Special | 8m 42s | Video has closed captioning.
Environments like 4chan, Know Your Meme, Reddit, and Canv.as are hotbeds for the creation of collective imagery. Usually in response to a cultural, political, or emotional phenomenon, the communities on these sites can generate dozens or hundreds of variations on a single image or concept. Considered internet "memes", these image families are often very astute condensations of shared feelings.
Aired: 08/17/11
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OLIVIA GULIN: Creating images together has never been so easy or widespread.
It's part of who you are.
It's part of your group identity.
CHRIS MENNING: There are just scenarios in people's lives that we can all relate to.
People enjoy that, and they pass it along.
They share it because they identify with it.
With the culture that you're making and the culture that you're interacting with online, there is a sense of universality.
The people who make and the people who watch are slowly becoming the same group.
RYDER RIPPS: We're all living in that exact same moment.
It's very much about embracing pop culture, embrace it fully, and make it something new.
JOHN KELLY: I think it really rewires the infrastructure of knowledge and cultural creation globally.
Collaboration is much more like a dialogue or like discourse where one person will go do everything and then post that, and the someone else will see that and take that and go do everything.
People collaborating to build a large body-- Right.
--based on one form, using a certain technology.
And the collaboration is the aggregate of all of that rather than like everyone getting together on [inaudible].
Yeah, like 10 people getting together to make one really funny Rageguy comic.
That never happens.
Like that never happens.
But you've got 10 people making [bleep] until the 10th person makes a great one.
Yes.
Exactly.
CHRIS MENNING: In about 2008, this four-panel comic became really popular on 4chan and it just illustrated the effect of backsplash while taking a poop.
It's silly.
It's irreverent, but it's something that probably every single person can relate to.
More people had their own common experiences that they could share.
And they used that last frame, that screaming guy with seven F's and 12 U's as the punchline for their own common experiences.
And so it's just become this massive, massive medium.
Literally hundreds of different faces that are used and hundreds and thousands of iterations of people creating their own comics using these same tools.
And there are even handfuls of websites that try to make the process of making a rage comic easier.
But it's become something bigger than that.
What you do with it is self-expression, engaging with other people, communicating, creating things together, everything that creative people seek to do in real life.
They convey emotions that are sometimes really hard to put into words but much easier to convey as just a single panel.
OLIVIA GULIN: Miku Hatsune is the character associated with a particular voice in the Vocaloid sound package.
I think they labeled her as a virtual pop star.
We used the software to make music.
"Nyan Nyan Nyan" is song made using the Miku Hatsune Vocaloid.
It originally became popular on Nico Nico Douga, which is the Japanese equivalent of YouTube.
It's a pretty repetitive song, pretty fast paced, featuring the phrase nyan over and over and over again, which is the sound that a cat makes in Japanese.
It's kinds of like meow.
This guy named prguitarman made this little animated GIF of a pixel art cat with a Pop-Tart body and rainbow moving behind him and stars bursting in the background.
People started sharing Pop-Tart can on Tumblr.
At some point, a YouTube user decided to take the Pop-Tart cat and the "Nyan Nyan Nyan" song and put them together.
And the marriage of the two is kind of a cute overload.
Millions of people have watched it on YouTube, obviously, and then lots of remixes happened.
So one thing that was popular was listening to the nyan cat song while watching a slipknot video.
People have done fan art of nyan cat.
It's turned up in all sorts of different places.
Things move back and forth between different countries all the time.
It's so easy to.
And nyan cat is one of them.
RYDER RIPPS: dump.fm is a website that myself and Scott Ostler started in late 2009, with the predication that it was for artists, and the content was primarily GIFs.
The purpose of an animated GIF is to make something that is to the point, fast, can be shared really easily.
It's a visual soundbite.
That's how the best way I can put it.
It's just like a little piece of an instance.
These GIFs, they're a reflection of pop culture.
It used to be, if you didn't like what was on the radio or you didn't like the way most people dressed, you had to counter it.
This standpoint is, to me, a very old model thing.
And I think a new model thing is to embrace it fully but be subversive and funny and re-contextualize it.
You could take an element of pop culture and juxtapose it, rehash it, create a mash up, so to speak, and have it become yours and own it.
I never I guess made a distinction between art on the internet and art in the real world.
We're having a generation of younger people who-- they only make stuff on the computer.
We get in the space together from all over the world, and we're all seeing eye to eye.
JOHN KELLY: There's always of avant-garde cultural producers.
Those have, however, traditionally been constituted in major cosmopolitan cities.
What I think is different with the internet is that you still have pockets of avant-garde cultural creation and innovation, but they're no longer sort of location based necessarily.
But they can be contained in certain centers of online space.
If you look at the emergence in the last few years, particularly of sort of meme culture, this kind of meme form tends to move very quickly in certain online pockets.
They're often going there to sort of get away from mainstream culture, but what they're doing there now can radiate out and have some kind of an impact back out to more mainstream culture.
OLIVIA GULIN: People are just making the stuff of their own accord, and it's growing.
It's going to become a thing, and people won't be able to ignore it after a point.
Every single piece of content that a user on the internet makes amounts to a certain amount of self-expression.
RYDER RIPPS: I really want to see an image that I never thought I'd see before.
On the internet that's happening all the time.
CHRIS MENNING: It's cultural expression.
We can see themes about where humanity is at, where people are at.
OLIVIA GULIN: They're definitely sharing ideas.
They're definitely creating stuff that hasn't been created before.
Except now we have all these opportunities to find out about them and to see these like weird, crazy, amazing things they do.
How do you make a meme?
First you don't.
Step one.
Don't.
Yeah, don't.
We'll do a case study.
Let's look at the things that are extremely popular, and then you can decide, when you decide that you want to make a meme, whether or not these are activities that you would like to engage in.
So number one.
You need a cat.
You need a cat.
You need a cat.
Do you-- That's a shortcut.
You can get a cat.
Get a cat.
Take some pictures of it.
See what happens.
Yeah, that's pretty good.
Other options.
Your butthole.
Yeah.
Or boobs.
If you've got like big ones or just any ones at all.
12-year-olds.
If you got a 12-year-old, load that kid up with Mountain Dew and then like leave him alone in a room with like three computers and some crayons for an hour.
That's a situation.
Actually if you just go to reddit and post a bunch of the same picture over and over and over again-- Yeah.
--that will work.
Absolutely, yeah.
If you just make 20 different accounts for yourself on any given service, you load something, and then just use all of your accounts to like button that, just like it, and there you go.
Then you're very popular on the line.
I think we also sometimes don't take this question as seriously as we should, because the vast majority of people who want to know the answer to this question are people who want to know it's answer for one reason.
And that reason is to make money.
And people can see it coming a mile away, and so that's why we say don't And they shut it down.
Yeah.
As a user, if you're interested in making like a new joke form, just make something funny, and post it somewhere.
And if it gets noticed, it gets noticed, and if not, try again.
If you make something that can be repeated or can be changed, and then you upload it to your internet, even if you just email it to like 10 friends.
Like congratulations, you've made a meme.
We'll see how successful it is, but you've made it meme.
