Tag Archives: meme

I Literally Can’t Even

Literally… Can’t Even…

By the time you read this the title phrase will be a cringeworthy embarrassment to the teens that popularized it just over a month ago. Ok, so I’m exaggerating slightly, but you get my point — new slang enters, and leaves, our pop lexicon faster than the rise and fall of internet hasbeen Psy. The simplified life-cycle goes something like this:

Week 1: Teens co-opt and twist an existing word or phrase to a new meaning.

Week 2: Parents of teens scratch heads; teens’ obfuscation is successful.

Week 3: Social networks both on and offline amplify the new “meme”.

Week 4: Corporations targeting the teen demographic adopt the meme themselves.

Week 5: Mass media picks up the story.

Week 5 + 1 Day: New meme is old news; teens move on; parents continue head-scratching; corporate ad agencies still promoting old meme are fired.

To an amateur linguist this process is fascinating. Though, I must admit to heart palpitations — metaphorical ones — when I hear people, young and old, use and misuse “literally”. As for “can’t even”, well, its time has already passed. Next!

From NYT:

A little paradox of Internet celebrity is that a YouTube personality can amass millions upon millions of young fans by making it seem as if he’s chatting with each of them one to one. Tyler Oakley, a 26-year-old man who identifies as a “professional fangirl,” is a master of the genre. He has nerd glasses, pinchable cheeks, a quiff he dyes in shades of blue and green and more YouTube subscribers than Shakira. Some of his teenage admirers have told him that he is the very first gay person that they have ever seen. He models slumber party outfits and gushes over boy bands, giving the kids who watch him from their bedrooms a peek into a wider world.

In March 2012, Oakley faced the camera, balanced a laptop in his sightline and paged through a photo set of the curly-haired actor Darren Criss, whose turn as a hunky gay singer in “Glee” made him a fixture of teenage dreams. In these new pictures, which had just been leaked online, Criss was lounging on a beach wearing only a pair of low-rise jeans and a layer of perspiration. Oakley’s videotaped reaction was exultant. “I literally cannot even,” he informed his fans. “I can’t even. I am unable to even. I have lost my ability to even. I am so unable to even. Oh, my God. Oh, my God!”

Soon, Oakley’s groupies had immortalized his soliloquy in GIF form: “Can’t” upon “can’t,” looping forever. Now they could conjure the GIF whenever they felt so overcome by emotion that they couldn’t even complete a thought. Oakley was not the first to recast the sentence fragment “I can’t even” as a stand-alone expression. He just helped shepherd it out of the insular realm of Tumblr fandom and into the wide-open Internet. That June, John Green, a writer of fiction for young adults who was awed by the praise for his breakaway novel, “The Fault in Our Stars,” pledged to “endeavor to regain my ability to even.” When Kacey Musgraves, then 25, won Best Country Album at the 2014 Grammy Awards, besting Taylor Swift, she began her acceptance speech with two “I can’t evens.” And this season, “Saturday Night Live” aired a sketchin which a trio of nasal-toned interns “literally couldn’t even” deal with their office’s frigid temperature. The punch line lands when they screech at a fourth intern to close her window, and the audience sees her sitting helplessly at her desk, both arms suspended in plaster casts. “I can’t,” she whimpers. “I literally cannot.”

For those who grew up when teenagers didn’t “can’t,” the phrase might register as a whimper, as if millennials have spun their inability to climb the staircase out of the parental basement into a mantra. At least the Valley Girls of the 1980s and ’90s, who turned every statement into a question, and the vocal-fried pop tarts of the early 2000s, who growled almost inaudibly, had the decency to finish their sentences. Kids today, it seems, are so mindless that they can’t even complete their verb phrases.

But if you really believe that teenage girls (and boys) don’t know what they’re talking about, it’s more likely that they just don’t want you to know what they’re talking about. Teenagers may not be able to drive or vote or stay out past curfew or use the bathroom during school hours without permission, but they can talk. Their speech is the site of rebellion, and their slang provides shelter from adult scrutiny.

Guarding the secret code has become tricky, though. Teenagers used to listen for the telltale click of a parent eavesdropping on the telephone line. Now somebody (or something) is monitoring every keystroke. If an adult picks up a scrap of inscrutable teenager-speak via text or Twitter or a whisper wafting up from the back seat, she can access its definition on Urban Dictionary or Genius (which explains that “?‘I can’t even’ is a state of speechlessness too deep to even express in any other words”). In 1980, the linguist David Maurer, author of “The Big Con,” a book about underworld slang, wrote that “the migration of words from subculture to dominant culture is sparked by the amount of interaction between these groups,” as well as by the dominant group’s “interest in the behavior patterns” of the other. Parents are perennially nosy about what their teenagers are saying, and nowadays they can just Google it.

Read the entire article here.

Pre-Twittersphere Infectious Information

While our 21st century always-on media and information sharing circus pervades every nook and cranny of our daily lives, it is useful to note that pre-Twittersphere, ideas and information did get shared. Yes, useful news and even trivial memes did go viral back in the 18oos.

From Wired:

The story had everything — exotic locale, breathtaking engineering, Napoleon Bonaparte. No wonder the account of a lamplit flat-bottom boat journey through the Paris sewer
went viral after it was published — on May 23, 1860.

At least 15 American newspapers reprinted it, exposing tens of thousands of readers to the dank wonders of the French city’s “splendid system of sewerage.”

Twitter is faster and HuffPo more sophisticated, but the parasitic dynamics of networked media were fully functional in the 19th century. For proof, look no further than the Infectious Texts project, a collaboration of humanities scholars and computer scientists.

The project expects to launch by the end of the month. When it does, researchers and the public will be able to comb through widely reprinted texts identified by mining 41,829 issues of 132 newspapers from the Library of Congress. While this first stage focuses on texts from before the Civil War, the project eventually will include the later 19th century and expand to include magazines and other publications, says Ryan Cordell, an assistant professor of English at Northeastern University and a leader of the project.

Some of the stories were printed in 50 or more newspapers, each with thousands to tens of thousands of subscribers. The most popular of them most likely were read by hundreds of thousands of people, Cordell says. Most have been completely forgotten. “Almost none of those are texts that scholars have studied, or even knew existed,” he said.

The tech may have been less sophisticated, but some barriers to virality were low in the 1800s. Before modern copyright laws there were no legal or even cultural barriers to borrowing content, Cordell says. Newspapers borrowed freely. Large papers often had an “exchange editor” whose job it was to read through other papers and clip out interesting pieces. “They were sort of like BuzzFeed employees,” Cordell said.

Clips got sorted into drawers according to length; when the paper needed, say, a 3-inch piece to fill a gap, they’d pluck out a story of the appropriate length and publish it, often verbatim.

Fast forward a century and a half and many of these newspapers have been scanned and digitized. Northeastern computer scientist David Smith developed an algorithm that mines
this vast trove of text for reprinted items by hunting for clusters of five words that appear in the same sequence in multiple publications (Google uses a similar concept for its Ngram viewer).

The project is sponsored by the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks at Northeastern and the Office of Digital Humanities at the National Endowment for the Humanities. Cordell says the main goal is to build a resource for other scholars, but he’s already capitalizing on it for his own research, using modern mapping and network analysis tools to explore how things went viral back then.

Counting page views from two centuries ago is anything but an exact science, but Cordell has used Census records to estimate how many people were living within a certain distance of where a particular piece was published and combined that with newspaper circulation data to estimate what fraction of the population would have seen it (a quarter to a third, for the most infectious texts, he says).

He’s also interested in mapping how the growth of the transcontinental railroad — and later the telegraph and wire services — changed the way information moved across the country. The animation below shows the spread of a single viral text, a poem by the Scottish poet Charles MacKay, overlaid on the developing railroad system. The one at the very bottom depicts how newspapers grew with the country from the colonial era to modern times, often expanding into a territory before the political boundaries had been drawn.

Read the entire article here.

Image: Courtesy of Ryan Cordell / Infectious texts project. Thicker lines indicate more content-sharing between 19th century newspapers.

Las Vegas, Tianducheng and Paris: Cultural Borrowing

These three locations in Nevada, China (near Hangzhou) and Paris, France, have something in common. People the world over travel to these three places to see what they share. But only one has an original. In this case, we’re talking about the Eiffel Tower.

Now, this architectural grand theft is subject to a lengthy debate — the merits of mimicry, on a vast scale. There is even a fascinating coffee table sized book dedicated to this growing trend: Original Copies: Architectural Mimicry in Contemporary China, by Bianca Bosker.

Interestingly, the copycat trend only seems worrisome if those doing the copying are in a powerful and growing nation, and the copying is done on a national scale, perhaps for some form of cultural assimilation. After all, we don’t hear similar cries when developers put up a copy of Venice in Las Vegas — that’s just for entertainment we are told.

Yet haven’t civilizations borrowed, and stolen, ideas both good and bad throughout the ages? The answer of course is an unequivocal yes. Humans are avaricious collectors of memes that work — it’s more efficient to borrow than to invent. The Greeks borrowed from the Egyptians; the Romans borrowed from the Greeks; the Turks borrowed from the Romans; the Arabs borrowed from the Turks; the Spanish from the Arabs, the French from the Spanish, the British from the French, and so on. Of course what seems to be causing a more recent stir is that China is doing the borrowing, and on such a rapid and grand scale — the nation is copying not just buildings (and most other products) but entire urban landscapes. However, this is one way that empires emerge and evolve. In this case, China’s acquisitive impulses could, perhaps, be tempered if most nations of the world borrowed less from the Chinese — money that is. But that’s another story.

[div class=attrib]From the Atlantic:[end-div]

The latest and most famous case of Chinese architectural mimicry doesn’t look much like its predecessors. On December 28, German news weekly Der Spiegel reported that the Wangjing Soho, Zaha Hadid’s soaring new office and retail development under construction in Beijing, is being replicated, wall for wall and window for window, in Chongqing, a city in central China.

To most outside observers, this bold and quickly commissioned counterfeit represents a familiar form of piracy. In fashion, technology, and architecture, great ideas trickle down, often against the wishes of their progenitors. But in China, architectural copies don’t usually ape the latest designs.

In the vast space between Beijing and Chongqing lies a whole world of Chinese architectural simulacra that quietly aspire to a different ideal. In suburbs around China’s booming cities, developers build replicas of towns like Halstatt, Austria and Dorchester, England. Individual homes and offices, too, are designed to look like Versailles or the Chrysler Building. The most popular facsimile in China is the White House. The fastest-urbanizing country in history isn’t scanning design magazines for inspiration; it’s watching movies.

At Beijing’s Palais de Fortune, two hundred chateaus sit behind gold-tipped fences. At Chengdu’s British Town, pitched roofs and cast-iron street lamps dot the streets. At Shanghai’s Thames Town, a Gothic cathedral has become a tourist attraction in itself. Other developments have names like “Top Aristocrat,” (Beijing), “the Garden of Monet” (Shanghai), and “Galaxy Dante,” (Shenzhen).

Architects and critics within and beyond China have treated these derivative designs with scorn, as shameless kitsch or simply trash. Others cite China’s larger knock-off culture, from handbags to housing, as evidence of the innovation gap between China and the United States. For a larger audience on the Internet, they are merely a punchline, another example of China’s endlessly entertaining wackiness.

In short, the majority of Chinese architectural imitation, oozing with historical romanticism, is not taken seriously.

But perhaps it ought to be.

In Original Copies: Architectural Mimicry in Contemporary China, the first detailed book on the subject, Bianca Bosker argues that the significance of these constructions has been unfairly discounted. Bosker, a senior technology editor at the Huffington Post, has been visiting copycat Chinese villages for some six years, and in her view, these distorted impressions of the West offer a glance at the hopes, dreams and contradictions of China’s middle class.

“Clearly there’s an acknowledgement that there’s something great about Paris,” says Bosker. “But it’s also: ‘We can do it ourselves.'”

Armed with firsthand observation, field research, interviews, and a solid historical background, Bosker’s book is an attempt to change the way we think about Chinese duplitecture. “We’re seeing the Chinese dream in action,” she says. “It has to do with this ability to take control of your life. There’s now this plethora of options to choose from.” That is something new in China, as is the role that private enterprise is taking in molding built environments that will respond to people’s fantasies.

While the experts scoff, the people who build and inhabit these places are quite proud of them. As the saying goes, “The way to live best is to eat Chinese food, drive an American car, and live in a British house. That’s the ideal life.” The Chinese middle class is living in Orange County, Beijing, the same way you listen to reggae music or lounge in Danish furniture.

In practice, though, the depth and scale of this phenomenon has few parallels. No one knows how many facsimile communities there are in China, but the number is increasing every day. “Every time I go looking for more,” Bosker says, “I find more.”

How many are there?

“At least hundreds.”

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article after the jump.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image: Tianducheng, 13th arrondissement, Paris in China. Courtesy of Bianca Bosker/University of Hawaii Press.[end-div]