Unruly Audience by Greg Kelley

Author:Greg Kelley [Kelley, Greg]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781607329893
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Utah State University Press
Published: 2020-09-21T00:00:00+00:00

Meme-ing TWSS

Google searches for the phrase TWSS spiked notably in 2009–10, corresponding almost exactly to the run of season 6 of The Office, and I think we can extrapolate that the show’s accumulation of TWSS references over the years reached a sort of tipping point by then that launched the phrase generally into the popular consciousness. That, and the extensive repetition of this folklore form across the digital landscape, sent it on its way to becoming a bona fide media meme. The application of biological meme theory to folkloristics is certainly not without its quandaries. In the fullest scholarly treatment on the subject, Elliott Oring (2014a, 2014b) thoroughly interrogates precedent studies of memetics and folkloristics by Pimple (1996), Zipes (2008, 2011b), Ellis (2003, 75–97), and Heath, Bell, and Sternberg (2001). Oring is especially critical of earlier tautological formulations claiming that memes demonstrate “fitness” simply by dint of their continued replication; in the end, he remains skeptical as to the value of memetics theory for cultural analysis because, he argues, the operative principle of selection in cultural dissemination has not been conclusively demonstrated.

Oring’s discussion focuses primarily on nonmediated cultural forms, however. Once the consideration broadens to include the wider expanse of electronic communication—broadcast media, the internet, digital social networking—the possibilities for proliferation, and therefore evolutionary selection, would seem greater, albeit still difficult to measure. While descriptions of media memes as “self-replicating” are flawed, as they fail to account for human agency in the production and dissemination of culture, the conceptual notion of the meme does provide “a compelling way to understand the dispersion of cultural movements,” Jenkins, Ford, and Green accept, “especially when seemingly innocuous or trivial trends spread and die in rapid fashion” (2013, 19). Complexities arise when the supposed replicating “selfish genes” meet social selves (Haig 2020). Within those larger questions about why certain instances of folklore (face-to-face, mediated, or otherwise) multiply while others go extinct (Oring 2014a, 473), I would suggest that the TWSS joke replicated effusively, and remained robust for a period, partly as a function of its brevity and relatively stable form.

It should be noted here that there is a distinction to be made between virals and memes. The difference lies in variability, notes Limor Shifman. Virals are single cultural units (videos, photos, or jokes, e.g.) that proliferate in numerous copies, while internet memes are comprised of collections of remixed, mashed-up, and repurposed texts (2014, 56). In that regard, then, TWSS jokes qualify as both virals and memes. The four-word TWSS text presents low variability, disseminated virally as it is in a consistent, compact verbal form. But the truncated (and therefore easily transmitted) jocular phrase is embedded in wide varieties of conversational and/or visual contexts, whose meanings then shift toward the salacious as a result. So as a rhetorical device, the TWSS tagline is transformative, retroactively refiguring benign antecedent discourse into extended dirty joke telling. There is something of a balancing act here, struck between adherence to the established patterns of the meme and creative innovation in novel expressions of it (see Nissenbaum and Shifman 2017, 493–94; Milner 2013).

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.