Memes are one of the most contemporary modes of expression that we find in our digital culture today. They are often used to convey a message through the marriage of text and picture, and gain popularity based on how relatable they are to the users that read them. I choose a meme that I thought fulfilled many points of reference when looking at it from a cultural perspective.
This meme is both a combination of the hit television series “Friends” and the movie trilogy “The Lord of the Rings”. The meme is essentially a picture of a character in Lord of the Rings complimented with a quote that says “one does not simply walk into Mordor”. Furthermore, this meme has been reconstructed by incorporating a famous character from friends, Joey, and altering the text to inflict humour in the reader. One of Joey’s famous lines in Friends is, “Joey doesn’t share food!”. This quote has been altered to mesh with Lord of the Rings and thus create a humorous meme. This reconfiguration showcases the intertextuality of the meme, as incorporating Joey from Friends shows how it can reference other concepts and themes in popular culture. The templatability of this meme was another attractive reason to choose this work. The “one does not simply” line leaves wide range of customization for the user to utilize when captioning the picture. As Sparks and Honey point out in “Anatomy of a Meme: From Inside Joke to Viral Celebrity”, a wide range contributes to how these internet memes become viral, as giving it a voice will allow it to be recreated and remixed by other users and thus enhancing its popularity (Sparks and Honey). In terms of indexicality, this meme can be used to comment on a variety of situations, opinions, and events to a large audience. For example, as a person who considers himself to be incredibly bad at math, I can easily use this meme to comment on my situation be captioning it as, “one does not simply…do well in math”. This fulfills my role as a participant and incidentally could be relatable to others once put into the digital realm.
As Rintel explains in “Explainer: What are Memes?, memes are often created for a particular audience, but with components that will hopefully make it grow to a larger audience (Rintel). So I believe that as I reader this meme would position me in a fantasy-like community. However, with the clever incorporation of Friends, this meme has the capabilities to grow beyond its original audience and into different audiences. For the most part, memes seem to be inclusive, mainly when they evolve high profile matters or popular culture. This gets people participating and creating memes of their own to circulate on the internet. I believe that this solidifies a memes definition as a cultural artifact, because they evoke meaningful participation in users who create and recirculate them in the digital world (Zeffiro, Week 4).
Rintel, Sean. “Explainer: What are memes?” The Conversation. 13 Jan. 2014. http://theconversation.com/explainer-what-are-memes-20789
Sparks & Honey. “Anatomy of a Meme: From Inside Joke to Viral Celebrity.” BigThink. 17 Jan. 2014. http://bigthink.com/amped/anatomy-of-a-meme-from-inside-joke-to-viral-celebrity
Zeffiro, Andrea. “The Language of Social Media”. Brock University. 2014. Lecture.
Alex Gibson 