Further assorted angry meme thoughts

[yvannairie]

The irony of course is that good meme usage is one of those "I know it when I see it" type of things. There is an art to getting the context, meaning, cultural cache and intent right, and just like my point about good memeing being like good allegory, it all comes down to finding some kind of a communicational fault line that lets you slip from one code into another and back without disturbing the flow of the conversation.

And, that's another reason why I can see why ND people gravitate towards memes, other than the easy camaraderie -- it's a really good way to practice code-switching and what I tend to think of as "speaking registers". I remarked in the tags of the Tumblr repost that every time I've slapped down for substituting reference for communication, I honestly feel like I've deserved it, but that it's in that category of things my developmental delays didn't allow me to grok on my own, and I'm always gonna be a little bit sour about it.

My bad experiences with highly referential second-code communications have always been bad, and I do mostly feel comfortable blaming the need for a second code for it, because in the instances of people I know who are memelords that I get along with, they don't rely on that second code when they're truly trying to make themselves understood. Again, on Tumblr I called it "false familiarity", and their refusal to rely on it is why I make that distinction, and where my whole understanding of integrative language comes from -- because there's no reliance on a common reference point, and no need for me to do a lot of translating (or alternatively just go "fuck it" and let the language stand on its own)

And then there's just. In general that I really only had this realisation when I was reading a conversation about "How To Radicalise A Normie" and the way both fiction police and the alt-right rely on reductive, dogwhistley language to signal belonging and exclusion, and how that shapes the perception both inside and outside of the group of the severity of the situation. It made me realise this isn't a problem endemic to just one group, it's just what evermore elaborate language games do to everyone.

And it's kind of... like, I'm someone who doesn't get metaphors unless I'm the one making them, because then the whole context is ready and apparent to me and I can say something reasonably accurate. And I've always thought that that's just something that's wrong with me? But looking at how language evolves on the internet, I'm starting to wonder if that's not just true for everyone else as well, and other people just don't care if what they're saying is actually what they mean, unless it makes sense to them inside their heads.