viz. - memes

“Rueful Reluctance:” An Unwitting Cat Owner’s Search for Meaning Among Memes

james.wiedner — Wed, 03 Sep 2014 03:12:19 +0000

Image Credit: "Nyan Cat-Pop Tart Cat," by Chris Torres

Last week, my neighbor stopped by to tell me that he was moving, and that pets were not allowed at his new residence. With all due histrionics, he lamented the fact that he was going to take her to the shelter, and that “unless anybody here wants to adopt her, [insert overly dramatic sigh] I guess she’ll probably be put down.”

My manipulative neighbor was playing me like a fiddle. He knew I had a soft spot for that cat; hell, I was the one to feed her on multiple occasions when her deadbeat dad couldn't be bothered to do so. The cat liked me, too. Whenever she’d enter my apartment, she’d survey her surroundings and then proceed to scratch the side of my couch like it was her job. I’d tell her to knock it off, and she would, but not without looking at me with what I swear was a bit of amusement.

When I realized that Violet had already moved my (generally) rational thinking into the land of the Pathetic Fallacy, I tried to take solace in the knowledge that I wasn’t the only one. And while I can’t fathom ever creating cat memes myself, it would be foolish to underestimate the power that felines have had over the human photographer since there were photos to take. Aside from the comedic or cuteness factors, publishing cat memes has always been a lucrative endeavor.

Around 1900, author Osgood Grover sold millions of books, one of which was 1911’s “Kittens and Cats: A Book of Tales (hyperlink below)” The image below is just one example of the many pictures of costumed cats. Many of these pictures are even replete with “quotes” of the internal monologue of the pictured cat, just as we see in the typical meme of the digital age.

Image Credit: Dan Bloom http://dailymail.co.uk

Over 100 years later, cat books are still where the money is at. In his New York Times Op-Talk interview last month (“Confessions of A Cat Guy”), author and illustrator Peter Catapano described what is known in the publishing industry as “going cat book.” Catapano says that brilliant authors that tire of having brilliant books overlooked can get rich from publishing an identical book, except with pictures of cats throughout it, “because people will buy literally anything with a cat on it.”

So, it would appear as the cat meme was here decades before us, and there’s no reason to think that they won’t be as popular as ever after we all shuffle off this mortal coil, perhaps it’s time to do away with what Catapano calls the “rueful resignation” that accompanies “becom[ing] the sort of person you had always ridiculed- in this case, a Cat Guy?” it seems high time that even those who don’t count themselves among the “Cat People” finally accept- and even learn from- what these cats and their people are trying to tell us.

Reaction Shots and Reader Response at the Purple Wedding

Rachel Schneider — Fri, 18 Apr 2014 21:37:54 +0000

Image Credit: Cyndicyanide

[Note: Spoilers below the cut.]

As a Game of Thrones fan, I was pretty excited to watch this last week’s episode. It’d been a while since I’d watched, and the wedding of Joffrey Baratheon and Margaery Tyrell gathered together many of the show’s beloved characters.

More importantly, it also meant the end of the show’s most-hated character, Joffrey, whose poisoning ended the episode. What intrigues me today, however, is the fan reaction to his death, recorded in GIFs, fan art, and videos. What does it mean to celebrate Joffrey’s death? What value does the reaction video have for audiences? and how does visual communication change the idea of reader-response?

Readers have long found ways to record their reactions to texts, whether in letters to friends or in the books themselves. Marginalia, as described by H. J. Jackson in her book Marginalia, reflects the visual structures of the book itself: “A tour of the annotated book from front to back, whether we consider conventional use or idiosyncratic variations, reveals that our customs and expectations, constant over time, are based on the conventional format of the book itself. In more ways than one, marginalia mirror the texts they supplement" (41). Thus, as footnotes go at the page's bottom, so does supplemental marginalia. For example, a recent reader found the following marginalia in a 1528 manuscript:

Image Credit: Superlinguo, via io9

Whether or not the reader was commenting on the abbot’s sexual practices or expressing disgust at the text, the reader leaving the marginalia communicates his reaction to others long after his death. During my own dissertation research at Harvard’s Houghton Library, I found some interesting marginalia in this copy of the 1765 edition of the satirical poet Charles Churchill’s Works:

Image Credit: Rachel Schneider / Houghton Library

As one reader responds indignantly to Churchill’s “An Epistle to William Hogarth,” another mocks and subverts that reaction. We readers following them can not only enjoy the text but their mutual exchange. Readers today need not limit their reactions to the page’s margin, however, but can spread them over places like Twitter and YouTube, where websites like Buzzfeed and io9 curate them for other fans to read and enjoy:

Image Credit: Screenshot from io9

These responders use humor to comment on the show, responding not just to the details of one scene but the whole episode and series at large. Also, their writing participates and relies on other internet memes to be intelligible, as when Ol’ Qwerty Bastard adapt the Kanye West meme to apply to Game of Thrones. Just as book-readers use marginal comments in a similar fashion to print commentary, these reaction tweets are written for an Internet-literate audience and partake of its themes.

Image Credit: brienneoftarth

H/T: Brianna Hyslop

Likewise, GIFs and LOLCAT-like images are created to comment on the character and react to him based on the popular perception. For example, if one Tweeter compares the spoiled King Joffrey to the popstar Justin Bieber, one fan makes a Tumblr remixing images of both to write the comparison visually. Another fan comments on Joffrey’s cruelty by presenting Out-of-Context Joffrey, taking a line used to mock his uncle Tyrion and presenting it as a self-affirming bromide. These visuals don’t create new readings, but instead rely on an understood reading of Joffrey as terrible to make a joke. We can imagine Joffrey’s biological father Jaime running thus towards his dying son, but towards the wedding pie. Other fans will reblog GIFs of Joffrey dying alongside celebratory GIFs to represent their reactions.

Image Credit: Screenshot from Twitter

Still others record their reactions on video rather than through remediated pictures or text. The reaction video is a genre which shows people watching some sort of media event (from Auburn’s surprising kick return against Alabama or the 2 Girls 1 Cup video) and responding to it. Fans of Game of Thrones have recorded their reactions to major events like the Red Wedding, in which several members of the Stark family are killed by Lannister agents, and this week’s Purple Wedding. Some of the reactions are NSFW, so at least put on your headphones first:

The viewers’ visible excitement contrasts oddly with the Joffrey’s audible choking and his mother’s raging grief, but these videos provide solidarity between the audience within and without the screen. There is a tension in some of the videos about how aware the person in the video is of being filmed: sometimes the video’s subject acknowledges the camera, sometimes they just react. We as an audience can also be cognizant of the person doing the filming, who understands what’s coming and wants to record it. Whereas marginalia is a semi-private act—one person reading alone and recording that reading—these reactions are performed for their viewing companions and the room and the wider YouTube audience. A whole bar breaking into applause at the critical moment shares solidarity in their reaction, and the viewer joins them in their joy. Yet the viewers’ enthusiasm—like the man who responds to Oleanna Tyrell saying “Help the poor boy!” with “No!”—seems not to be in doubt, as he stares at the TV and not the camera filming him. There’s a sense in which we are engaging with individuals in an unguarded moment, framed so by the knowing person holding the camera. The emotional exposure creates intimacy, even if it is highly mediated.

Image Credit: The Independent

I’d like to consider here how these videos also replicate the common film technique of the reaction shot, where within a movie the camera will scan other characters within the scene to see what they make of what’s happening. The Purple Wedding itself features many reactions, like Joffrey and the actors responding to Tyrion’s speech, or the people reacting to Joffrey’s death itself. The goal of a reaction shot is to reveal or obscure something about the character, depending whether or not their reaction appears onscreen. In a show where subterfuge and outright scheming are required—“when you play the game of thrones, you win or you die”—no characters are allowed to react visibly with strong emotion. Only Cersei does so. That very tension may be why the reaction videos are so popular—they supply the place of what must be hidden, what cannot be expressed in Westeros. The film medium thus produces both reactions, and the means for viewers to react.

Part II on Memes and Political (In)action: Satire and Empathy

Sarah G. Sussman — Wed, 11 Sep 2013 19:39:19 +0000

In November 2011 student protestors at UC Davis were holding a peaceful demonstration on their campus when former Lt. John Pike pepper-sprayed them at close range. In the days that followed, my Facebook newsfeed became a log of collective outrage. One day, an image of former Lt. John Pike Photoshopped into Georges Seurat’s “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” appeared, and the “Casual Pepper Spray Everything Cop" meme was born.

Image Credit: Knowyourmeme.com

Reactions to the meme were varied. Some, like a friend of mine who is a UC Davis alum, worried the humor would become detached from the message of the protest. After all, in the world of internet memes detachment is somewhat of a governing principle. Even databases like knowyourmeme.com refer to the UC Davis Cop as “Casually Pepper Spray Everything Cop” -- emphasizing the disjuncture of his body language with his actions in a nonspecific time and place, over his place in UC Davis’s institutional history, and in the history of the Occupy movement. I would argue that some subjects seem riper for meme-making than others because their engagement with their surroundings already suggests the kind of disconnect between an individual and his or her environment that we usually associate with the chaotic and Photoshopped world of the Internet.

The highly controversial portraits taken of Brazilian model Nana Gouvêa in the wake of the devastation of Hurricane Sandy provide another example of this disjuncture. The photos featured Gouvêa in a variety of postures and attitudes in which she appears completely oblivious to the effects of the disaster that claimed hundreds of lives and cost billions of dollars in damages. Perhaps creators of the Gouvêa meme were able to identify Gouvêa as a specimen prime for meme making because her portraits amidst the wreckage mingle the absurdity one finds on awkwardfamilyphotos.com with the kind of morally reprehensible obliviousness that led to the creation of the Casual Pepper Spray Cop meme.

Image Credit: knowyourmeme.com

What both Gouvêa and Pike have in common is that they were completely disconnected in a way that occluded any empathy or attention to the crisis at hand and any ability to fathom the effects that their personal actions would have on the people surrounding them. Satire can be an excellent outlet for outrage, as we see in the case of some users of the Casually Pepper Spray Everything Cop meme, but it can also be a tool rendering history absurd to the point of erasing it. As Susan Sontag says in Regarding the Pain of Others “As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself more numb. To acknowledge the existence of the incorrigible. ” What happens to a meme is of course anyone’s guess, but one would hope that purveyors of memes will be able to steel themselves with humor without losing sight of the original crises that sparked the controversy: a complete numbness to the suffering of others.

Look for more on memes and the process of erasing vs. preserving history in the next post.

For more on memes, check out fellow viz. blogger Laura Thain’s previous posts: http://viz.dwrl.utexas.edu/content/%E2%80%9Cmemeing%E2%80%9D-silence%E2%80%94-gif-and-silent-film-part-1

http://viz.dwrl.utexas.edu/content/%E2%80%9Cmemeing%E2%80%9D-silence%E2%80%94-gif-and-silent-film-part-2

Political (In)action in the Meme Generation?

Sarah G. Sussman — Wed, 04 Sep 2013 21:04:54 +0000

Dawkins playing a midi breath controller in Saatchi video. Image Credit: Saatchi.com

This will be the first post in a three-part series in which I will explore the relationship between memes and civic discourse.

What is an internet meme? Though most young people can instantly recognize a picture of Philosoraptor, Feminist Ryan Gosling, or a Lolcat, few know the history of this ubiquitous term. Nevertheless, show a room full of undergraduates an image of Nyan Cat, and you'll immediately elicit laughter and a sense of camaraderie. In that moment of laughter, however, it seems worth asking: what exactly is bringing consumers of memes together? From UC Davis’s “Pepper Spray Cop Meme,” to China’s “Big Yellow Duck” meme, how are memes shaping their viewer’s and creator’s understanding of activism and history? Is a comical form treated with such levity an effective means of communicating about more serious matters?

The term “meme” was first articulated by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene in order to describe the way some ideas are spread through society in a pattern that is similar to the transmission of genes. At the time of writing The Selfish Gene how could Dawkins have predicted that within a few decades, his words would be used to describe a unique by-product of the digital age, one which has mutated and grown to such an extent that even the proudest luddites are hip to Lolcats? Check out this video of Dawkins for a fun (and highly visual) overview in which Dawkins links his theory of the meme with the other life it has taken on online. https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=GFn-ixX9edg (for more background on the video, click here: : http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-06/20/new-directors-showcase) In the video he appears bemused, the unwitting but delighted progenitor of a term “hijacked” by internet culture.

Playfully embracing the term’s fluidity he says, “In the hijacked version, mutations are designed, not random. . . In some cases this can take the form of genuinely creative art, but now that I think about it, mightn’t somebody argue that all creative art comes about through something like a mutation in the mind?” These last words echo before a projector displays layered, brightly-colored collage imagery. At one point an owl shoots lazer beams at a cartoon rendering of a purple brain emerging from Dawkin’s head and then he begins playing a riff on an air midi. Hello Pied Piper of the web, here to whisk our generation away to Nyan Cat land. Eventually the screen is left only with the fluorescent hues of spilled oil. Is this a commentary on the enticing but polluted nature of the internet? Dawkins himself said that memes could be “Good ideas, good poems, as well as driveling mantras.” How do we, as consumers of culture, define the value of internet memes? In next week’s post I’ll look at several popular memes in the context of activist movements and large scale catastrophes and ask whether these are “driveling mantras,” rallying cries, or something in between.

For more on memes, check out this interview with Dr. Simone Sessolo on DWRL’s podcast, Zeugma http://dwrlpodcast.libsyn.com/simone-sessolo-interview-mp3

Wild Horses and Bayonets Couldn’t Drag My Binders Full of Women Away: Political Satire on Web 2.0

Rachel Schneider — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 14:13:58 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot from Twitter

Inauguration officials estimate that about one million people crowded the National Mall this weekend to watch Barack Obama be sworn in as President. While this crowd was smaller than the 1.8 million who attended his first inauguration in 2008, a number of luminaries were present: Beyoncé, Stevie Wonder, and Invisible Obama. Apparently Invisible Obama had a busy day planning his inaugural ball outfit, surprising Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, and acting as a “seat filler.”

In case you’re wondering who Invisible Obama is, he is a parodic Twitter feed started during the 2012 Republican National Convention. As Clint Eastwood lectured an empty chair occupied by an imaginary Obama, Invisible Obama tweeted his responses back. Over the course of this last year’s presidential campaign, a number of individuals used new media platforms to satirically comment on the election and the debate. Yet despite the fact that the election is over, however, Invisible Obama persists in commenting on political developments and other invisibility-related issues (like Lennay Kekua). As I spent two weeks of December in Boston reviewing myriad eighteenth-century political satires for my dissertation, this moment finds me thinking about satire’s evolution from the eighteenth century to our present age. New forms of media—and the new possibilities for remediation that they offer—create different opportunities for rhetors. In other words, as the 1662 Licensing Act’s lapse and evolving engraving practices enabled satire’s rise during the eighteenth century, new media platforms like Twitter and Tumblr expand satire’s spread today. However, it seems worth asking whether or not the various proliferating political memes truly function as satire. Can we compare Twitter’s Paul Ryan Gosling to Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal? And what insights does the comparison provide? What kinds of political impact can satire make? And in what ways does it persist within the popular political discourse?

Image Credit: Eighteenth-Century Collections Online

Eighteenth-century satire took various forms, from text and image to performance. Whereas Alexander Pope multiplied footnotes upon footnotes in his 1729 Dunciad Variorum to mock Grub Street figures like Lewis Theobald, Edmund Curll, and Eliza Haywood alongside Grub Street writing conventions, John Gay’s 1728 Beggar’s Opera turned political corruption and popular depictions of criminal life into comic melodies. The period also saw the development of a rich visual satire tradition, as caricaturists like William Hogarth, James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson, and George Cruikshank satirized eighteenth-century society at large. If satire is meant to enact critique, eighteenth-century satire aimed itself at many different objects. For example, James Gillray’s 1792 print A Voluptuary under the horrors of Digestion directs its ire at the spendthrift Prince Regent, who was known for his excessive eating, drinking, and gambling.

Image Credit: The British Museum

The satire here lies in the careful background details. The feathers and candles surround what should be Prinny’s crest, which here has been changed into a fork and knife crossed across a plate. His bulging gut contrasts with his carefully curled hair and elegant fob. Dice lie on the floor as a dripping pot sits behind him, both signs of his conspicuous consumption. The print hanging on the wall depicts Luigi Cornaro, a Venetian nobleman who famously wrote The Sure and Certain Method of Attaining and Long and Healthful Life, a text reprinted multiple times during the eighteenth century. Gillray juxtaposes the two gentlemen not only to contrast the wastefulness of “prince of whales” with Cornaro’s sobriety, but also to generally indict upper-crust voluptuaries. If other satirists openly critiqued the fop and the macaroni as cultural types, Gillray took on the most famous and powerful example of them all.

Today’s satire groups around similar topics, but its different forms enable different effects. For example, the Binders Full of Women meme consists of images which sprung up on Facebook and Tumblr quickly after Romney answered a question about gendered pay inequity during the second presidential debate with a story of how he chose women for his gubernatorial cabinet from “whole binders full of women.” Like all memes, the visual requires popular cultural knowledge to interpret.

Image Credit: Binders Full of Women

This example takes a screen still from the 1987 movie Dirty Dancing and overlays on top of it a rewritten line from the film: “No one puts Baby in a corner” is now updated to “No one puts Baby in a binder.” The reinterpretation works insofar as the viewer recognizes the original context, where Patrick Swayze’s Johnny Castle shows up at the movie’s conclusion to encourage the character Baby to dance with him, and thus rebel against her family’s attempts to enforce gendered and class-based restrictions. Thus, by juxtaposing Romney’s statement with this image, the meme connects Romney with similar forces of gendered oppression.

But what are the meme’s uses? The Democratic Party quickly adopted and employed the meme to articulate arguments against many of Romney’s policy stances, co-opting the popular response for political purposes of their own. Yet commentators like Amanda Marcotte have argued that Romney’s earlier attempts to seek out qualified women for political positions are good policy, if oddly expressed. In other words, while the meme works to satirize the popular image of Romney as a patriarchal figure—and the language of restraint inherent in the word “binders”—its cultural extensions may in fact work to ridicule policies that do benefit women.

Image Credit: The Daily What

The Horses and Bayonets meme, which developed after a comment by President Obama during the last debate in which he criticized Romney’s comments on defense cuts, likewise overlays text and image to make a pointed statement. In this case, the meme gets reimagined into a Romney/Ryan slogan where Civil War re-enactors with rifles are “leading the charge” for the Republican team. The obvious Photoshopped rifles included not only suggest a link to the NRA, but also an underlying violence within the political debate.

Image Credit: Screenshot from Twitter

Similarly, many satirists enacted political commentary by creating parodic Twitter accounts. Taking advantage of the first-person expressive mode of the platform, individuals as varied as Paul Ryan Gosling, Diamond Joe Biden, Bane Capital, Big Bird, Rafalca Romney, and Mexican Mitt Romney began to comment on the election both in and through the persona of political actors. As Bane Capital, playing off Rush Limbaugh’s comment that The Dark Knight Rises was attempting to smear Romney because the movie’s villain was named Bane, tweets as a pathological venture capital firm ready to “free Gotham’s people… from taxes on income above $250,000 per year,” the feed played on public perceptions about Romney’s morally-dubious business ethics. On the other side, Obama Translated juxtaposes Obama’s celebrated coolness with the popular imagination of what an angry black man would say. In the picture above, we see how Obama's anger translator Luther reads Obama's inaugural address. This feed, however, differs from many of the other Tumblr or Twitter-based satire of the election in that it is still ongoing—and created by Key & Peele, a comedy duo with a Comedy Central show.

Looking back upon the variety of political memes, it’s easier to see how they functioned and what they could do. An account like Obama Translated in part continues to have life not only because Key & Peele have branded the idea, but also because Obama remains a powerful figure. Something like Binders Full of Women may still be able to comment on sexism, but Romney’s fall means that he is no longer the most useful means through which to do so. However, perhaps the difference between something like Paul Ryan Gosling and Gulliver’s Travels has much to do with the medium. While Gulliver responded to a political moment, its method of publication provided the kind of narrative and conclusion that new media platforms don’t, without specifically building towards it (as in the case with Mayor Emanuel). It may also have to do with the status attendant the book as an object that new media has not yet had the chance to obtain—in other words, we see A Modest Proposal as something worth preserving, but not Bane Capital. Yet as I’ve read through eighteenth-century satires that attack the Duke of Newcastle’s 1750 election to Cambridge’s chancellorship, I have to work hard to reconstruct the moment. If eighteenth-century satire favors only slightly-veiled characterizations that make identification a guessing game for readers, new media satire retains all the same karotic specificity, but builds through repacking cultural products in new ways. I’ll be interesting to see what afterlives new media satire finds in the time to come.

What Andy Cohen Can Tell Us About Jim Lehrer

Laura Thain — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 08:00:14 +0000

Image Source: Reality TV Gifs

I’m weighing in late this week on last week’s first presidential debate. Jay has usefully analyzed several covers of The New Yorker and illuminated for us a particular venue’s take on the candidates, while Todd has collected “Big Bird” memes to demonstrate a variety of reactions to Romney’s attack on PBS. I’d like to pick up the popular culture trail where Todd has left off and discuss one meme in particular, posted by RealityTVGifs on October 4^th, the morning after the first debate. The gif depicts presidential candidate Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama superimposed on Real Housewives of New Jersey Jacqueline Laurita and Teresa Giudice, respectively, while Andy Cohen, Executive VP of Bravo, moderates. How can we read the comparisons this image invites—of the presidential debate to a Real Housewives reunion special? Though there is obviously the potential of productive discussion in the relationship between Romney/President Obama and Laurita/ Guidice, what if we examine the less obvious juxtaposition: how can Andy Cohen inform our reading of moderator Jim Lehrer?

First, some context for the source of the image: the GIF was taken from the RHONJ reunion special, Season 4 Part 1 of 3. In RHONJ, as in all of the RH franchises, each season ends with a reunion, filmed after the season itself airs, in which the stars of the show comment on the previous season and respond to viewer questions. Andy Cohen, the executive face of Bravo and a producer of all of the RH iterations, hosts each reunion. Typically, Cohen takes a moderating role—that is, that he is guides the participants from sequence to sequence in one of two styles—either by asking the housewives questions directly (through which we might read Cohen as an agent for the television audience) or by selecting pre-submitted viewer questions (through which we might read the audience acting as their own agent). In a particularly fraught reunion special (or at least, one which is presented as such), Cohen often finds himself breaking up unproductive ad-hominem attacks, even ones that result in physical violence.

When asked about the altercation on his nighttime talk show Watch What Happens Live, Cohen remarked “[Teresa’s] stronger than she looks.”

Cohen seems mostly interested in preserving conversational momentum, so while he usually tolerates (and in many cases, instigates) these personal attacks, he gives them a short leash; once the possibilities of confrontation exhaust themselves, Cohen reclaims authority over the pacing and content of the narrative being produced and makes a concentrated effort to shift the focus onto a more productive subject. The parallels between Cohen’s role as “drama moderator” and Jim Lehrer’s as debate moderator are clear here: they both act as agents of a television audience whose responsibility is to facilitate a dialogue that efficiently reveals information.

And, increasingly, we can see the overlap between presidential candidates and celebrity in these debates as news outlets evaluate performance based not just on the ways in which candidates address issues but on their “personality.” But personality has two prongs here in relation to a discussion on presidential celebrity: personality as the performance of charisma and personality as the performance of intimacy. Certainly, historians trace this trend to the Kennedy/Nixon debates of 1960, but it seems to me that charisma, rather than intimacy, is the overarching criteria of such discussions. The key factor in discriminating between the cult of presidential personality and the cult of presidential celebrity, I think, is that the latter requires conflation of the public and the private—a construction that depends upon constant cultural labor in order to maintain an illusion of intimacy surrounding the political figure. We can see the relation between charisma and intimacy rather neatly performed in the clip below from the Nixon/Kennedy debates, as Nixon responds to the moderator’s question about political experience much more specifically and with arguably greater rhetorical skill than Kennedy, but lauds the virtues of non-disclosure and closed-door politics (“The president has always maintained, and very properly so, that he is entitled to get what advice he wants from his cabinet…without disclosing that to anybody!”), while Kennedy adopts a strategy of broad, direct speech by reorienting the premise of the question: “The question really is, which candidate and which party can meet the problems that the United States is going to face in the ‘60s?”.

It is in the labor of cultivating intimacy that the role of the moderator in public discourse becomes crucial. The moderator becomes an agent of the audience who has the ability to manipulate rhetorical distance to reveal or conceal information about those he is moderating. Yet he does all of this in plain sight, presenting himself as a neutral, transparent entity, not an agent himself. So go ahead and pay attention to that man behind the curtain, because he’s really one of “us”!

The comparison of Lehrer to Cohen brings to attention our assumptions about a moderator’s neutrality, in part because in the hypermediated world of The Real Housewives, our attention is constantly drawn to medium. The housewives not only engage in metadiscourse about the show itself but also discuss their treatment and participation in tabloid culture and online blogs. In addition, Cohen’s role hardly remains passive. Take, for instance, the clip below:

Real Housewives of NY "Shut Up" Montage at Reunion from Shannon Hatch on Vimeo.

As Cohen claims, the behavior of the housewives (in this case, of New York) was so egregious and that they “broke [him],” that is, that they forced him to break character or face. Why? Because, as Cohen in his frustration articulates, it is his responsibility to maintain the conversation’s productivity, which relies utterly on constantly maintaining intimacy between audience and housewife. “Shut up and let me ask about it,” “We’re going to get to it,” “Let me keep going,” “Moving on,” and his constant plea to “Let her speak” all emphasize that conventional structure—the “ask and answer” confessional—is absolutely necessary to accomplish this intimacy, while his remarks about having lunch and “getting on with it” seem to emphasize the severity of its disruption. So of course, once Cohen regains control of the reins, without skipping a beat, he looks straight into the eyes of socialite Sonja Morgan and, in utter earnestness, asks, “Sonja, tell me about Guam.”

(Cohen’s “breaking point” has become its own gif, often implemented in topical tumblrs as a means of regaining control of a conversation from an aggressive adversary:)

Image Source: Reality TV Gifs

Lehrer entered this round of presidential debates as a reluctant moderator, agreeing only to return to the hot seat after being promised that the format of the debate would differ from those of 2008. (He again, this year, claims it will be his last.) A long time contributor and advocate of public broadcasting, Lehrer on the surface couldn’t be more different than Cohen; he has long defended his exploratory, rather than pointed or aggressive, moderating style as the hallmark of enlightened debate. ““If somebody wants to be entertained,” said Lehrer after the 2000 presidential debates, “they ought to go to the circus.”

And while he might paint himself as reluctant, the media has blasted him as “the worst moderator in the history of moderation.” But, as our examination of Cohen’s moderation tactics show, Lehrer’s goal was not hypermediacy but immediacy. His support for an open debate format and his almost willingness to be talked over all serve as evidence for Lehrer’s desire to appear as a transparent mechanism in the debate proceedings. Ultimately, it seems for Lehrer, his job is done best when it is noticed least; a successful debate should appear as an intelligent conversation between the two candidates. In fact, in response to criticism of his performance, Lehrer asked, “"I was thinking, `Weren't you paying attention to what was happening before your very eyes?” (In other words, why disrupt the intimacy between the debaters and the audience by bringing attention to the moderator?) And, more significantly, Lehrer favored the new debate format, saying “I thought the format accomplished its purpose, which was to facilitate direct, extended exchanges between the candidates about issues of substance. Part of my moderator mission was to stay out of the way of the flow and I had no problems with doing so. My only real personal frustration was discovering that ninety minutes was not enough time in that more open format to cover every issue that deserved attention.”

Ultimately, Lehrer’s tactics aided Romney’s victory, which political commentators across a variety of news media outlets have attributed to the strong, in-charge demeanor he was able to portray during the 90-minute debate. But the question on many analyst’s minds now is articulated nicely by Philip Rucker of the Washington Post: “Mitt Romney’s challenge, with less than five weeks until Election Day, is to convince voters that the steady, decisive, in-command competitor who showed up for the first presidential debate is the real Mitt Romney.” I’ll be interested to see how the dynamic changes in next week’s debate, and how much moderator Candy Crowley and the town-hall format will have an effect on that change.

Mitt Romney vs. Big Bird: When Enthymemes Attack

Todd Battistelli — Mon, 08 Oct 2012 13:00:00 +0000

Image Source: Unknown

In last week's debate, one of the more memorable moments was Mitt Romney's vow to cut off government funding to public television despite his appreciation of both Big Bird and Jim Lehrer. Because he would neither raise taxes nor borrow money from China, Romney argued, he would cut programs like PBS. I suppose Romney intended the statement as a bit of red meat for his base—those who would rather their tax monies not go to PBS—and perhaps also for the putative independent/undecided voter who also distrusts such government spending. I also suppose that for such audiences the line worked. However, for other audiences, Romney's enthymeme provoked an outcry, because those audiences do not share the unstated premise in his argument that PBS does not merit continued funding. Sesame Street lovers (and Romney haters) across the web responded with a torrent of photoshopped images criticizing Romney's position.

Video Credit: PBS

Of all the PBS programming to attack (in addition to Lehrer's News Hour), Romney chose one of the most beloved children's television programs in the United States. Advocates have long grown used to defending public TV in the face of threats to cut government funding. In the video above, Fred Rogers defends PBS funding before a Senate committee considering cutting the budget for public broadcasting. The American Rhetoric website offers a transcript of his testimony, where Rogers wins the support of a Senator who was previously unfamiliar with Rogers' work.

Romney may not be familiar with the Rogers story, or he may not care. At any event, he felt confident enough to declare that Big Bird would feast no more from the giant bird feeder of government funds should he win the presidency. I suspect that if Big Bird could face down an Egyptian demon and assist a lost soul on his journey through the afterlife, Romney doesn't pose too great a challenge. And if Big Bird needs any help, he can find it in the wide-spread support being expressed on image boards and blogs.

Video Credit: Sesame Street

In the spirit of Sesame Street, I'm excluding images with graphic language or imagery, though they're out there if you want to search for them. The images cover a range of arguments, from supporting President Obama or criticizing Romney to supporting PBS, and they use a range of emotional tenors from good-hearted ribbing to sharp satire to anger and sadness.

Image Credit: John Aravosis

Much like Vice President Biden's summation of the first Obama term that bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive, the above image contrasts the different "aims" of the Obama and Romney campaigns, placing bin Laden and Big Bird behind bulls-eyes.

Image Credit: everyonedienow

Image Credit: leuqarraquel

Two Kanye West memes have been repurposed for this debate. In the first, his claim that George W. Bush doesn't care about black people has been replaced with Big Bird West saying that Romney doesn't care about Big Bird. In the second, Big Bird stands in the background as West pulls away the microphones from Willard Mitt "Taylor Swift" Romney, declaring "But Big Bird is one of the best birds of all time." (I have to admit that West's more proactive moderating style might have helped the debate stay on track better than Lehrer's tepid interjections.)

Image Source: LabCoder

Other images use Sesame Street common places. In one, Big Bird informs the viewer that today is brought to us by the letter U for unemployed. In another, using a frame from an episode, he sits sadly with two children on a Sesame Street stoop holding a sign reading "Will work for food."

Image Source: johnnyhuckleberry

Image Source: cinemascapes08

The real urban streets too provide source images with Occupy Wallstreet protesters replaced with muppets from the TV show. The #occupysesamestreet meme does predate Romney's Big Bird moment, but the images seem even more relevant now.

Image Source: Unknown

Familiar Obama campaign imagery serves as the basis for others, with Big Bird appearing in Shepard Fairey's famous "Hope" poster, standing next to the red, white and blue sunrise symbol, or picking up on the campaign's "We've Got Your Back" ad.

Image Credit: Unknown

Image Credit: davonemadisonjackson

Image Credit: perpetualfrizz

Hey Girl, I Made This Meme For You

Rachel Schneider — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 14:00:00 +0000

Image Credit: F--- Yeah Ryan Gosling

Some recent procrastinating led me to Jezebel and thus Joey Thompson’s recent YouTube video, in which he teaches men how to look like actor Ryan Gosling. I was intrigued because I have been following the proliferating Ryan Gosling memes for a while—which have gone on long enough that they’ve been accused of jumping the shark. Still, I’d like to take some time to think a little bit about what their newest evolutions might tell us about memes, form, and feminine desire.

Image Credit: Poli Sci Ryan Gosling

In case you don’t know what a meme is, Richard Dawkins first defined it in The Selfish Gene (1976) as “a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation.” The Internet has lead to the proliferation of memes, from "all your base are belong to us,” to Xzibit Yo Dawg, to the most prolific of them all, the LOLcat. What many memes share is a consistent form: a picture with humorous text superimposed over it. Frequently the memes—like the LOLcat—even use the same fonts to create a visually consistent appearance. What these memes do is to create communities through the shared humor and enjoyment of the same structure. Thus, the LOLcat meme developed certainly consistent cat characters like Ceiling Cat, and further iterations would feature new references to Ceiling Cat.

Image Credit: Rhet/Comp Ryan Gosling

The earliest Ryan Gosling meme started with a humble blog named Fuck Yeah Ryan Gosling, which gained notoriety when Ryan Gosling read several posts from it during two separate MTV interviews. What followed were numerous other Tumblr blogs, including Feminist Ryan Gosling, Typography Ryan Gosling, Silicon Valley Ryan Gosling, Campaign Staff Ryan Gosling, and of course Rhet/Comp Ryan Gosling. The Goslimania culminated in protests against Bradley Cooper when People declared him the Sexiest Man Alive over Ryan. While People will go on to find more sexy men and Gosling more work, I’m left wondering what this decidedly symbolic protest represents.

Image Credit: Feminist Ryan Gosling

Anne Helen Peterson’s excellent post on the topic argues that the Gosling meme only works as long as the pictures support what he says. When it came to versions like Feminist Ryan Gosling, “you could actually imagine Ryan Gosling saying the very phrases that adoring bloggers were photoshopping into his mouth.” However, she argues that versions like Biostatistics Ryan Gosling go too far because they don’t fit the meme. She reads the meme’s appeal in the juxtaposition of star and text, creating connections between Gosling and his fans:

Pairing star images with dense theory is funny. Every scholar wants to think that an object of their desire would be interested in the things they’re interested in — would have a discussion in which you share a secret language familiar to a select few (and then, after you’ve had a good debate, you go to the Farmer’s Market and snuggle). I wish Ryan Gosling’s image wanted to get his PhD in media studies with me. But it doesn’t — he fell in with the gender studies people long ago. That’s where his image belongs. That’s where it works. To take it beyond can be funny……but, if we’re honest with ourselves, misses the point. It’s a meme built on a meme, and thus evacuated of its core.

I agree with Peterson that the attraction lies in projecting shared values onto Gosling, particularly feminist ones. We female academics would like to think (and perhaps have reason to suspect) that Gosling shares our values, and that we could talk Laura Mulvey with him—or Susan Jarrett, or any other topic we enjoy. However, I also suspect that the Gosling meme works best on women of this type: political liberal, feminist, and educated. These viewers appreciates how Gosling’s mild, non-threatening appearance can be endlessly appropriated to fit their desires—which is why the meme’s life has extended so far beyond its original appearance. The Ryan Gosling meme's core lies not in Ryan Gosling, but in his audience.

Image Credit: Hey girl. I like the library too.

Thus, Steve Kolowich’s suggestion that “it is unclear whether the blogs are intended as pure irony or as a genuine experiment to test whether the following gambits stand a chance of working even under optimal conditions” is a complete misreading. None of these women are suggesting that the pickup lines attributed to Gosling in the images would work. Rather, Gosling is a space in which women can vocalize desire. I think this is why the meme has been adapted to include variants like Gael García-Bernal Feminista, Academic Coach Taylor and Fuck No Rick Santorum. If Gael García-Bernal Feminista adds social justice overtones and sensitive floppy hair, Academic Coach Taylor embodies a more authoritative—though equally feminist—intellectual male. Fuck No Rick Santorum explicitly flips Fuck Yeah Ryan Gosling to protest Santorum's sexist political policies. When so much Internet culture is explicitly sexist, the Ryan Gosling Tumblr memes constitute a safe space for feminist—and female heterosexual—discourse.