The emancipation of meme

A friend of mine and I have lately taken to referring to “memes.” I could search my Gchats to determine when we first used this term, but it seems irrelevant—we’ve been describing moments and feelings as “memes” for so long that the first instance feels as insignificant as my first paper topic at Columbia.

I do know that neither of us were—or really are—sure what the exact definition of “meme” is, though it generally refers to a joke or idea that gains significance for a large group of people rapidly, like a disease. Loosely, though, we use it to mean something of negligible personal significance but long-term humor potential. Every person and relationship has its own memes, and the memes my friend and I use might have no significance to another person. When one of us is sad, we’ll say, “I am the walrus,” referencing the Beatles lyric—I think we just decided it’s a funny term. The walrus itself is irrelevant as anything but a punch line. An old magazine profile of the songwriter Diane Warren (it’s not online—believe me, I’ve looked) has entered heavy reference rotation, although neither of us recalls much about it other than Warren’s banal love life. Friends’ and acquaintances’ Twitter posts and Gchat statuses (and, once in a while, the novels we read) are chewed up and regurgitated into circular conversations. Our references float freely, describing little besides themselves.

The word “meme” first came up in my Contemporary Civilization discussion of Darwin and evolution. A flannel-shirted classmate earnestly professed that ideas could mutate and evolve, too, and get passed, like a genetic inheritance, from person to person. I brushed that hypothesis off at the time, but I guess that’s what happens with my friend and I—our minds have grown so attuned that we’re able to say “Thank you, India” to one another and immediately get it, even though we’re saying nothing at all. “Emoting is a meme,” we both said at the beginning of summer. Our emotions feel more performative than real, like we’re acting out shared ideas of happiness or misery. We feel fulfilled by our lives’ concordance with transient, meme-like ideas, if not by those lives.

Our manner of conversation is hardly rare. After all, many of the “memes” we’re repeating are Twitter posts originally written—if indeed “written” is the word—by others. Something about the site’s character limit not only prevents the exchange of ideas but supports its opposite, a certain type of manically coded jargon that is meant to signal its author’s wit while denying that anything lies beneath that wit save the desire to broadcast it. The site has been used to organize revolutions overseas, but the revolution it’s fomented among American college students seems to be one of meme generation.

Our set’s codes and patter, all signifier and no signified, can’t be blamed on the convenient scapegoat that is Twitter, though: our culture is one of disposable ideas and experiences, memes springing up constantly. On a recent flight, an attendant discussed that week’s US Weekly cover story on Jon and Kate Gosselin with an eager passenger. I waited to overhear instances from the series or quotes from the article. It was not to be. Both Jon and Kate were being communicated about as ideas or archetypes—the harridan ex-wife, the husband in a midlife crisis—based on nothing but the fact that saying it made it so.

Such is the nature of tabloid journalism and reality television, but it was disconcerting to see two minds working in concert and arriving at the same conclusion without any empirical evidence. It sounds laughable to apply the terms of the scientific method to celebrity gossip, but such is the level of the national discourse. The penumbra of ideas and cultural assumptions emanating from the collective mind of our culture—too entangling to get into in this, my first column—are passed on from mind to mind, but I am striving to become a terminus: to examine why said ideas are fixed where they are and to what our shared cultural referents actually refer, before I pass the memes on.
As I disembarked the plane for my layover, I called my friend, who said she was worried: I was actually emoting. I was sad about something personal (and not Jon and Kate), but that was of little interest to my fellow passengers who watched me, red-eyed and pacing. They seemed bemused. A mother whispered to her daughter before pointedly looking away from me. Who knows what I meant to those people? Without even trying, I’d become an object of fascination in an unstimulating environment; I was the walrus to them, a mere meme.

Daniel D'Addario is a Columbia College senior majoring in American Studies and English. He is the managing editor of the Columbia Political Review. The Unbearable LOLness of Being runs alternate Mondays. opinion@columbiaspectator.com