Dana Montello Journal #9
Anyway, memes are a great tool in cultural criticism because of the very real fact that criticism of something is almost always less well known than the thing being criticized. In fact, in many areas, like academia, criticism is not known to the wider society at all and instead only lives in its own critical community. I'm sure scholars like to keep the riff raff out, but how is a criticism meaningful if it isn't received? And if the thing being criticized is taking in by almost all of the wider society (workplace norms, movies, music, news) then the criticism must strive to reach those ears too.
This is where memes come in. You cannot boil down all the nuance of criticism into a funny image and about 15 words, but you can distill it's major world-altering point. It can create a moment of cognitive dissonance awareness that allows someone in the wider culture to understand the inherent contradiction. It might not have nuance, but it has power, and it has repeatability. It's small enough to exist as a single transmissible idea that's beauty is in it's simplicity and it's "self-evident" nature. If humanities scholars, especially digital ones, can raise their cultural criticism into the culture itself, then they achieve their goal of awareness in a much more real way.
Now the negative side of memes is that some ideas are actually "self-evident" without being usefully critical. Their simplicity is false and they are used not to understand a discourse better but to shut down a potential threat to the status quo. We could consider these types of memes regressive as they don't advance our social understanding but rather just provide an argument of why would shouldn't advance social understanding. The college liberal meme often falls into this trap of being regressive. This is not to say criticism of liberal causes in and of itself regressive, but that if the criticism consists of shutting down debate instead of trying to refine understanding, it's less useful.