline programmer meetings. But though it’s kind of creepy, maybe it’s kind of helpful.
Is Timeline Facebook’s attempt at encouraging us to cherish our lives, to look beyond the potential pettiness inherent in social media? Is Facebook starting to categorize our updates and life events as “important” and “not as important” to try to teach us that this is actually, in fact, how life really works? Is the movement to these points on lines an attempt to “teach us to number our days” and to “[redeem] the time”? A bit over the top, I know, but perhaps pillaging programmers can tap into the wisdom of the ages. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt.
Maybe Timeline is Facebook’s conscious attempt at making us face life as life: something beautiful and brief we are called to fill with as many meaningful dots as we can. That’s almost an anti-social media form of social media.
Perhaps the infiltration of the Like button into all facets of modern life simply puts some digital skin on a pre-existing human condition: You are what you love.
“LOLcats and sites like it are fun, healthy, humorous distractions that can add a dimension of enjoyment and self-forgetfulness that our world-weary hearts desperately need.”
Each Saturday in What Memes Mean, Alan Noble questions the significance, humor, and subtexts of viral videos, memes, and other Internet fads.
Although “Baby Got Book” was first posted on YouTube in 2007, it still occasionally gets posted and sent around the Internet. The lyrics are witty (“it looks like one of those large ones, with plenty of space margins”), DJ WhiteBoy (the artist) has a gold chain that reads KJV, and it is a parody of a song about a man who is attracted to women with large butts. Wait, what?
Before we can talk about this specific video, I need to say a word or two about musical parody. In general, what makes a musical parody funny is the disparity between the original and the parody. The more dissimilar, the more humorous. For example, you can think of Weird Al Yankovic’s classic “Amish Paradise.”
It is hard to imagine a more dissimilar context for a gangster’s Paradise than an Amish community. So, what makes Weird Al’s song so funny is not merely the fact that he is describing an exaggerated version of Amish life, but that the original song was a gritty portrayal of life in a gang. In other words, it would be hard to find this video humorous if you did not know what it was making fun of.
Now, let us consider “Baby Got Book.” What is the original content and context that is contrasted in this song? What is so dissimilar? What makes it so funny?
“Baby Got Book” is a parody of “Baby Got Back,” a song about a man who has a butt fetish. In the song, he describes how he becomes sexually aroused at the sight of a woman with a large butt. He also describes in various ways how he would like to sleep with these women and the great joy he takes in viewing them. So, what is funny in “Baby Got Book” is that we have replaced a sexual butt fetish with a Bible fetish.
In the original song, Sir Mix-A-Lot raps, “when a girl walks in with an itty bitty waist and a round thing in your face you get sprung.”
In DJ WhiteBoy’s parody, these lyrics are changed to: “When a girl walks in with a KJV and a book mark in Proverbs you get stoked.”
Sir Mix-A-Lot: “My homeboys tried to warn me, but that butt you got makes me so horny.”
DJ WhiteBoy: “My minister tried to console me, but that Book you got makes (“M-m-me so holy”)”
The Bible replaces a large butt. Instead of sexual arousal at the sight of a large butt in his face, he is “stoked” because a girl has a KJV Bible with a bookmark in Proverbs. And instead of a butt making you horny, the Bible makes you holy. And these are some of the less explicit comparisons.
It is a good, healthy, and humbling thing to make fun of our own Christian culture. It reminds us that our Bible fetish (an inordinate focus on the translation and physical appearance of a Bible), which many Christians do have, is trivial and a distraction. But, if this poking fun takes the form of a song that draws a comparison between butts and Bibles, and horniness and holiness, and sexual arousal and excitement about a Bible, is this humor really appropriate? If the exact thing that makes “Baby Got Book” so funny is that a butt fetish and a Bible fetish are so dissimilar, then is this really edifying? Is this really honoring to the word of God? Is this merely making fun of our Christian culture, or does it also necessarily implicate the word of God in its mockery?