I've been thinking a lot about genre recently. Anyone who works with non-canonical old texts on a regular basis has most likely noticed that they tend to sift themselves into loose, yet definite generic groupings that are only loosely captured by terms such as "didactic literature," "travel narratives," "palace memorials," and so on. Thus, European literature has a long tradition of texts that imitate the Socratic, ordered question-answer structure of a catechism. Anything from libertine parodies to political pamphlets and treatises on accounting could be wedged into this framework, primarily because it was instantly familiar to everyone who received a religious education that utilized actual catechisms--i.e. practically any literate person.
The Internet age is remarkable for the speed and singlemindedness with which it produces new genres. There are, of course, the obvious innovations such as "blog posting" and "email" (which are roughly the equivalent of the traditional "novel," "Spectator-style journal," and so on). These rarely attract interest as such because they seem so familiar and so close to the old genres they're derived from; because of this, they're also not especially interesting, since their formal coherence is outstripped by the wide variations in style and content that they accommodate. I am more interested in a metagenre which the Internet did not invent but totally transformed: the image macro. Variations on the image macro have formed the backbone of the vast majority of Internet memes. (Memes, incidentally, are a classic instance of Foucault's argument about disciplines creating the thing they're supposed to be investigating: the rather homely conceptual apparatus of Dawkins' "memetics" has totally failed to catch on in the world of intellectual history, where its weaknesses are obvious, but it did manage to create and shape our vocabulary for thinking about the specificities of Internet fads. "Meme" could become a meme only on the Internet.)
Obviously image macros, defined at the most basic level as a combination of text and image in which both are equal in status and comment on each other in some ironic way, have existed for a long time. When the definition is modified to include their viral distribution and anonymous creation using electronic media, however, certain things become clear. For one thing, individual genres of image macros remain remarkably internally consistent even as they get further and further away from the original on which they were supposedly an ironic comment. Thus, the venerable Demotivational Poster meme was once based on a parody of an actual genre of posters containing blandly reassuring corporate vomitus printed in white text underneath kitschy photographs of sunsets. The vast majority of the meme's producers and consumers have never seen a motivational poster in their lives, and if some parodic intent remains, it's completely undetectable in almost all of its instantiations.
On the other hand, the consistency of the internal language of an image macro enables it to be incredibly flexible in what it can express. I am thinking in particular of two genres that have reached large-scale prominence over the past year and a half or so: "rage comics" and "Advice Animals." (Although these are now being generated at enormous rates all over the Internet, the most convenient place to find decent examples is reddit.) It's hard to argue that these works are meaningfully artistic or even participate in a "folk art" tradition: the whole point is that the very slight variation in themes and content erases the distinction between creation and imitation. What they are, though, is a sophisticated language for expressing daily experience, a kind of pop phenomenology. For instance, this image, one of the many semantically-distinct stock faces (even this list is incomplete) that compose a rage comic, with or without accompanying text, means "experiencing a vaguely shameful or illicit pleasure":
Although the subtle differences between faces can be totally inaccesible to an untrained observer, to someone who regularly reads and produces rage comics they are transparent. As a result each rage comic is a sentence written in a constantly evolving but still mutually-comprehensible language. In that sense, they can be compared to emoticons, although the scope of emotional nuance and expression they permit is much broader.
Advice Animals are similar, although they usually consist of a single semantic unit in which the image dictates the coloring and interpretations. The best Advice Animals are either well-realized jokes, such as Business Cat:
Or expressions of submerged, universal, yet also shameful facets of human experience:
My point here is not to do a '90s-style critical reading of a pop-culture text. What I'm interested in is how this emerging regime of artistic production connects to broader cultural trends. Its salient features, as far as I can tell, are its anonymity and its laserlike focus on the line between public and private. Many of the themes taken up in rage comics and Advice Animals, in the hands of a traditional literary writer, could form the crux of a story that would rely for its impact on just this kind of disclosure of intimate emotional terrain. In the hands of anonymous rage-comic makers, these disclosures seem utterly banal and even democratic in their assumption that secret anxieties are really communal. Anonymity, in this case, is not the bogeyman that destroys thoughtful discourse (as some tedious critics would have it), nor is it the heroic facelessness of the resistance fighter (as some tedious advocates claim). It is the auto-psychoanalysis of a collective subconscious that is insistent on excavating and exposing all of its hidden traumas.
4chan may or may not have been the origin of these memes, but it does showcase the meaning of this anonymity. Rage comics and Advice Animals coexist there with all kinds of original and copypasta'd personal stories, typically those to which it would be impossible to admit in public. (Anti-Semitism, by and large successfully exiled from the public sphere over the past fifty years, is a common theme.) Once created and popularized, varieties of the new genres of Internet art sanitize the autotherapeutic discourse of the anonymous subconscious and "resell" it for consumption to equally anonymous Internet readers. Ultimately, the result is an erosion of privacy from the other side: not a forcible corporate-funded assault on private space, but an expansion in the things legitimately to be considered public. So if we want to talk about Facebook and the future of privacy today, we have to look at how we've begun to make art.
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