relatable romney

the meme i chose is not actually the one i wanted. as no doubt many others discovered, memes are a genre with multiple sub-genres. there's the ancient walrus-bucket meme, the ehrmegod (spelling?) girl meme, the happy cat, etc. and then there's relatable romney.

memes as a concept are short pieces of information -they don't have to be pictures, but this is what we think of when we hear the term. and this type of picture is more or less what we imagine when we think of internet memes as a genre. it's a picture, repeated over and over, with different captions in a similar theme. humor is almost always the point, but memes are also often used as satire and make some sort of social commentary.

as a sub-genre, the relatable romney meme has certain expectations. the top line will have something to do with the hardships faced by many in the current economic climate - failing banks, lost retirement funds, unemployment, no health care, rising gas prices, inability to afford quality food - and in the bottom line will come the turn. it portrays romney as someone hopelessly unable to sympathize with regular people experiencing hardship. other examples say things like "i know how awful rising gas prices are - i own 6 cars, after all." or "i understand detroit - they built all my cars." as the election progressed some of these memes expanded to include topics like feminism and multiculturalism, again, portraying romney as a white guy totally unable to connect with female or non-white voters. as you can see, there was a general theme there. the comments are intended to be funny, but also barbed. and more barbed because they were often true statements about how many cars he owns, how much money he's worth, etc. actual things he'd said were twisted out of context to fit the meme.

obviously, these memes appealed to a wide audience, but perhaps most especially to a politically savvy and liberal audience. things like romney's tenure at bain capital were referenced, as well as remarks he made during debates or interviews. anyone not following the election and keeping abreast of current events wouldn't have fully understood all of the memes, although many of them would still be immediately accessible. the focus on actual information, even twisted, suggests that in addition to being funny, the community around the memes actually did want to use those partial truths and facts to be persuasive.

i could say more about this example, but i'll let it go.

the meme i wanted to find, but couldn't, used this same picture. the caption said something like "jokes about romney's wealth obscure the fact that he'd be a damned dangerous president." i found this particular meme *really* interesting. it deliberately ignores the conventions of the genre, refuses to play by the rules. and yet, it seems to have similar goals. it's obviously a liberal voice. what it seemed to be doing that i found so fascinating was calling attention to the meme in general as a genre and asking whether it was actually a useful genre for creating change. i think you could look at that a couple ways. is this someone who's missed the point? is the internet meme supposed to be a vehicle for change (i'm thinking here of the reading that said that genres are "how things get done")? if it IS, this is actually a potentially devastating critique, or at least one worth taking seriously. but if that's NOT what the genre does, if it's point is rather to be funny and create a sense of solidarity among members of the Discourse, then essentially that person is getting angry because their DVD player won't make toast. of course not, because that isn't its job.

but then this is part of why genre analysis is important. we need to understand what "texts" people are using to get things done. this helps us think about whether those texts are actually doing what we want. and it helps us chose appropriate genres in our own lives. if we want X done, a good understanding of how genre works can tell us what sort of text might best get us what we want.