Post Semiotics and Memery

The lifespan of a meme: digital Wheaties for pop culture ripples

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Nyan Nyan Catabag. Numa Numa guy. Star Wars kid. Nickelback as meta for bad. These are echoes from a near past. There are many others in many languages. They had no 8 bit funerals, no tears from we got a bad ass in here or songs played on guitar by Tom Selleck by a waterfall with a sandwich. They are undead but at the zombie stage of disuse of cliches, the lepers of language, quarantined away by overuse. Like cliches they worked well and on a certain knife through butter as a rolling stone gathers no moss chains on my heart way still do, but in near absentia, in a distant realm of cooling magma, of a certain kind of semiotic death. These are the memes who have lived their life. Once they were famous like pop stars, shared like the news of botox on that celebrity who did that stuff.

 

What is the life span of a meme? What factors breathe life into this text and image, this pop culture fragment, this post post post post post modern post mash up shard? What peaks its life? What factors then curdle and take the thing from this (digital/shared) world? What sustains some longer than others? Is it a semiotic bouyance , a kind of updraft of timely relevance? Or is it more a time line of a rise and fall/birth and death/ a lifespan?

 

semiotic_triad Semiotics deals with connotative and denotative meanings , what something literally is and what it suggests or symbolizes. An interesting thing happens however when one considers how several people can have different semiotic interpretations. This can be (a bit overly stated perhaps) labeled as “post semiotics”. A meme can have a specific literal read but some more subtle memes can be interpreted in several ways. The question then arises (post semiotically and so forth) could they negate each other? Perhaps part of the life span’s ebb with a meme is a shift in ways it can be interpreted or related to; perhaps some memes fade as they fall into non specificity…the lack of one primary quick read to post and share.
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Your assignment:

  1. Find and post a long dead meme (can be in any language). What made It peak in memey goodness and yummy usage? What made it fall away ?
  1. Write a 2 paragraph poem or bit of prose imagining what your meme is doing now and where it resides on the system of tubes/interwebs. Is it bitter and vengeful at its loss of fame ? Is it instead more at peace away from the grubby hands of so many shares ?