Eavesdropping on Memes

I am a fan of memes. To me, they represent who “we” are in a very real sense. After reading Ratcliffe, I guess I need to solidify who I mean by “we” (ooh, did you see that rhetorical listening I just did on myself?). By “we,” I guess I mean affluent, predominately white, educated, plugged-in (or digitally literate), young, American males obsessed with pop culture and inside jokes. So you very much may not be included in that group; but you might be, even if you aren’t an affluent, white, educated, plugged-in, young, American male obsessed with pop culture and inside jokes.

So let me start over. I love memes because I identify with those who are most likely to create, distribute, proliferate, and engage with them. I am a big fan of Know Your Meme, a for-profit website dedicated to cataloging and discussing memes and their implications in culture. I check it every once in a while, probably just to see what “my people” are thinking about and saying and whether or not I agree or disagree. Perhaps my own interaction with memes is mostly about identity building.

And so, maybe that is why I was primed to see this particular meme, “The Unhelpful High School Teacher” (or click the images in the gallery below to see a few instances of the meme) as a site of cognitive dissonance or a “margin of overlap” (66), as Ratcliffe calls it. My body has been troped, or marked, as a white, internet using, pop-culture obsessed American, but also as a teacher, and this meme represents a place where these two tropes are in conflict with each other. Which cultural trope am I supposed to side with? The inside-joke-loving, witty, participator-in-memes? Or the sincere teacher trying to be the best teacher I can be? If I am a meme-er (I just made that up), than I am engaging in an act that recognizes teachers as hypocritical, self-absorbed and stupid. But if I am a teacher, I could easily resist the messages in the meme and fail to recognize the validity of memes as culture. I could just say that the meme creators don’t understand teachers and are just spoiled anonymous kids sitting safe behind a computer their parents bought them. But by doing so, I am imposing false stereotypes on the group as a whole and turning my back on a group I identify with. So what’s the solution?

Eavesdropping.

If I “[choose] to stand outside… in an uncomfortable spot… on the border of knowing and not knowing… granting others the inside position… listening to learn” (Ratcliffe, 105), I can learn from these memes without becoming defensive, or insulting the tropes I identify with. I can listen to the memes instead of defensively rejecting them outright. I can step outside of my roles as teacher and meme-er for just long enough to see the validity of the Unhelpful High School Teacher meme as culture and as constructive critique for all teachers.

For example, one instance of the meme (which is known as an exploitable, meaning it is an easily distributed image, which those who participate in the meme download and use various programs to add text to) quotes a fictitious teacher saying “‘What matters is how hard you tried'” at the top of the image and then “Has no way of assessing personal effort” at the bottom, is one where a margin of overlap happened for me. The top line of the meme is the setup and observes a typical behavior a teacher might do or say, and the bottom line is the rejoinder, which points out the hypocrisy or absurdity of the teachers behavior. When I listen rhetorically to this instance, I am faced with the very real truth that I have no way, or a very arbitrary way at best, of assessing personal effort. I have to humble myself and hold myself accountable for those accusations of hypocrisy and ignorance.

In an 2010 article in Composition Studies, Kerry Dirk points out that what some professors call a “Participation grade” is not really based on any real system to back it up, but is rather used to fudge grades one way or another based on a subjective feeling the teacher has for the student when it comes time to assign grades. So there is some very real truth to this internet meme and one that I need to now deal with as a teacher. However, without rhetorical listening, I would be forced to cling to one trope or the other and deny and defend (and possibly insult and harm), or simply feel internally dissonant looking at these memes.

When I rhetorically listen though, I don’t have to give up my role as a teacher to defend the validity of memes, and I don’t have to give up my role as a teacher to defend the integrity of other teachers like me (which is really just a way of defending myself and my own actions) by questioning the validity of memes or those that create them. I can be both at the same time by giving up both for a small amount of time to just listen. I can then begin the process of figuring out a way to assess personal effort, or else change find new motivation to unpack what I mean when I say (or think, or portray) that only personal effort matters. Rhetorically listening isn’t an end in itself, it is a gate that we walk through that requires more work after passing. But it also gives us a way as teachers and people to let go of tropes that cause conflict and listen in a way that can bring understanding.

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Literally Unbelievable Rhetorical Situations

As we all should know The Onion is a satirical online newspaper. Just like many other news sites, the Onion allows visitors to share links to articles directly to Facebook. Sometimes Facebook citizens are perhaps caught off guard and confuse the satirical news for real news. A man (who goes) by the name of Hudson Hongo has begun curating a Tumblr called Literally Unbelievable to document when this happens. While the intention of the site is probably to be funny, I think we can learn a lot about rhetoric and consider some of Burke’s questions about audience by looking at one of the entries.

Much of the humor of this entry comes from the dramatic irony, so to speak, of us know the rhetorical situation of the Onion while this person doesn’t, but also we see that the person fails to acknowledge that the “Massive Star in the Center of Our Solar System” from the article is just our own sun that we see everyday. In defense of the person that wrote the Facebook post here, I’ll point out first that links to articles from the Onion and links to articles from “actual” newspapers look very much alike. The Onion borrows much of its ethos from visually aligning itself with reliable news sources. A person sees the bolded letters of the article title, which also omits articles (a common practice in newspaper headlines), followed by the dateline and assumes that the news source is just as reliable as any other. Secondly, when a person sees a headline like this, they assume that the information comes from a news source and that is precisely that, new. The headline here points out something so obvious, so tightly woven into our quotidian lives that it is almost unnoticeable. She (I am guessing it is a girl from the blurry picture, I could be wrong) assumes that a massive star causing problems talked about in a news source would be a new development as a real news source would have no reason to report on the sun. The Onion article is funny because it exploits our expectations of what is new and what is newsworthy. It is also poking fun at anyway searching for an answer to why the weather has been so hot recently. The readers are left to judge the credibility of the source almost entirely on the content. A problem then arises because we live in a world where we take visually and circumstantially established ethos just as if not more seriously than an ethos based on quality of information presented. Because of this, we laugh at how stupid these people must be for not understanding the satire, but without fully seeing how complex a rhetorical situation we are dealing with.

Burke argues on page 64 that “new mediums of communication” are rhetorically “‘carving out’ … new audiences” but that “there is nothing here essentially outside the traditional concerns of rhetoric.” While we might be justified in calling the people who show up on Literally Unbelievable as dim-witted idiots, we must also realize that the limits, constraints, and style of the Facebook interface, and the very specific particular audience of the Onion clashing with the very general audience of Facebook, also play a role in these misunderstandings.

When presenting the article, the facebook citizen takes care to position herself as an open-minded, rational thinker. She watched a show that didn’t agree with her world view and beliefs because it featured Stephen Hawking, a known astrophysicist, and how he theorizes the universe was made without a creator. She “followed it” but “disagreed.” She even questions whether she has spelled Stephen Hawkings’ name correctly, which shows concern for correctness. But, even still, the information from the Onion article took her by surprise. There’s no way of knowing in what format she came across the article, it could have been the full article at the Onion’s site, a link like the one above, or other formats. But regardless, she took the information as truthful reporting of actual scientific findings. She assigns herself a role in the audience. She sees herself as a selective consumer of information and she imposes that role on the information she encounters from the satirical news. She goes on to point out the connection of these grand scientific principles to very base things. She connects this massive star, which the article has presented to her as a new phenomenon, to a sunburn she got on her “butt” while on a “floaty” in the “lazy river.” She is taken aback that this new scientific phenomenon has effected a personal, intimate, and common part of her life and she is at a loss for “what to think anymore.” In this entry we are witnessing her struggle with cognitive dissonance, her beliefs about the creation of that world that were recently questioned by Stephen Hawkings, and her own personal connection to what the Onion has led her to believe is scientific discovery. In other words, the recent situations of her life, the television shows she has recently watched, her religious worldview, a recent sunburn on a vacation trip, the identity she has constructed for herself as a rational consumer of information, and countless other factors went into how she saw and understood the article.

It is easy for us to see that she failed to connect the “Massive Star” in the article to our sun and see her as a dim-witted christian girl with little to no experience parsing information. However, when we consider the massive amount of information that really goes into processing any information, we can start to understand why a misunderstanding like this can happen. Burke says, “an act of persuasion is affected by the character of the scene in which it takes place and of the agents by whom it is addressed. The same rhetorical act could vary in its effectiveness, according to shifts in the situation or in the attitudes of the audience.” More than his facebook citizen’s intelligence played a role in whether or not she understood the purpose and intent of the Onion article, her attitude and “scene” in which she received the message were just as influential.

But what can we learn from this as rhetors ourselves? I think we must realize that if our audience doesn’t understand or isn’t persuaded by our message, it is not entirely our fault. If we assume it is, then we grossly misunderstand the entire rhetorical process. We can’t get down on ourselves for our own “failure to communicate” but we must work harder to understand all the myriad aspects of our rhetorical situations.

I don’t know how to post this without making it look like I’m bragging

But tonight on facebook a friend of a friend of a friend posted this little narrative:

This narrative is the kind of powerful one that gets circulated that bolsters deeply held beliefs. Even though they are obviously fictional, they serve as confirmatory evidence of these beliefs. Notice there is no argument here that takes place about the existence of God. There is never any stasis reached. The “evidence” provided by this narrative does nothing to prove Gods existence through reason or logic. If anything, it merely argues that anyone who is not an expert in a subject isn’t qualified to discuss it. However, as you can see by the responses, this narrative wins over many people. (All except for me.)

I felt that after reading Crowley, I know the power of these narratives. Now, I’ll finally out myself as a very devout Christian, a Mormon even. So my intention in commenting on this post was in no way supposed to convince the poster not to believe in God (however, I am sure that I will receive quite a bit of backlash from other commenters insinuating that I am). It was simply to show that this narrative sets up a straw man version of an atheist. Almost all of the atheists I know are pretty upright people who don’t creep around on planes trying to convince vulnerable little girls that God doesn’t exist. I simply wanted to express that I don’t believe the narrative, and I hope that will, in some ways deflate some of its hate-mongering power.

As I said in the title, I am not posting this to brag or make it seem like I saved the world a little with my little comment. I just wanted to show that I agree with Crowley and think that these kinds of tiny interactions are what serve to reinforce ideologies and hegemonies. I think if we are going to make a difference in this world, we need to put a little bit of pressure on these narratives and point out how they are not reflections on reality and how the arguments they contain don’t hold up to the pressure.

(Update: Here’s the rest of the conversation. I don’t know how much it adds, but Ben wanted to see. Click it to see full size.)

My Problem with Crowley

After 150 or so pages of Crowley, she had me hooked. I fully believed her assessments of fundamentalism, the Christian right, liberalism, apocalyptism, millenialism, and the dangers of thinking in terms of binary, us/them, friend enemy terms. I was with her all the way. In the first four chapters, she is very clear that she does not mean all Christians or believers in God are part of the problem, but that solely apocalyptists are the topic she is dealing with and the cause of the problems she sees. Then in chapter five she begins a really subtle shift away from apocalyptists and starts incompassing the beliefs of all Christians. She acknowledges at the beginning of chapter five that by examining Christians she is aware that it isn’t proving the point she has set up for four chapters, but moves on and ends up lumping all Christians into one category. She herself begins demonstrating her own ideology of clarity based on her own densely articulated ideologies. It seems by the end of the chapter five that any Christian or anyone who ever voted republican is in the same boat as the apocalyptists.

In chapter seven, what is supposed to be the culmination of her thesis, a new rhetoric that can be used to deal with anyone who does not support gay marriage or who holds up the nuclear family as the ideal, she gives what reads to me to be the same thinking that convinces people to bomb abortion clinics.On page 194 she suggests that liberals she use whatever they can come up with (sorry I don’t have my book and so I can’t give a direct quote) to help Christians see the error of their ways, and then suggests that the best way to get people to take the words of an authority is after suffering, and being upset. I imagine this is exacly the same thinking that someone who bombs an abortion clinic would be thinking. It would sound something like “I just can’t get through to these liberals no matter how much I try to talk some sense into them. They just don’t listen. Well, I’ll make them listen. I’ll wake them up and make them see the error of their ways.” Those two quotes from Crowley so close together literally frightened me.

Not only that, but she spends a lot of time talking about conversion, which in itself is deeply entrenched in a binary thinking. In order for a person to be “converted” they have to stop being one thing and become another. She seems to hope to convert all Christians to liberal ways of thinking. In other words, she sets up a very clear us/them, friend/enemy binary. She imagines the reader as on her side and suggests a few ways that anyone who doesn’t hold her ideals can be convinced to see the error of their ways and jump over to her side.

There was one point where I agreed with Crowley and Taylor covers it very well in her post. Crowley suggests that the most powerful way to help bring understanding to someone with contrary views is through narrative. She says that the emotional appeals inherent in narratives have more force in convincing people than logic or facts ever will. She sites the example of the story Ronald Regan told of the woman living on welfare with 80 forged identities driving around in cadillacs purchased with taxpayer money. She then talks about how, even though this story isn’t true and has never been true, it still permeates much of the discussion on welfare today. I get the feeling that Crowley might even be suggesting with this example that the narratives might even need to greatly stretch the truth, or even be wholly fabricated, to begin to convince people. I don’t agree that this is a good plan however.

So all in all, I expected great things from the last chapter of this wonderful book, but I was sorely disappointed to see that Crowley herself was not even capable of the types of thinking and understanding and argument that she suggests herself. She instead redraws the boundary between Christians and liberals and defends the liberal side with all the force she can muster in what will surely be an endless war unless we can listen to Crowley, start sharing our real stories of human success and triumph and try, not to convert each other, but to understand one another.

Mad Men, Aristotle, and Backwards thinking

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Aristotle, Don Draper, Feminism, I.A. Richards, Mad Men, Post-process, postmodernism, rhetoric

So the wife and I have started watching Mad Men, and it is probably the best TV show I’ve seen since the first three seasons of The Office. What I really love about the show are the characters. Each is very flawed: they make the worst decisions, are racist, sexist, treat each other horribly, and cause so much of their own trouble. But they are all so good looking and likable, and in small moments we get to see their vulnerabilities and pity them. The writing is amazing and that’s what keeps me watching. But one aspect of the show that is absolutely fascinating is how well the characters act from the 1950s mindset in which the show is set. Not only does the setting provide beautiful and foreign clothes and products to look at, but also it shows off just how backwards seeming Americans were not so long ago.

As I said before, these characters are constantly saying and doing things that we consider dangerous or wrong and that would get anyone who did or said them today fired or worse. For example, As a prank for a coworker coming back from his honeymoon, the office mates pay a Chinese immigrant family to sit in his office. Doctors (and everyone else for that matter) smoke cigarettes in the examination rooms; A pregnant character is regularly seen smoking and drinking and talks about eating raw hamburger; children roam around freely in the backseats; when a child comes in the room with a dry cleaning bag over her head pretending to be an astronaut, the mother scolds her for leaving the clothes on the couch instead of warning the child of the dangers; when the executive secretary shows a new secretary the typewriter at her desk she says, “Don’t be overwhelmed by all this technology, they’ve made these things so easy even a woman can use them,” to which the woman breathes a sigh of relief. I concede that this is a fictionalized version of the 50s, but nevertheless these things did happen, and they happened because of the mindset of the people.

Along with watching Mad Men, I am reading Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity Through the Renaissance, by Cheryl Glenn. This book seeks to explore rhetorical history from a feminist perspective and reclaim some history for female rhetoricians. Glenn denies that historiography works to “reflect” the truth of historical events, and wants the read to understand that all history is always told from a particular perspective and therefore privileges certain histories.

These two texts Mad Men and Rhetoric Retold, surely colored my reading of Aristotles Rhetoric, in that I was primed to look for how backwards Aristotle’s thinking was, how his claims, when seen from my particular perspective, were incongruous with my morals and with my version of reality and social justice.

For example, Aristotle claims that “We must not make people believe what is wrong,” (23) and “What makes a man a ‘sophist’ is not his faculty, but his moral purpose” (24). To Aristotle, these statements were probably (possibly?) commonly understood by his audience to mean one thing, because his societies definitions of”what is wrong” and “moral purpose” were more homogeneous then they would be among an audience today. Today’s postmodern audiences will see “moral purpose” and “what is wrong” in a different way than the original audience of the text. Some in the audience will even doubt the existence of morals and right and wrong, which would make the conversation entirely different. Aristotle also condemns creating dialectic syllogisms from “the fancies of crazy people” (27) and fully supports using “evidence given under torture” (24). These notions, if spoken today, would be (and probably are) gaffs that would surely alienate many in his audience.

Just like the characters in Mad Men say and do things that seem backwards to us but natural to them, Aristotle makes claims that seems silly at best and racist or sexist at worst. So if Aristotle is trying to persuade me, Steven Hopkins in 2011, of his good character, he is not doing that great of a job. But it would be impossible for him to do a good job because rhetoric is always, to paraphrase Thomas Kent, public, interpretive, and situated. Watching Mad Men and reading Rhetoric Retold, along with an infinite number of other experiences I’ve had, influenced my reading of Rhetoric just as much as the words Aristotle wrote.

I really like I.A. Richards sentiments on this. The more rhetoricians of the past tried to codify and systematize rhetoric in the past, the more they failed to answer the bigger and more important questions like “How does a word mean?” (7). And he points out that for too long people have carried a “Proper Meaning Superstition” about words. In other words, the enlightenment lead rhetoricians to try to look at words as if the were easily grasped concepts and had solid agreed upon meanings for everyone who used them. Through thinkers like Richards we realize that words like “wrong” and “moral” that Aristotle uses so easily to mean one thing, no longer (or perhaps never) mean exactly what Aristotle originally intended them to mean.

It really makes me wonder, if given the chance to understand our time and our mindset, what would Aristotle have to say today about rhetoric? And also, what would Don Draper think of the new Skittles Commercials?