Talking about the concept of metaphors has really interested me, and made me more aware of metaphors I am exposed to in my day to day life. One specific variant that I find to be interesting is the use of memes as metaphors. More specifically, I’d like to discuss quotes and screenshots taken from short videos that were uploaded on the social media app Vine. In communities I’m a part of online, as well as with my friends I have in real life, I noticed how much we’re able to get across by just showing a picture or saying a quick phrase. At one point I was discussing it with a friend, and I compared it to an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation (This is the second time I’ve gotten the opportunity to write about Star Trek for this class, and I am over the moon about it.) titled “Darmok,” where Captain Picard is stranded on a planet with an alien whose language is based entirely upon allegories based on his culture’s history and mythology. Equating this communication to be a bunch of overblown references to online culture amused me to no end. In the case of screenshots of Vines used as reaction images, one of my favorites is one taken from a video of a man driving down a street and passing a “Road work ahead” sign. The looks into the camera and sarcastically says, “Road work ahead? Uh, yeah, I sure hope it does!” This has lead to people posting this still of the video, basically saying in shorthand, “Yes, that is the intended way that things should be working, and I hope they continue to work as such.” In the case of quoiting vines in verbal or textual conversation, one that delights myself and many others is a reference to a vine where the person recording walks into a room singing “I want to see my little boy,” where another man is holding a cat that seems to halfheartedly struggle out of his arms. The man holding the cat exclaims, “Here he comes!” on beat to the cameraman’s song, who then repeats his chorus. One singing or typing “I want to see my little boy” is often used to refer to one’s pets, friends, or favorite characters, expressing joy and perhaps some sort of nurturing feelings. These references can be looked at to be a mixture of slang and jargon, These work as slang as they are mostly used within communities of younger people who were aware of Vine when it was still running, and jargon as it requires special knowledge gained from watching the videos to understand. As silly as it may appear to be, I truly love the kind of culture that the Internet and Vine has brought to the table. I like to think we’ve made our own modern form of allegories and hieroglyphics in the form of quotes and reaction images that we’ve gathered and understood over shared experiences that could never happen without the internet.
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April 2019
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