So, I now search ‘umberto eco meme’ and what do I get:
http://millipedetime.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/umberto-eco-on-memes.html
Ed. note: Apparently Umberto Eco got really into memes and spends all his day reading /b/. MT is honored to publish his essay on memes in abridged form.
Memes as a sociological indicator. The meme is a product, nearly always conceived and distributed thinking of a certain public: this is the case whether it is a matter of Trollface, Scumbag Steve, or Lol Catz, which every meme enthusiast knows but obviously nobody cares about anymore or analyzes. Like everything on the Internet, it can be analyzed as an indication of the tastes of a public, or of the ideology of its creators and/or distributors.
In exactly this way the anti-douche premises of Scumbag Steve, the satire of cultural stereotypes in Successful Black Man, the latent xenophobia of Cunning Putin have been analyzed, and so on. As always in these cases, there has been research counter to the current (Scumbag Steve as a cool bro, for example), and there has been ingenuous research: for example someone has analyzed the implicit self-hatred of Forever Alone written by Forever Alone types who amused themselves precisely by creating the Forever Alone meme as a caricature of themselves. We will not say that this tradition is ended: in theory it can live as long as there are new memes. In practice it is in crisis, because the new creators of memes have read the social critics of memes. How to analyze, in terms of ideological indicators, Paranoid Parrot, Good Guy Greg or High Expectations Asian Father? It is easy to write a brilliant analysis of the “aesthetic mystification” of Y U No, but how to do it with Picasso?
Because I number myself among those who by now know to read memes forgetting (in principle) the medium, I assert that with these works a new literature (a genre to be precise) has been inaugurated, which has taken the place of the works of the great moralists of another time…Scumbag Steve belongs to the tradition of moralist literature. He does not imitate it, he replaces it. The lovers of the written page, without images, may think (like King Thamus) that it is sad: but it is so.
The reading of newspapers (said Hegel) is the morning prayer of the modern man. And moral reflection on customs and society is the meditation of the lay man. Now we open 4chan or Reddit and in its pages we find – by design – the elements necessary to carry out our daily practice of lulzy lessons: irreverent, ironic, but quite sympathetic reflections on the defects of those who are our brothers and sisters. And it may prove that, reading authors like Scumbag Steve, at times we are shamed and we discover that it tells the story of us.
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