Blog #3: Have I mentioned I love memes?

.

 Before I get started, I just wanted to talk about Maiya's post on genre awareness.  She described how she it took her like 20 minutes to come up with how to start with the blog because it is so hard to translate dense academic ideas into informal blog writing, and it was so hard she decided to start by writing about how hard it is because she thought that might sound "blog-ish." And as she started writing, she realized that this was in many ways exactly what Devitt was talking about.

Yeah. When we are in school, we are so used to trying to sound "smart," that we forget to sound "real." We forget that real writing is for real people for real purposes.

I think one of the values associated with blogging is self-discovery. Like Maiya, I figure out what I think or feel when I start blogging.  Or something like that. 

At any rate, back to meming. I am fascinated by the genre of internet memes, by the way the replication and transformation of patterns of cultural information. 

The Original Rose and the Original Poster

Take for example, Rosie the Riveter:

Someone, probably a guy, wanted to motivate women to work in factories during World War 2, so he chose one of those women to represent all of the women, and he fashioned an image, a poster that went viral, so to speak. No one called it that then. 

Over time, that image has morphed many times, taking shape for a variety of purposes. Take a look at a few of them:

The first three memes press the idea that women CAN achieve the things that men say they can't. They all replicate other strands of culture as well: female Mexican freedom fighter with a bullets draped across her shoulder, the common phrase "Fight like a Man" shifts to "Fight Like a Girl," celebrating the power of women, and the homage to Iranian woman depicts a woman in a hijab.

I'm not sure what the Obama mean says, whether this is positive or negative, but it not only memes the Rosie poster but also his first campaign slogan.

 

Okay. You get the idea. At any rate, read either Knobel and Lankshear or Davison. Both of them talk about analyzing memes. And then analyze a meme in your blog, an internet meme or another unit of culture that has evolved as it has been replicated.  Seriously fun.