The meme is useless without context. It's the context that makes it memetic. There's a lot of things from our parents childhoods that were really cool and funny at the time and they try to help us relive the enjoyment they lived at that time, and it just isn't the same.
It's sort of like what Jon Stewart said about his audience back at the height of The Daily Show. For a lot of the jokes to work, the audience needed to be very well informed. They needed to know who these people were, why they were important, why the punchlines of these jokes hit. Without that, the show wasn't funny.
It's the same with memes. Something succinct requires faith in your audience, that they understand what the meme represents, and that they understand the message you're trying to convey with very little information.
That's also why the left is losing the best and brightest, and they can't meme for the same reason -- because they don't trust their audience, they can't tell the truth, they can't or won't assume their audience is smart enough to get the joke.
It's sort of like what Jon Stewart said about his audience back at the height of The Daily Show. For a lot of the jokes to work, the audience needed to be very well informed. They needed to know who these people were, why they were important, why the punchlines of these jokes hit. Without that, the show wasn't funny.
It's the same with memes. Something succinct requires faith in your audience, that they understand what the meme represents, and that they understand the message you're trying to convey with very little information.
That's also why the left is losing the best and brightest, and they can't meme for the same reason -- because they don't trust their audience, they can't tell the truth, they can't or won't assume their audience is smart enough to get the joke.
@houseoftolstoy That's a good way of putting it.
The "extra context" is usually creating new levels of abstraction so you can sand away complexity to get to the next level of abstraction cleanly.
You *can* get important data using abstractions (Math->Physics->Engineering for example), but you have to be very careful because for every new level of abstraction there's a chance you cut away the core reality of a thing and once you do that you end up with absurd conclusions.
The rest of us see stuff like "Multi-racial white supremacy" and that becomes a meme by itself because it's so absurd without the mental gymnastics and abstractions upon abstractions required to make it not absurd.
The "extra context" is usually creating new levels of abstraction so you can sand away complexity to get to the next level of abstraction cleanly.
You *can* get important data using abstractions (Math->Physics->Engineering for example), but you have to be very careful because for every new level of abstraction there's a chance you cut away the core reality of a thing and once you do that you end up with absurd conclusions.
The rest of us see stuff like "Multi-racial white supremacy" and that becomes a meme by itself because it's so absurd without the mental gymnastics and abstractions upon abstractions required to make it not absurd.
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