Devouring The Signifier: How Memes Cannabilize Society.
A hipster, yet scientific study of what memes do in social media. How sociology can help us understand what compels people to share memes and what it means for human behavior.
Memes are everywhere. They’ve evolved enough to be a form of language. We relate to each other in memes. In fact, according to research, memes
Remember, memes don’t necessarily tell us what the individual is thinking, feeling or even believing. In fact, the process of sharing a meme has become so habitual that the ‘share’ button on social media has become more of a Pavlovian trigger influenced by several competing motivators: desire, virtue signaling, locality, and common ends. Let’s deep dive into these to find out something about what compels humans to act in a way that proliferates memes across the virtual world.
Desire: This is the most difficult one to explore. Mainly, because desires are subjectively and radically influenced by our own individual schemas of the world, ourselves, others, events, social phenomena, etc. But, desire (‘I want to’) is the strongest motivator.
Virtue Signaling: I don’t really like the word choice of this phenomenon. Mainly, because it’s made the desire to be virtuous somewhat of an action we shouldn’t all pursue. But, the main hear behind this can explain what could drive people to share memes — they want to look good. They want to look smart. They want to look cool. They want to look like a leader. Funny. Powerful. Beautiful. The list could go on forever. But, Virtue Signaling is probably one of the biggest factors influencing people’s decisions. (Notice, all the different reasons are driven by desire — it's why I started with it!).
Locality: Okay so to fully understand this one, we have to turn to Sociology.
Locality means a community occupies a territorial area permanent or changing. The people are having belonging to their locality and develop “we” feeling with each other.
In sociology, locality refers to the occupation of a physical space. I want to use it now to include virtual geographies — online communities and virtual spaces. Each area and artifact of the internet (like memes) operates as a form of territory. We each identify with these territories and the groups that occupy them.
Think about this. Do some self-observation. Watch where you go on the web, and watch where you avoid — but then, ask why. The why is key to finding out what drives your own biases and what keeps them where they are. We all have a dispensation towards identifying with the spaces we inhabit, or the groups that we identify with that inhabit them.
Common Ends: This idea combines two concepts from sociology - this new definition argues that people are not driven by an end, but rather by interest. It is that group interests and community identification are the most important elements that guide people’s behaviors. An example would be when a group is concerned about political values - the member must adhere to the political belief over and above their own.
Although these are all sociological examples, they cannot account for the many different guiding ways in which meaning itself filters itself through these particular areas. We are all meaning-makers, and memes are the blank screens upon which we play out all of our different constructed views of the world.
Memes repurpose and cannibalize the parts of society that the metanarrative requires us all to value. Let’s explore this practically.
Political Memes
Might as well jump into the most taboo subject to explore at your nearest family gathering!.
The ideas presented in this meme show the argument for political correctness in what is meant to be a perceived “backhanded” explanation of what communication without being politically correct - and what that assumes.
The banal interpretation is to reduce this to a one-sided political argument, which many want to do. We must critically engage with the content we interact with, otherwise, we fetishize the attractive laziness found within convenient ignorance so prevalent today. Meaning, that people just want to read with their own biases in place and not challenge them.
Political correctness, from a sociological perspective, is dealing with taboos and what has become acceptable and unacceptable. It’s a filter for language and values. So, it is more about linguistic sensitivity. The heart behind it is driven by the desire to allow the other (the person(s) who are not us) to have a say in how we communicate with each other. In an age of globalism, this makes sense, that political correctness would be part of our lexicon and behavioral values. Political correctness does not occur in a vacuum.
This is one of the greatest misunderstandings within the general public - to think, that what we read happens without a wider context. The thing to remember is that memes do not represent what you interpret them to be — they represent what you have been conditioned to believe about what you’re reading.
Brands Are Who We Are
Memes that represent our favorite brands are not merely groups we identify with - they become us and we become them. I know this sounds overstated.
However, research shows that consumers segment their own decisions based on which brands they follow. The brand though, in reality, doesn’t matter - the brand is the screen upon which we pursue our values. The brand represents value, identity, group identity, and a host of other social components that we must engage with to uncover the metanarrative in place. The boring sociological claim is that brands are about community group identity - while this is true, it does not get to the root of multiple factors competing for dominance. However, to find what a culture truly values and identifies with, we have to look at behaviors as territorial markers of identity.
Studies have shown that different areas of the brain are activated when exposed to a brand as opposed to a person, and decisions regarding the evaluation of brands in different product categories activate the area of the brain responsible for semantic object processing rather than areas involved with the judgment of people.
Jean Piaget, the Swiss child development psychologist, called these world maps: Schemas. A simpler way to define this term is to say that our childhoods have been one of the major contributors to how we interpret everything from a shoe brand to a political party.
Memes don’t stand for anything. They are called empty signifiers. They are more like blank screens upon which we discover what we really believe about ourselves, objects, elements, and people on this third rock from the sun. Interpretations work more like concentric circles, rather than lines that have a direct path. Memes can also be viewed as schemas of a society. Meaning, that when something is invented or re-created (i.e., brand consumer items) it’s simply a map of what a culture mythologies and wants to normalize through the medium of behavior and mental occupation (i.e., how people identify with the object).
Everything has an outer concentric circle guiding it. Everything.
To truly understand the role of memes in how they shape our many lives across society, we must see them as participatory voices that are speaking back to us from within the field of critical thinking. Culture dictates human behaviors and values. Memes are simply objects oriented towards the values that are either assumed to be true of the culture now or assumed to be true of the culture to come.
1 Concentric Everything.
(I’m working on something to share in a future blog to explore what I am implying here!).
I never thought about memes in this way before.