Greetings to my vast army of followers.
This is yet another new blog. As the name implies, I will use it to show and critique bad "memes".
In its original meaning, a "meme" is "an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture". The word was coined by Richard Dawkins in his book "The Selfish Gene". The idea is that an idea can exist, replicate, and spread through a population in much the same manner as a gene can. (Of course the idea of a "meme" is itself a meme.)
More recently, the word has been applied more specifically to "image macros", generally images with superimposed text. Such things are endemic on Facebook and other social media sites. There are web sites that let you generate your own, picking or uploading an image and superimposing your own text. This is the kind of meme I'll be discussing here.
I see several problems with this trend.
These memes are very often inaccurate. I've seen this from both ends of the political spectrum.
Even if the statement in a meme is accurate, it's often superimposed on an image of a particular prominent person who didn't make the statement, presumably in an attempt to make it more plausible.
Embedding text in an image is problematic for several reasons. It can't be automatically translated, so it's available only to speakers of a particular language (almost always English in the ones I've seen). Text in an image can't be copy-and-pasted, making it difficult to verify or refute whatever statements are being made. It can't be processed by screen readers, making it inaccessible to people who are visually impaired.
Unfortunately, Facebook makes it very easy to re-post images, and Twitter doesn't count the size of an image against the 140-character limit, making an image the easiest way to tweet a long message. (And even purely textual tweets are routinely shared on Facebook as screen shots.)
I'll be collecting and posting Bad Memes as I run across them. Watch this space.
Last updated 2017-01-27 12:19:27 -0800
