PicoBlog

Here’s a talk I gave on my thesis in its broad outlines, and where we’re at with it now. It’s about the Distracted Boyfriend meme, which I’m studying in-depth. Parts from this Substack figure into the larger thing, and I’ll also post pieces of the thesis as I finish them. If you’ve got any suggestions or criticisms, share them please!

The “scan” in this title was something I wondered a long time about. I mean to use it in both senses of “scan”: when you scan something you’re buying at the grocery store, you find out its value and how it fits into a database. When you scan a poem, you count the syllables, find the caesurae, and mark out the rhyme structure to determine how the poem manipulates all the pieces inside of it to make a meaning. I think memes are just as meaningful as poems, and just as valuable as groceries.

I’ve worked for two years for Know Your Meme, the internet’s only and oldest meme archive. We trace memes back to where they begin and describe their spread and trajectories across the internet. It’s a private media company and also the main contextual archive in place for memes, somewhere between Wikipedia and Buzzfeed. There’s some academic research in the field of memes, but it’s a very fresh and recent topic, so there’s not too much. Some people have done larger studies theorizing memes as a kind of discourse, taking a semiotic approach. But mostly, there’s people who have worked on memes and how they relate to politics — looking at how the alt-right uses memes. This is also the primary mainstream media narrative about memes. 

What I hadn’t seen was a considered, precise study of a meme and how it worked aesthetically. Memes have been studied as a social phenomenon, but not as a kind of art — which is what I want to do here. Choosing just one and focusing on it as a singular work is what I want to contribute: how can we do a close reading of a meme, and what do we learn from that?

I chose Distracted Boyfriend because it came around in 2017, which is as far back in the archive as I can go and still a more or less intact record: the internet gets deleted really quickly. Distracted Boyfriend is also a really famous and well-known meme, which has become a recognizable part of the overall culture. And, I think Distracted Boyfriend really exemplifies some of the dynamics I see in memes in general. 

This is the first truly viral example of Distracted Boyfriend. It was posted on Saturday August 19th, 2017 on Twitter. Over the rest of that weekend and into the week, there were probably thousands of Distracted Boyfriend memes posted, which probably earned millions of likes. There’s no way to count that exactly, but we do know this meme was a Big Deal. By the end of August, posting subsided and people moved on. But long after its peak, Distracted Boyfriend has stuck around. It still gets used pretty frequently. My focus, however, is on that one week when the meme was everywhere on the internet. 

Here’s another example of a Distracted Boyfriend meme. What I’m studying here is the social game, where you put different texts over the same image. They can be texts from very different contexts: the Capitalism-Socialism meme was political, but this one’s personal. 

What stays the same between postings is the structure of the relationship between the three figures, which I describe this way: the guy is the Agent making a choice, the Girlfriend is the old way of doing things, and the woman in red is a new possibility. 

In general, the three figures in the image are associated with certain values. The woman in red is often labeled with things from the online world, while the girlfriend is labeled with real world things. The girlfriend tends to represent order, rules, the way things “should” be done, while the woman in red is the new, unknown possibility. The only real difference between the two women, who look very similar, is the unknownness and the novelty of the woman in red. The guy is sometimes an “I” or “me,” and other times he’s a person you’re making fun of. Either way, he’s making a choice. 

But whatever you label this image, it’s never not a picture of a guy looking at a girl’s butt. It inspires a strong reaction, and it also shows a male gaze way of seeing the world. The choosing subject is assumed to be male and white, while women are symbolic values which he has to decide between. That said, the man is also frequently made fun of: the image opens itself up to be turned in many different ways, depending on which words you place on top of it. For me, the social game of the meme is about turning the image, and because this image is such a strong and ambiguous image in terms of what point its trying to make, it’s very turnable. What I mean by “turn” here is closer to the French détournement.

There’s also a point where creators turn the meme format itself. You’ll see that over time, postings of the meme start to mess with the core format: the man’s head here is swapped in for Donald Trump’s, and the joke is both about Trump but also about the meme format itself: by August 25th, this meme had been viral for almost a week, so everyone knew what it was and you could riff on it. 

Similarly, this September 1st meme messes with the orientation of the image, and is one of my personal favorites.

So, what, ultimately, does the meme format express? A choice, but not just any choice. No form is neutral, and Distracted Boyfriend doesn’t just present a situation, buy characterizes it also: this meme shows choice happening through the male gaze, and it implies several things about the options. The girlfriend precedes the woman in red, so one option is old, and one is new. The form also assumes the choice is binary, that the woman in red is the opposite of the girlfriend, that you can’t have one if you have the other.  For some reason, this form fit the things people in August 2017 wanted to express.

This question of choice is a universal human question, and it’s something all of us face. In the last week of August 2017, in the United States where my study is focused, we have a society facing massive technological and demographic change, which has a lot of choices to make. It’s also society facing institutional rot, where the conventional ways of doing things feel increasingly dangerous and irresponsible: Americans see how the supposedly “right” way of being has damaged their planet and their democracy. Just two weeks before this meme went viral, white supremacists marched in Charlottesville, in my home state of Virginia, and murdered a person. Hurricane Harvey bore down on Texas and a President who acts towards women a lot like the man in the meme acts towards women failed to respond adequately to that disaster. 

At the same time, a once-in-a-generation solar eclipse swept across North America, which is always an omen of some sort. Of course, I should mention that the conditions of dire institutional rot and technological and demographic change apply to many countries beside the United States. I also have no way of knowing whether any specific memes I’m studying come from the United States — but because I’m working on the English-language internet, looking on American platforms, and basing my work off Know Your Meme (which is primarily an archive of the American internet) I’m choosing to look at memes in this way: as a medium of public engagement participating in American traditions about the public square. Many of the most popular and pivotal Distracted Boyfriend memes also make reference to political developments.

The question of democracy’s future — like the questions of globalization, imperialism, and English as the lingua franca of the internet — is beyond the scope of my thesis.

But I see memes as a useful kind of source that can help us address all of these large historical questions.

What you’re looking at now is a 2017 meme calendar, posted to Reddit at the end of that year, which recaps which memes were viral at different times. You’ll find Distracted Boyfriend over in August. Theorizing why and how things go viral is also beyond the scope of what I’m doing here, but one thing viral media offer us is a time capsule that’s really precise. They also tie into what’s going on in the culture, and comment on them. In this meme calendar, you see images from the film Get Out over in March, jokes about major political and pop-cultural figures throughout, and commentaries on new technologies. What this says to me is that if you’re a historian studying film, politics, culture, or technology in 2017, memes are going to be some of your best primary sources. So there’s an imperative to understand how to deal with them, and how to read them. 

Memes are also an important element in how internet communities are constituted, and by tracking memes we can kind of track the way online social space is structured. Here, for example, is a report I did last fall with Know Your Meme. Our archive records the site of origin for memes, and for the memes we recorded in our first year of existence, 2010 (I did not participate, I was eleven at the time) YouTube was the leading source for memes, and a number of smaller sites also posted great numbers.

By 2022, the balance of power shifted: TikTok is now overwhelmingly at the forefront of digital culture. In 2017, the time of Distracted Boyfriend, we have a different picture of the platforms. To some extent, these changes mirror developments in the business and regulatory models that run these platforms — you have a lot of small, peer-to-peer websites in 2010, and big platforms in 2022 and 2017. You also have websites made for mobile (like TikTok and Twitter, which are just weird to use on a laptop) dominating in later eras when we access the internet from our smartphones more. But these shifts, I think, are always aesthetic too — memes are a part of this story, and a valuable source for learning how the social internet and the platforms (and the lives we make on them) are structured and how they change.

So how can changing hardware, software, and economic/political models, be reflected in an aesthetic form? I see form as a sort middle ground where the material constraints and affordances of a medium encounter culture, tradition, and the intentions of creators and audiences. When you pour water into a bottle, it takes on the shape of that bottle. When you pour your public discourse into Twitter, it takes on the shape of Twitter. So what is that shape, what is that form?

I think one of the key aspects of it has to do with a layering of contexts. Memes like this one work by putting text on top of a picture. But there are a few other things that are on top of or below the text. My contention is that perspective and depth in a meme communicate something, and are meaningful. 

Within the image itself, we have two moments of judgment conducted through a gaze and related to each other by the depth of image. First, the Distracted Boyfriend judges the woman in red, then his girlfriend judges him.

Then, leaving the image, the person who places the text judges their reactions and turns the image. A change in depth here indicates a change in voice, a different speaker and judger, in addition to a movement in time: the photo precedes the text. Then, the platform or website it’s on, both the algorithms and the community of people judge how, where, and when the meme should appear: you see the likes, the shares, and it lands someplace in your feed. Lastly, the viewer, operating at the furthest-out level, judges the meme.

Memes organize a discourse through these successive framings of context. Community is formed through turning, judging, and reinterpreting what others have done. Context is malleable. Meaning is generated through strategic curation. The chorus, the accumulation of voices, replaces the individual speaking. No form is neutral.

My idea is that this way of seeing different contexts and manipulating them has to do with the way the graphical user interface and the platforms themselves work. The meme leads people to act as turners and judgers, but it does that because it reflects the incentives, structure, and set-up of the platform. Ways to meme are ways to be. When life is organized through these forms, and the relationship of the self to the things of the world is imagined in this way, then art reflects it.

Memes should be taken seriously, because the traditional ways of doing discourse are dead: nobody will read your book, and everyone will be on their phone as they’re watching your movie. For now, people do still pay attention to memes, and make sense of their lives and their communities through the memes they encounter. While the archive still exists, we need to look seriously at digital media and develop the methods we need to criticize and understand what’s happening on the internet.

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