Chapter Seven: Networks

It is difficult to overestimate how radically changed the world has been by the internet, and a big part of that power has been in the power to rapidly and widely share, search, edit, and reproduce images. It’s an interesting phenomenon that what we choose to do with the power of the internet at our fingertips, what we spend the most amount of our personal time doing, is circulating and viewing images. Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, Pinterest, and Facebook are only the most prominent of the forms of image-sharing that have become a part of our daily lives; the ability to search for images using Google, to scan the internet for different iterations of the same image, to view exceptionally high-resolution images of paintings, and to easily edit, process, and reproduce them infinitely, are all radically new abilities that have become commonplace and accessible.

Imagining how Walter Benjamin would have viewed this technological reproducibility and its impact on art and politics is a difficult task. We might start by thinking about Benjamin’s theory that being able to reproduce images has a democratizing effect. This can be explored in a number of ways with the internet; for instance in the way that it can give people who can’t get to a particular gallery a chance to view a work of art in detail; or in the way it enables citizens to share pictures and videos of instances of civic events like police brutality or the indiscreet behavior of government representatives, allowing them to better participate in democracy in a more informed way.

If mechanical reproduction affected us mentally, as we see in Chaplin’s Modern Times, how has this new networked reproduction affected our minds? How are the minds of those who have grown up with the internet different to the minds of those who never interacted with it? In her essay The Communal Mind, an essay we might call “experimental creative nonfiction”, Patricia Lockwood explores her relationship to the internet and her sense of being part of a shared intelligence or “communal mind” online. The essay depicts a life spent engaging with mainstream and niche aspects of online culture, including its particular sense of humor as well as its visual aesthetics. The impact of living your life on the internet – which the essay calls “the portal” – is reflected in her first creative choice with the essay, which is to shift into third person because, she says, “I no longer felt like myself”. Alongside the positive, democratizing elements of the internet, we see from the beginning that this essay might explore what the internet might be taking from us in exchange for all its gifts.

An early meme? “Venus vom Hohle Fels” by Gerbil is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

“Meme” meant something different before the internet. In The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, Dawkins uses the word (which he invented) to describe small pieces of culture that circulate within a society. From the statuettes made by Ice Age humans, 35000 years ago, to the rapidly circulated gifs of the 2020s, memes have always been a part of human life. In some senses, they mark the beginning of our humanity: many anthropologists consider the statuettes evidence of behavioral modernity – the practice of art, music, and religion that distinguished us from other primates.

Now, the “internet meme” has taken hold of the world. Internet memes are unique in the sense that they are a small piece of culture like a statuette but they’re also already wired into a massive network that allows them to spread and reproduce quickly. It is possible to argue that internet memes are the fastest and most prolific way that our society and our online world processes world events. A day’s political events, a musician’s behavior at a gas station, an athlete’s tears at an awards ceremony, the simple shocked blink of an actor in an interview: all can be processed and shared before a journalist who witnessed them can even get to their desk. And they have become a way to process national and international trauma as a society, too, in the form of coronavirus and systemically racist police violence, and those just in 2020. Of course, it’s worth noting that they’re often funny too, which is also part of their power.

Dawkins had a point about those early memes that range from small statues to big novels, from the written word to Renaissance frescoes, and that was that they behave like genes. The way they spread, proliferate, and die out, is similar to the way that specific parts of a human or animal’s genetic coding are passed down and spread through a species or “die off”. This model can be used to think about internet memes in the same way: which ones are the fittest, and how do they survive? Why do some die quickly, others slowly, others get big and then disappear, while others quietly refuse to go away? And, in the case of internet memes, what effect does their rapid mutation (in the form of different versions and edits by different users) have on their lifespans and how widely they reach into the culture and the world?

Think of the most recent internet meme you noticed. Was it successful? How? What do you mean by success? Beginning to ask these questions of memes – close-reading them ­– can give us insights into what’s going on in our culture today. It requires the same analytical skills for analyzing advertising, but these images aren’t generally trying to engineer our consent – we can think of them as trying to survive.

In Jennifer Egan’s Black Box, Egan writes a story entirely composed of tweets. Tweets can be considered memes of a sort: they are traded and shared and liked and rise through the ranks like more traditional image memes. But Egan uses these small missives of information to tell a story about an undercover agent observing a national security threat. The missives are part of the agent’s communications, so they take the form of information. But the agent who transmits them is also trying to convey the trauma, fear, longing, and hopes that she’s feeling while on the mission, hiding them in these very direct tweet-length messages. The process of turning all of her thoughts into tweets has left her robotic and (literally) part-machine. Like Lockwood, Egan demonstrates the impact of the medium we choose to communicate with on the way we are able to think and what we are able to say. Considering that our new polis (a Greek word for the meeting place of a body of citizens) is in memes, how will that impact how we behave in the future and what we value?

Works Cited and Further Reading

Egan, Jennifer. “Black Box.” The New Yorker. 25 May 2012.

Jackson, Lauren Michele. “A Unified Theory of Meme Death.” The Atlantic. 7 Dec. 2017.

Lockwood, Patricia. “The Communal Mind.” The London Review of Books. 21 Feb 2019.