#KnowYourMeme
Illustration by Dana Heimes
Footage of “your” FBI agent bringing gifts when everyone forgets your birthday. A bride getting married on Friday because Saturdays are for the boys. The guy who spots a king, but is looking in a mirror.
You probably recognize those memes, but for Olga White, these media are less a laughing matter than an important window into how we communicate. She’s become an expert at creating “family trees” of memes, thinking critically about their origins to understand what they say about the cultures and creators who build them.
“On their own, we don’t remember these micro-content interactions—if you see a meme about kings, or the boys, and don’t see the topic for a few minutes, you don’t retain what you saw earlier,” said White, a PhD student in CMDI’s media studies department who researches surveillance and online identity. “Our social media feeds are so jumbled together that the narrative gets broken up, and it becomes difficult to see the underlying patterns.
“There needs to be a voice encouraging us to look at these as a group, and say, ‘Isn’t it
weird how all these memes are about someone watching what you’re doing?’”
A late-night doomscrolling session kicked off White’s scholarly interest in the topic. As she went through her Instagram feed, she saw an image of a text message setting up a hookup, helped along by an FBI agent.
“I just felt there was something there. And then I started coming across more memes related to the FBI agent,” she said. “So I essentially curated this family of memes around surveillance, and how this character is helping to hyper-normalize that.”
To illustrate the connections linking these media, White curated a gallery of memes in ATLAS earlier this year that highlight patterns related to surveillance. For the exhibit, she printed the images and put them in ostentatious frames, highlighting the ugly meme aesthetic while emphasizing that the media were being shown out of their element—“one way memes
have left the digital sphere,” as she put it.
There needs to be a voice encouraging us to look at these as a group, and say, ‘Isn’t it weird how all these memes are about someone watching what you’re doing?’”
Olga White, PhD student
Another example of this is when the language of memes creeps into our speech, something White sees in Generation Alpha’s adoption of “Ohio,” “sigma” and other terms into everyday speech.
“Now, to understand what a person is saying, we have to understand what a particular meme meant,” she said. “And that’s hard, because memes are rooted in the context of the culture that created them. It becomes a ‘you had to be there’ moment.”
She brought her classes to the exhibit, asking them to deliberately spend time with each meme, as they might in a museum, to understand the patterns on display.
“The most gratifying comment I got was from a student who said, ‘I want to tell my mom she was right—that when I spent a lot of time diving into gamer culture, I didn’t realize what I was taking out of it,’” White said. “Hearing students say things like that convinced me there was value to this work.
“And I hope he called his mom afterward.”
Joe Arney covers research and general news for the college.