Our memes, ourselves

In the early 20th century, Irish poet William Butler Yeats asked, “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” Today, Richmond professor Ben Pettis is asking its 21st-century equivalent: How can we know the person from the meme?

Pettis, a professor of rhetoric and communication studies, asked the question in a piece published shortly after the death of actor Chuck Norris. Well-worn Norris-based memes riffing on toughness resurged so much after his passing that “they almost overshadowed remembrances of the movie star’s life,” he writes.

For Pettis, the Norris example raises broader questions about how memes can subsume people’s images and real identities. Some of his other examples focus on other famous people, such as a photo of a sad-looking Keanu Reeves inserted into ridiculous scenarios or variants of Miley Cyrus’ wrecking ball imagery. Pettis says endless riffing by regular people signals a control shift.

“No matter how much a studio tries to manage a star’s image,” he writes, “a meme can be created that takes on a life of its own.”

Celebrities aren’t the only ones coping with memes that reduce their complexities as human beings to a running joke. “Regular people decide what a meme is,” he writes, and sometimes the burdens of meme fame fall on other regular people. Last year, People magazine interviewed a woman named Laina Morris, who has tried to move on from becoming a hit meme in 2012, the  “Overly Attached Girlfriend.” She’s still constantly recognized from it.

Experiences like hers, Pettis writes, show “just how difficult — or even impossible — it is to sever oneself from internet fame.”