Dr. Chapman's Love Shack: A Qualitative Analysis of Memetic Communication

Dedicated to Zachary Wright, my research partner without whom this project never would have succeeded. He is truly the spiciest meme-lord.

Memes are My Love Language

“Memes are my love language,” a student shouted years ago in “Introduction to Communications” as the subject of the popular book by Gary Chapman’s love languages caused a ruckus in the room. The crowd of 50 students erupted in laughter and affirmative cheers. That student in that instance was expressing one of the most intriguing emergences in the 21st century: the proliferation and normalization of pictorial memes in internet culture. What is a meme? Defined quite broadly, a meme is a piece of cultural genetic material that is shared, like a virus, through hosts (Dawkins, 245-260). Like a virus, it adapts rapidly, or it dies out (Lynch, 2-16). Some of the top research universities around the globe are tracking the generation of this content by examining pictorial memes in particular, as they provide a unique window into how culture is made on the microscopic level. It allows us to open our collective human consciousness and examine just what makes us tick.

How Memes Work

Our goal was to take the findings of some of these strictly empirical models and see if they work in a localized setting. In other words, is the theory observable when we look at a small sample? It turns out, it is. First, a pictorial meme, which for the sake of brevity we will call a meme from now on, is not a single picture. A meme is a series of images, all cohering around basic categories. Keep in mind because memes come in a progression of pictures, meme series overlap with each other. A research project from Tel Aviv University concluded that meme families gain cohesion around 3 basic categories: concrete images, unique ideas, and ideology (Segev et al. 417-433). Memes do not thrive in moderation, they live lives of extremes. In this way, the meme is the message, in that memes communicate by their virulent and incipient mnemonic qualities via concrete imagery, original speech acts, and strong ideology. However, it is not enough for a meme to merely communicate an original idea clearly, it must also be persuasive. The rhetoric of the meme, according to the university of Kemp’s research, when successful tends to appeal to logic, custom, emotion, prestige, and propinquity—as if the idea emanates from those physically or emotionally close to us (Burgess et al).

A Case Study

To begin testing whether or not our theory held water, we considered the current relationship between the “Moody Memes” Facebook page administrators and their relationship to memes. To begin with the conclusion of our findings on Moody Memes, we saw that as a means of communication, the memes from the “Moody Memes” page have largely failed in recent times. This is due to the fact that they neglected several key components of what makes a picture meme-worthy and propels it into imitation.The reasons for considering this page in particular is because it is a megaphone into a localized sub-culture and provides a perfect lab environment for research. The page has 1,300 active followers on Facebook. We must acknowledge that prior to the invention and proliferation of social technology like smartphones and Facebook, this entire relationship would not exist. Neither would the interrelationship be possible without the proliferation of open-source code and app technology and image processing software that can run on smartphones.

Conclusions

The page administrators often failed to achieve meme-worthiness because they neglected two key components. First, the page administrators often do not create memes. Instead, they share a funny photo or clip-art from a cartoon in the newspaper. Once again, while it may be funny to some people, these pictures are not memes unless they become a part of a replicated series that undergoes change through imitation.Second, we conclude that they often fail because they miss two out of the three marks of what make a meme cohesive: original speech acts and strong ideology. The formats the administrators utilize are worn out. This reflects a common misunderstanding of how language works in general. Specifically, the administrators do not understand the linguistic phenomena of synchronic drift. Linguists study language over time and observe the various ways in which language imperceptibly changes over time, drifting away from their original forms. As a media reliant on unique “forms” or templates, memes rapidly drift away from their original forms. Furthermore, they undergo semantic bleaching, which is the loss of original meaning over time. Memes are not exceptions to these linguistic phenomena. If anything, they exhibit a higher rate of drift and bleaching as memes have moved from purely joke-based material to highly abstract, surrealist formats.In the case of “Moody Memes,” we observed an example of a “dead” meme format, demonstrating failure to utilize original speech acts and strong ideology with persuasive rhetoric. A meme is a “dead” format when it has gone through enough drift and bleaching to where it is no longer funny. The visceral emotive response is gone because the sociocultural community has sped up the linguistic process of drift and bleaching through rapid and virulent imitation. For many people, this process is intuitive, and they move with the constant evolving process of memetic communication. However, for some, like the administrators of Moody Memes, linguistic drift and bleaching seem to go unnoticed by the administrators.For example, one of the memes utilizes the template known as “what if I told you” which features a picture of Morpheus from The Matrix and often communicates a passive aggressive or unpopular opinion. In this instance, it says “What if I told you there are better places than the middle of the hall to have a conversation." This is an example of a dead meme which the content creators have unknowingly attempted to resurrect, but to no avail. Ostensibly, we can prove this by metrics, if and only if post likes and comments coincide with actual cultural impact. Their post garnered only 20 reactions out of their 1,300 followers at the time this was written.Additionally, consider that out of their following of 1,300 people, only 8 people reacted to a meme which said “When your number is called at the omelet station” and depicted a familiar meme character, Robbie Rotten, smiling maniacally. While the meme says something original and the meme communicates concretely, the idea is so niche and innocuous, that little compels the page subscribers to forward the meme into ideological reproduction.

Bad Theory = Bad Memes, Good Theory = Good Memes?

An Ideological Culture

The environment of Moody Bible Institute, the Moody Memes page audience, thrives off of strong ideology. One of the central and most common binding purposes for the school is precisely the ideology “Go [...] and make disciples…” (Matt 28:19-20 NRSV). In a culture which believes in the apocalyptic and prophetic call of God to unveil those realities which did not exist, why is it that we are unable to say something significant?After all, it has been done by others. Some of the most successful meme pages are run by religious individuals and are dedicated to theologians. Tommy Aqua’s Summa Memeologica, a Facebook page dedicated solely to Thomist, Aristotelian, and Roman Catholic memes has 10,000 followers. The number of followers is not determinate of the success of a meme. Instead, the popularity is an example of how an individual can pick an ideologically significant position, stick to it with humor, and gain a following. The administrator of Tommy Aqua’s regularly picks very strong viewpoints, like a rejection of capitalism as compatible with the Christian life, defense of papal support, and even sometimes defense of Catholic anti-contraceptive dogma. While the Moody Memes page regularly communicates in concrete images, making their memes appealing to the average “consumer” of memes, creating a meme for consumption is not enough. The entire life of a meme is bound up in its virulent procreation via the cooperation of humans on the other sides of the network. Thus, the meme creators need to harness the power of controversy and creativity alongside their ability to think concretely.

A Biblical Perspective on Memes as Communication

The Prophetic Ministry of Memes

Memes are inherently built for prophetic communication as they bring concepts in the real world into a higher level of abstract discourse. They are deconstructive in nature, taking apart a complex idea or feeling and breaking it into smaller components so that the meme maker can fit it onto the unrelated template as a metaphor. Even the most absurd and abstract memes communicate something, even if it is an underlying philosophy that life is meaningless. Even the kind of humor that only a select few get due to its highly asinine premises and redundant nature are funny because they are appealing to an underlying expression that life is absurd.[embed]https://youtu.be/9g3--WYH8SY[/embed]Throughout the prophetic tradition, we see the prophets deconstructing the reality of the status quo and re-presenting the community a new vision. Examples of this are rife throughout the OT. The most striking to me at the moment is when Jeremiah presents the prophetic word of the Lord: repent of face destruction. He begins in Jeremiah chapter 4 by presenting a way out. Then in 4:23 he deconstructs the creation story and uses it to his own template of un-creation to powerfully demonstrate what will happen if the people will not listen to the Lord.Obviously, I do not take myself so seriously that I am comparing sharing an internet picture with the prophetic witness of the Old Testament. I am merely offering this as a paradigm for how it can and probably should function. Certainly, the prophetic is not at odds with humor either. Harsh polemical arguments are sprinkled throughout the Old Testament, such as in the story of Elijah and the prophets of Baal. There is certainly precedent for deconstructive humor in the canon of Christian scriptures.However, in order to utilize memes as a means of proactive communication, we must not only challenge the faux pas of an insular culture, but also communicate constructively, take a stand for something, and say it with longstanding rhetorical effect through humor. The way page administrators must achieve this is through not only rebuke but invitation into new reality. Even Jesus cracked a joke once in a while to do the double duty of rebuke and redemption (Matt 19:23-24).

The Apocalyptic Ministry of Memes

When we re-present to the world an alternative paradigm for a shared experience, we are quite literally opening an alternative reality. We are opening a new pathway for someone to understand their situation in the world. Again, the precedence exists for wildly creative higher discursive modes of communication. The genre which did this best was the Apocalyptic. The Apocalyptic genre is related to the prophetic in that it deconstructs the present reality, however it goes one step further and unveils the coming of a new reality.The apocalyptic writings were especially popular at a time when religious persecution was at its height against Christians and it remained unsafe to express one's opinions and beliefs. Incidentally, insubordination of the social order of Roman hierarchy was tantamount to treason. The reason Jesus died was not a misunderstanding of his message, it was because the Roman government understood all too well that he came to put an end to the present reality.Perhaps this is speculative, but I wonder why it is that memes have emerged now at this point in history in their pictorial and abstracted form. I wonder about our underlying needs as humans: the need to feel respected, the need for community and a sense of belonging, the need for a sense of higher purpose, and the need to be understood. I wonder if perhaps memes allow us a way to externalize our collective experiences in ways that artificially allow us to equate experiences. The memes which utilize a "that feel when" format which describe a feeling of life experience for which we do not have a specific word or phrase exemplify this well. Perhaps memes have emerged as a means of overcoming our present and very real communicative barriers, and as such become spatially binding.In a world where memes perpetuate racism and misogyny at their worst, and give voice to collective experience or call forth into new realities at their best, I believe it is crucial that we utilize the medium as a means to communicate constructively into an alternative reality that mirrors the way of Christ.

The Parabolic Ministry of Memes

Jesus' formulaic invocation is inherently prophetic and memetic: "you have heard it said... but I say unto you." Jesus takes known concepts and opens up new social imaginaries for his followers. One the one hand, he reaches his followers where they are at by anchoring what he communicates in a known template. One the other hand he calls them into a deeper understanding by changing their paradigms.

Qualitative Analysis

The task of proactively communicating through memes is difficult. As we attempted to create an alternate vision for what memetic communication should look like, we found that it was far easier to deconstruct harmful ideas or even mock them than to call forth a new reality. As we began to look for proactive methods to channel constructive communication, we sought out qualitative crowd-sourced feedback. The names of our participants have been redacted. We make note of this because the solution to the issue of purely negative communication came from within the very same community that we were targeting for our experiment.Significantly, one person offered that we ought to look past the faux-pas of a conservative Christian school and get at what motivates the stereotypes. A widely known fact is that humans bond around a sense of belonging and a common center. At Moody, the common center is, ideally, Christ. However, many of the faux-pas that were apparent pointed to a deep sense of fear for being an outsider and alienation from the community. In talking over this issue with another individual, they suggested that we make our competing page speak from the mouth of an infamous building’s personality: The Chapman Center.

The Love Shack is Where It's At

The Love Shack is a Little Old Place...

Originally, we named the page “Dr. Chapman’s Love Shack” as a snarky commentary to indict much of the drama surrounding the creation of the building. As with anything so monumental and expensive, the construction of the Chapman Center has been highly politicized and has become a symbol all on its own. The building communicates a posture of daftness from administration: the building’s back is to the street and the entrance is not intuitive. You might ask why it matters that the building face the street. The reason this is ironic is for the huge museum that was erected to marriage and family, which is open to the public, but not visible anywhere from the street. The museum, being almost always empty, is dead center across from the only entrance to the Sweeting Center, the location for almost all of Moody's undergraduate courses.This display, which emphasizes and elevates the nuclear family, does significant harm to our spiritual family who do not have these ties. Every day our faculty and students who are single, divorced, and same-sex attracted are forced to look into an empty museum dedicated to the nuclear family they may never have. The emptiness of that room communicates to our family in the faith deeply on a daily, subconscious, liturgical level. It communicates that they are second-class members of the family of God, because our primary motivation and concern is the nuclear family.Paired with the timing of the closure of Moody Spokane and a mass layoff of faculty, the building has become a monument to administrative failure, earning the nickname “Spokane’s Tombstone” among some students. How could such an ikon of indifference, inflexibility, and insensitivity become anything more than a sacrilegious symbol? Why don’t you ask the Love Shack herself.

Life Begins at Conception

You see, life begins at conception. The Chapman Center never asked to be born, she is just a product of her environment. She cannot help that she has a body type that was in vogue in the 2000’s but now the public considers her to be bulky or plus sized. She received her fashion sense from her parents, which is psychedelic to say the least. As for the fact that she is turning a cold shoulder to the city, she is only a building and she cannot turn herself around. She might be large, she might be square, but she’s the Love Shack and she’s got your back.Yes, we indeed created a persona that matched the architecture to channel positive feelings through the campus. What began as largely a task of creating memes became the creation of a person: Dr. Chapman’s Love Shack. The Love Shack herself is body positive, she’s single-affirming, she’s inclusive just like the love of God, and she’s all about spreading that love.

Results

Beyond the seeming absurdity of assuming the personality of an anthropomorphic female building, we found a few surprises along the way in our research. First, we must remark that at the time of writing, the page achieved 200 followers over the course of about 2 weeks. Our theory was indeed confirmed that concrete, original, ideologically significant content communicated rhetorically well achieves full memeses through human hosts.

Methodology and Sociological Research

First, we exposed our audience to a sample size of about 150 memes, most of them original in content, including the templates. As we exposed them to this sample, we attempted to prod at a variety of tropes. We introduced consistency to posting in our experiment  as research suggests statistically speaking, repeated exposure in a social network is enough to gain traction (Notarmuzi et al; Weng et al). We began posting once every hour from the hours of 7am to 10pm using Facebook’s post scheduling feature. When we exposed this test group to the content, we found that our most popular posts tended to be posts with a strong emotive appeal, suggesting that people have a love for the flavor of spice, so to speak. Not surprisingly, people are drawn to negativity.

Content Socialization

After exposing them to content, people slowly but surely began socializing with it. In order to expose the content to a larger amount of people, we sent an invitation to friends on Facebook in the Moody community to follow, then we shared the page to Moody Memes. We also attempted to garner the attention of the audience of Moody Memes through gently poking fun at the Moody Meme’s use of outdated material. This attempt was successful and our following began to rise, increasing the rate of socialization with our material.

Legitimization

Our content became legitimized and by extension, Memes as a means of communication and our thesis (the Meme is the message) through a few successful breakthroughs. This occurred first when, independent of each other and independent of any suggestion from the page, 4 people promoted the page on their own Facebook sites to all their friends using the exact same phrase that began this endeavor: “Memes are my love language.” Second, this occurred when we received our own content back to us in the form of original memes from our participants. Further completing the feedback loop, users began to send original content, some without being asked, others in response to our encouragement in light of their negative reactions to certain content. In this way, our audience demonstrated externalization of memetic communication and implicitly their internalization of the content we exposed them to. They demonstrated this by finally giving life to the memes we exposed them to by sending us new instances of these memes. By creating an easier avenue to find original content on our page over and against the Moody Memes page, we confirmed that putting large amounts of content into the network consistently results in memory retention. One of the more popular memes that demonstrates this phenomena finds cohesion around the friendship of well-known professors John Clark and Marcus Johnson and is running commentary on their friendship, popularity with students, and the affinities their classes give students for high liturgical traditions (especially Anglicanism).

Negative Feedback

Over the course of our experiment, we of course received a handful of negative comments, criticisms, and messages. It should be noted that none of these were hateful responses nor were they threatening directly. The negative feedback we received on the page itself was mostly in relationship to the given user's perception of the page as inherently disrespectful and demeaning. We attempted to do our best to encourage more interaction with our page by urging these users to send us content they would rather see, but unfortunately no one took us up on this offer.However, we demonstrated servant communication in this regard by allowing their content to stay up on our forum and by encouraging them to participate in the effort of communicating memetically. Because of the value placed upon the freedom of expression, we demonstrated this through receiving critical feedback without argument and gave space for it to exist side by side with our content.

Demographics

An official empirical observation on the demographics of our participants lies outside of the scope of this project, however it is readily observable that the subscribers to our page were from incredibly diverse backgrounds and experiences. Some of our participants for instance are well known for being more socially progressive, others socially conservative, while still others consider themselves alternatively identifying from a left-right scale. By rotating the subject of conversation intentionally and inviting others to participate in our endeavor, we fostered an atmosphere of diversity in communication.

Outlying Phenomena

An interesting phenomena occurred for which we do not have a firm explanation. Twice, we received submissions of a new meme instance in duplicate form from separate people. We have provided these duplicate submissions below. Without questioning our participants, we might conclude that our participants were independently sharing related content with each other prior to sharing to our page.[gallery columns="4" ids="1375,1394,1393,1395"]

The Most Popular Posts

We will not sugarcoat the fact that some of our most popular posts were deconstructive and antagonistic towards particular ideological positions. One of the most popular was a post about the Moody Standard and me, Tyler Davis, as the specific contributor. However, by the end of this project, the post with significantly more engagement than any other post was a post which celebrated the playful and mischievous nature of beloved professor Dr. Kyeong-Sook Park, whom we are told is fond of playing pranks on over-trusting freshmen during the lunch hour.In this instance, I believe we are witnessing the more positive engagement that can be found in memetic communication as it also can celebrate someone for their quirky and endearing qualities. Memes are not inherently only capable of negativity it turns out, especially not in the context of Moody Bible Institute. Rather, they can function in a variety of ways, the most encouraging result being that they can be uplifting and celebratory. I believe this meme instance demonstrates how it can function in an uplifting manner especially well because the meme did not originate from the content creators, it originated from a participant.

The Kingdom of Heaven is Like...

What we were surprised the most by in this pursuit was how even though we began by exposing our sample to a broad swath of content that pokes fun at many different tropes, the people who supported and began following the page could not be more ideologically opposed politically, theologically, and relationally. Our hope for the future of the Love Shack herself is that she can go on to become a symbol of the love and inclusiveness that we were able to demonstrate through memes. While humans often bond over negativity, what comes after? I seem to remember someone saying “the kingdom of heaven is like…” right before making all sorts of wild comparisons. Perhaps the kingdom of heaven is like a body-positive talking building who helps people get through finals. In the end I still think a picture communicates more than a thousand words. In such a noisy world, what cuts through all the noise is someone who speaks the native language. So what speaks to me? Would you understand if I told you memes are my love language?   

Works Cited

Bruenig, Elizabeth. “Why Is Millennial Humor so Weird?” The Washington Post, WP Company, 11 Aug. 2017.Burgess, Adam, et al. “Prestige, Performance and Social Pressure in Viral Challenge Memes: Neknomination, the Ice-Bucket Challenge and SmearForSmear as Imitative Encounters.” Sociology, vol. 52, no. 5, 2017, pp. 1035–1051.Dawkins, Richard. The Extended Selfish Gene. Oxford University Press, 2016.Lynch, Aaron. Thought Contagion: How Belief Spreads through Society. BasicBooks, 1998.Notarmuzi, Daniele, and Claudio Castellano. “Analytical Study of Quality-Biased Competition Dynamics for Memes in Social Media.” EPL (Europhysics Letters), vol. 122, no. 2, 2018, p. 28002.Peirson, Abel L, and E Meltem Tolunay. “Dank Learning: Generating Memes Using Deep Neural Networks.” ArXiv.Segev, Elad, et al. “Families and Networks of Internet Memes: The Relationship Between Cohesiveness, Uniqueness, and Quiddity Concreteness.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, vol. 20, no. 4, 2015, pp. 417–433.Weng, L., et al. “Competition among Memes in a World with Limited Attention.” Scientific Reports, vol. 2, no. 1, 2012.