It’s never nonsense. Memes are like…dwarf mine graffiti. A way to see what the mood is of certain groups. Any image has a certain context and a meaning to it. You could post the image and leave out the caption and someone else who “speaks” meme will know exactly what it is you tried to communicate.
In that sense, no, you’re right … they’re information.
But how useful is the information necessarily? How much of it is really you gawping and rationalising your perving afterwarda?
And then there’s just images to study for the sake of the story captured.
And there we have it? Just for the sake of it?
And I’m an infojunkie myself — you have no idea (remind me to tell you about The Event some time).
So, if even I’m asking …
Pull your slip down, dear … you don’t want Dr. Freud seeing your knickers!
Like this one — I am sure you’ve seen it;
No … I hadn’t, actually.
The odd thing is that an image like this, doesn’t stay with me as an image but a feeling. Or a bunch of feelings. I didn’t remember until I pulled it out of my folder again that the woman was wearing brown boots.
When I was looking at that lizard I told you about before, I remember in that moment feeling very strongly (disgust) but it stayed with me as a bunch of images. I remember a lot of random details. Probably also because I knew it would be gone. I don’t have a reference to pull back up like the picture.
Yeah sure I could start to multitask, but would that make for a lot of fuzzy mind images because part of my attention is taken up by a screen full of interesting things?
Some years ago, going through some old boxes I’ve been lugging around the World with me for decades, I found an old keepsake: the tram ticket stub from the first time I went to visit a (long since) ex at her home in Germany.
I’d completely forgotten about it … completely forgotten that journey … completely forgotten the whole event.
I threw it out, because … well, not only was it unnecessarily sentimental of me to have kept it in the first place but unfathomably ludicrous that I should’ve been lugging something around with me all those years (decades) without even knowing I was doing so — it was just needless junk … a forgotten keepsake … kept only for the sake of keeping it and not even remembered … a souvenir (in the French sense) of nothing at all.
Since then, I haven’t forgotten it.
When I was a kid, there were three TV channels (and one of them only broadcast for two hours, twice a day). They competed for viewers, naturally, so whenever there was a must see film on one of the main channels, there was another, equally must see, one on the other.
You had to make your choice and live with it.
The next day, you’d be able to discuss it with all the others who’d watched it but, at the same time, couldn’t help being envious of those discussing the other one, because, even though they were in the same boat you were, they’d seen something you hadn’t … and it was gone, perhaps never to be seen again (you had no way of knowing if it would ever be rebroadcast).
So, you cherished the experience of having seen the one you had … it had all the more meaning and value for the absence of the other.
Years later, when videorecorders were commonplace and everyone had one, you could watch one whilst recording the other.
Somehow I never really enjoyed either of them as much as I had when I’d had to choose which one to forego … which one to miss … which one would be absent from my life — the ones I never saw were more a part of my life than either of the ones I had seen later were.
That thing of, when people die and we wish we had said things to them when they were alive … wish we could say them now … wish we’d realised things that, now, after an epiphany, we see in a whole new light …
… yeah, if they were still alive, we wouldn’t say them … wouldn’t realise them … any more than we did at the time.
Even if you are aware of Agrippa, you may not be aware of the below site — I’ll leave you to divine its relevance to my points here 😀
Interesting, but not that high on a priority because they can wait. It’s recorded. I can pull it up whenever.
And there it is … because you can always recall it … ‘remember’ it … any time you like, you won’t — no more than I remembered the ticket stub at the bottom of that box, whence I could retrieve it any time I wanted.
Then there are the things that don’t make it into the Internet Archive Wayback Machine … because it too has its outages … misses things … and is often incomplete even when it doesn’t, because it can’t spider everything everywhere¹.
Yes, I get it … the Internet is forever (at least until it isn’t anyway) and real life is ephemeral … I too have a YOLO driven urge to carpe diem, remember …
But memory is a peculiar thing and it takes the absence of things, sometimes, for them to be more with us, as it were.
You’ll only remember the colour of the woman’s boots now precisely because you forgot it before … and you’ll almost certainly never forget it now either — it’s the revelation that you forgot … of its absence from your memory … that will embed it there in a way that … paradoxically … repeatedly looking at the picture never could … and never would have had you not forgotten it … lost in the consuming, once again, of the psychosensual reward of looking at it for its own sake … meaningless because you can refer to it again and again, whenever you like … have your cake and eat it … rendering it, ultimately, tasteless … like recording one film whilst watching the other and enjoying neither quite as much … both being the duller … faded … for it.
Don’t try to hang on so tightly to one thing … the idea that you can’t afford to miss anything … that, ironically, you end up missing things — what did you miss whilst you were so fixated on not missing the lizard?
There’ll be other zombie-lizards to see … what happens if the Internet Archive goes down?
At the end of the day, it’s your choice and I don’t want to influence you in any way; t’s really none of my business albeit interesting to discuss it with someone who I gather thinks similarly about what to give their attention to … and for similar reasons — these are really just ideas for you to muse upon, should you choose.
But the thing is … if you’re looking at ‘memes’ … and, glancing around, see the lizard …
… the memes will still be there when you stop watching the lizard — you can have both …and, unlike that cake, the lizard won’t lose it’s flavour afterwards either.
BTW …
They. Are. NOT. Fucking. MEMES!!!
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¹ Try as I might … I just cannot find The Adventures of Cybermoses and his Faithful Sidekick, Wormwood 😒
