My Agency, Meme Style

I constantly tell my students not to disregard what is unfamiliar or what they don't understand. I enjoy quoting John Coltrane's wife who said something along the lines of, "not everything must be embraced with open arms." Some things are difficult to understand; other things seem of little consequence. To be a learner means to look at these things. To look again. And again. To resist the temptation to shrug and walk by.

And so it is with memes.

Before this week long dive into memes with #CLMOOC, I paid very little attention to this form of internet communication.  In general, they did nothing for me. I have come across some clever ones, but I was always turned off by the limited visual language: the baby holding up his fist, the tyrannosaurus rex, the line drawing of the deformed head. Ultimately I saw these like text messages with a picture. In many ways, I still feel this way.  I think what it comes down to is agency. Kevin Hodgson mentioned this in a Google+ post, and it really stuck with me. The memes that I am drawn to most are the ones where I see the most agency being employed by the creator.

Having just led a workshop on creating student agency in the classroom, this word was already on my mind. In that workshop, we brainstormed what agency truly meant. Here's a part of the list we made --->>

"Having a story," "Control," "Joy": these are so crucial to the creative process. And there can be no creative process without autonomy for the creator. As I worked on my own memes, I found myself drifting into a "flow" state. Probably not as deeply as what Csiksentmihalyi describes in his work. But present were the deep focus and mindfulness. As I meticulously cut out figures in Pixlr Editor, I could feel my breathing change and eyes narrow.

For me, the meaningfulness of the exercise did not come from inserting a phrase into a generator that limited the visual options of my message. With a meme, in fact, the visual structure is crucial. As far as digital writing is concerned, memes are a great example of how the interplay of text and image produce a message. Going back to the list, I did not want to cede control of half of my work.  Of course, I could upload my own image into a meme generator, but there was still a limitation on how it could look.


Perhaps I'm missing the point. Maybe the great thing about memes is that they do have this limited visual vocabulary out of which hundreds of thousands of statements are made. I don't know. I'll need to consider this further.

After a week of experimenting, however, what I do know is this: given the time to play and experiment with tools and choices, I want to know that the meme I create and the story I tell has as much of me in it as possible.