How do memes work?
Phil
Public
Seen by 42
You can't plan for viral, or can you? The anarchist anthropologist David Graeber wrote an article on the phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs. It was influential in anthropological circles. Then something disruptive happened. Guerrilla ads began to appear on the London Underground saying things like "It's as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working." The ads got talked about. Then there was a second intervention. The polling company YouGov ran a survey and found that nearly 40% of Britons felt they worked in a job that had no reason to exist. Suddenly it felt like everyone was debating bullshit jobs.
An insight was turned into a provocative statement, chucked in culture, it seemed to chime so then it was tested and validated and an idea was born. Will this process work every time? No. It will only have a chance of working if the provocation rings true. But, when it does work, it is a very powerful and cheap way of getting ideas into culture.
If we are to create memes, art, film, theatre, graphics for A/UK, we could do worse than start with insights.
Phil Sat 7 Mar 2020 3:49PM
Revolutionary Road is a great example. We instinctively crave stability and suburbia and what could be more stable than suburbia and middle management? Until we get there and start craving the freedom to make our own choices. I'll keeping poking around in TikTok...
Gabriella · Sat 7 Mar 2020 3:00PM
I remember this article going viral - he's written a book on it now. There's no better example of a bullshit job in literature than Frank Wheeler in Revolutionary Road. It was the height of 1950s "American Dream" cultural revolution and everyone got sucked into the idea that suburban life, consumerism and what we'd now consider "bull shit jobs" was, for the mainstream, the epitome of life! People are craving honest, transparency, down-to-earth talk. On the social media platform TikTok, Millenials and GenZ'ers are creating some interesting and entertaining narratives/memes around Socio-political themes such as Brexit and International Women's Day. It'd be cool if everyone explored TikTok because it really gives you a window into what the young generation think of everything. There's a lot of rubbish, but the gems are REAL gems.