Don't you question MEmes!

Everyday for at least an hour, me and a group of my co-workers have a battle to see who can find the funniest meme of the day. This is the biggest waste of time throughout my entire day but, I look forward to this hour of consumerism. It’s really a combination of everything you could think of from the realistic Spongebob memes to random cartoons that add attitude to the everyday conversation. 

Memes in my phone that take up way too much room 

Tons of photos like these swarm my camera roll, taking up way more space than they need to but for what reason? Stickiness is the reason. According to Jenkins, Ford & Green in their book called Spreadable Media, “stickiness broadly refers to the need to create content that attracts audience attention and engagement”. Is this not what I do along with the few other girls included in this work group chat? Is the goal not to create content or share content that would attract attention and engagement within the group? What if we think even deeper and ask, is this not the reason we create or share anything online, or as a matter of fact, is this not the reason we create or share anything in general? 

thereuven (in honor of Valentines day)

Behind the group chat memes being sent daily, there are a million questions to be asked prior to sending the best meme. First question, is it something everyone will understand? If I try to send a funny meme of Dwight from The Office to the group, but all of my early 2000’s baby co-workers are too young to even know what The Office is, I’m wasting my time and the stickiness of the content I want to share won't be as effective as it could've been. Knowing the audience you wish to attract is a key component when sharing anything really. 

The second question to ask is if it is memorable enough. If it is not funny, and not worth remembering then obviously it won't be worthy of the group chat and will be forgotten in the land of “left on read”. I really think that this is the idea of stickiness. The word itself implies the material must be stuck in our minds. If the meme is able to not only gain attention from someone but have them in some form or fashion interact with that meme, I’ve accomplished my goal of sharing something successfully and having it remembered by someone else. 

A good example of people that do this all the time are Youtubers. One of my favorite Youtubers, Jenna Marbles makes videos REVIEWING MEMES! She does a bunch of different things for her channel but something that I love to watch are her videos in which she picks out from the internet and basically makes mini reaction videos to these memes. Every creator of these memes ultimately has a goal. To share with their friends, to make it onto her very large platform, to create just for the sake of creating, it all connects back to whether or not it is important enough to share with the world in order for others to believe it's worth viewing. On the next level of stickiness, she has chosen these videos to review and react to, then posts herself ultimately sharing the original videos because of the desire for it to be remembered by her audience. On an even further level, people like me who want to share this with the one other person I know who watched Jenna Marbles because I want to make them laugh. I want to leave an impact on that person, enough to have them remember the video I have just sent to them. Is this because we all want an audience to approve of what we find funny? From memes to meme videos, the baseline of sharing these is the desire to grab the attention of another individual.

Jenna and Julian 

The action of forwarding a meme or sending a video through a mutual platform is the idea of spreadability. The idea of stickiness and spreadability go hand and hand because without the desire to have something shared, there would be no reason for spreadability. Since we as humans have that desire for someone else's attention and interaction with things they find interesting, the way in which we share these different ideas is what we call spreadability. This can be by word of mouth or over a text but how easily this message can be comprehended is the end game of the entire system. We will take Jenna Marbles for example once more. The content created is driven by the desire for others to interact and remember the content made, in this case it is her reaction video of memes others have created of her. The way in which she spreads her content, which is a large platform on Youtube and at the ease of a button, explains the level of spreadability she possesses. 

The idea of spreadability and stickiness, as described in Spreadable Media boils down to human desire to be noticed. The idea that we see something and think to share with the world or even a small work group chat in order to achieve the amount of recognition we think that specific thing requires is absolutely normal to me. Can we compare this to times that have always existed? A caveman somewhere wanted to show their fellow caveman what a fire was at one point, now they may not have done it to feel a sort of recognition from their fellow caveman but the idea and the concept still reside.