Political Cartoons
- Thread starter GURPS
- Start date
modern media has exacerbated this. it seeks crisis and conflict of people on people in a manner more prolific than prior periods because it’s inherent to the medium.
in this age of media activism and bespoke talking point regurgitation tailored for every demanding echo chamber and bias-confirmation hungry coffee klatch, it can get pretty severe.
media seeks to inflame not to inform.
that which used to be no big deal
is suddenly reason to lose our minds, change our lives, sell our cars, and start eating bugs.
but look at those temperatures closely. they’re lower, not higher. it’s not the world that changed, it’s the manner in which the world is being presented. this has long worked to mislead, but this ability is failing, supplanted by a new memetic technology.
memes like the one above are anti-propagandistic gold. their informational density is surreal and they lay plain not only how shabby this trick is but how the trick is done so you can more easily spot the next one. best, they teach away from the provocative image that previously evoked fear or rage and invert it so that the same image in the future now screams “they are manipulating you” instead.
it’s an entire argument, indictment, and informational immune booster in one simple medium.
memes are changing everything.
you can now distill an entire ethos into 10 seconds of attention by evoking myriad connections by utilizing familiar content repurposed as an elicitation of linkage.
and that is the path to victory for even if modern media is indeed more inimical to information and more disposed to manipulate and mislead us it is also more capable of absolutely destroying this practice because memes are ascendant and memes are different. they comprise a serious shift in the informational arms race.
pictures and soundbites are ruled by emotion, but memes rule by informational density and the power of analogy.
it’s the revenge of the shape-rotators whose intellectual/rational arguments were too slow to compete with the speed of talking points and powerful imagery. that which takes 6 seconds to say cannot be effectively refuted at mass scale by that which takes 6 minutes to lay out. this fact has long ruled the modern mediasphere, but memes have suddenly given the SR’s the upper hand for memetic information is faster still and calls upon far greater breadth of associative linkage.
a picture may be 1000 words, but a good meme is a treatise.
you know the pattern, so you pick up the rest. you fill in the gaps, draw the associations. the true meme does not carry in it all the information it expresses, it’s a shorthand code to show you the linkages between things you already know.
it’s a form of mnemonic.
it’s a map for shape rotation.
BOP
Well-Known Member
When even a microbe on another planet is "proof of life," but a full-term neonate is not.