Film Meme Data Collectors
I initially started out wanting to research film archivists. A dream is to work at the Margaret Herrick Library; surrounded with the works of the best. As I started collecting data on what I was looking for, what I realized is that the community I was interacting with were data collectors. Are we all familiar with memes? Not just the funny ones with cats, but the ones that delve a bit deeper into the meta of a film. Think back to last summer and the Instagram and TikTok posts of a stressed out Cillian Murphy in Oppenheimer. The film was about the man that created the atomic bomb and before detonating it, realized that there was a sliver of a chance that it had the capacity to end human life on earth if his calculations were off. The blank expression of sheer panic on his face has been repeatedly used by online posters to express their feelings about everything from a break-up to receiving the wrong order at Starbucks.
The characteristics to research by Fisher and Fulton (2022) that I believe will work well for this assignment will be the emphasis on collaboration among diverse information providers, the capacity to form around people’s needs to access and use information, and the capacity to exploit the information-sharing qualities of emerging technologies. (p. 43)
Memes shared across social media platforms of popular films and television shows takes a collaboration among all viewers. If we all saw the same film, did we take away the same point of view? Are there moments in the movie that will resonate differently with each viewer. Regardless of socio-economic background, a shot of Barbie & Ken staring out at Malibu is universal. The exploitation of the information-sharing habits can be seen by PR and marketing firms utilizing the hype on social media to promote their upcoming films. If it can become a moment before the film is even released, it’s gained momentum.
Faidley (2021) argues that “raising one’s consciousness requires challenging taken-for-granted assumptions” (p. 147). The power of controlling the narrative through the same image filtered through different apps was studied by her and her graduate class to analyze if the message of the film from the point of view of the filmmakers was the takeaway of the masses that posted about it. In her review of the work of Jennifer O’Meara, Droumeva (2022) argues that “the circulation of historically dubbed performances exists within their fixed meanings and at the
same time is reanimated by diverse emergent discourses, as concerns and issues shift with time” (p.123). Using classic Hollywood stars, her work focuses on how the original images remain the same, but the meaning shifts with each generation to fit the populace opinion. Shin (2022) goes into the analytics of movies that have been made into memes and the traffic those film receive. Movies like Shawshank Redemption and The Matrix were popular in their own right, but have now had a second life online represented in memes with their main characters being used as the everyday man conveying messages (p. 534).
The community is those that utilize media artifacts (stills and clips from movies) and add their own sentiment to convey their personal beliefs and views (memes). Film archivists seems like a stretch because what I see from the literature is that it’s more data collection. Is it cheating if I refer to them as film meme data collectors? The films are watched, the stills are collected, the opinions are etched into existing works that are then shared with the masses for either a laugh or understanding, or both. We are but a collection of our memories and memes are picking up on the radar of information professionals.
References
Droumeva, M. (2022). Review: Women’s Voices in Digital Media: The Sonic Screen from Film to Memes, by Jennifer O’Meara. Film Quarterly, 76(2), 123–124. https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2022.76.2.123
Faidley, Evan W. “‘Movies, TV Shows, and Memes… Oh My!’: An Honors Education through Popular Culture and Critical Pedagogy.” Honors in Practice, vol. 17, 2021, pp. 145-.
Fisher, K. E. & & Fulton, C. (2022). Information communities. In S. Hirsh (Ed.), Information services today (3, 42-44). Rowman & Littlefield.
Shin, Seungkyu, et al. “Analysis of Evolution of Movies Using Massive Movie-Tag Meme Network Data.” Journal of the Korean Physical Society, vol. 80, no. 6, 2022, pp. 533–42, https://doi.org/10.1007/s40042-022-00454-6.
