(no subject)

[metaphorge]

Many people often seem to become upset when memes they personally hold important or identify with are replicated in what they feel to be an inexact fashion.

Agree, disagree, commentary?

(I feel the wikipedia article on "cultural appropriation" has good things to say on and examples of this subject.)

Comments

Just some 5 minute thoughts...

[ineffabelle]

Agreed and this applies to so many axes of human life.

I'm sure Plains Native Americans get annoyed seeing "dream catchers" all over the place.

I think there's more chance for upset when the meme(s) in question seem "essential" to the identity of the original holder. Because there is more chance for misrepresentation and miscommunication.

Re: Just some 5 minute thoughts...

[prettydark.livejournal.com]

Just to let you know, the dreamcatcher comes from the Ojibwe or Anicinabe peoples, which are Algonquian/woodlands tribes (not plains), for the most part.

Re: Just some 5 minute thoughts...

[ineffabelle]

Ahh, that kind of shows how cultural distortion can happen.
I was utterly clueless about the actual connection to the dreamcatchers and I still knew of their existence, severed from any actual historical truth.

Re: Just some 5 minute thoughts...

[ineffabelle]

thanks for the correction on that, btw!

Re: Just some 5 minute thoughts...

[lysana.livejournal.com]

Huh. Since I have some ancestry from that neck of the woods, if you'll pardon the pun, I feel a bit better about the one hanging over my bed. I mostly claimed it for free because the color scheme matters in my primary tradition.

[ineffabelle]

I also suspect that this creates a certain amount of tension between cis-gendered and trans-gendered people...

There's just a lot of applications of that idea. Good insight!

[cherrypep.livejournal.com]

Agree, although I think that this is an effect based in the use of language rather than just the use of certain memes.

Language, meaning and society are very interdependent. Your 'cultural appropriation' article is more or less spot on. Imho it's about identity, the demonstration and/or establishment of. Semantics, particularly in terms of implication, depend strongly on context -- time, space and place...

[rpeate.livejournal.com]

Hey, I started having comment problems last night. Now what do we do? :)

(And I'm no longer authorised even to view your post on comment problems! :) Did I offend?? :) )

[metaphorge.livejournal.com]

Oh, no offense at all. I just privatized the post once I found out that there was a question if this was an actual issue. Take a look at this: http://elfwreck.livejournal.com/134619.html .

[gorillashaman.livejournal.com]

Violation of memetic purity. A mutated meme may be less fit for survival.

[roadriverrail.livejournal.com]

...or more.

[gorillashaman.livejournal.com]

Memes without the vociferous purity component are not likely to survive.

[roadriverrail.livejournal.com]

Do you have empirical evidence to back that up?

[gorillashaman.livejournal.com]

Anything I offer will be deductive rather than empirical.

If there are no checks against mutation, then mutations are far more likely to occur. If mutations are likely, then the odds of finding the same meme after many generations becomes vanishingly small.

[roadriverrail.livejournal.com]

Anything I offer will be deductive rather than empirical.

Then I'm going to just leave things as they are.

[the-revolution.livejournal.com]

Agree.

Meme mutation.

[feyandstrange.livejournal.com]

For people who value their individuality, having something they have chosen as an individual marker become a group marker is kind of hard.

I went to school with a kid I know only as Batman. Long before any of rhe movies came out, this kid wore a (different, thrift-store or home-silk-screened) Batman shirt to school every day, painted the logo on his Converse, knew his comics history and TV show, and nobody else was like him. He wasn't a hopeless little nerd, either; he was social, a skate rat, and kind of cute.

Then the Batman movie came out, and suddenly Batman merchandise was everywhere. Suddenly our Batman was no longer a standout or in any way unique; his years of fandom swept aside by marketing. It was sad.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then an accurate imitation is the most sincere and flattering; a half-assed effort is an insult to the meme and those who care about it.

And there's the question of why a meme is replicated. Batman is one thing; a religious symbol is another. Is it disrespectful to a faith and its believers to wear, say, a T-shirt with "om" on it in Sanskrit if you don't know what it means and just bought it for the cool lettering?

[beautifulpyre.livejournal.com]

If you thought the lettering was cool and you didn't know what it meant, how could you be disrespectful to the faith and its faithful? And why would the ignorant wearer of the t-shirt be the one that's being disrespectful? What about the company that created the t-shirt without any regard to who might be wearing it or whether they would understand and respect the symbol? Then again, is there anything wrong with making money off religious symbols? If so, why?

Why do these entities demand respect? Does anyone own OM? There are a lot of issues to consider.

[roadriverrail.livejournal.com]

There are a lot of issues to consider.

There sure are, and I think there are no satisfying answers to them, which is why I personally try to hold very little as sacred and try to not care about stuff like this.

[roadriverrail.livejournal.com]

I agree that people often seem to become upset in this way. I think that it is very rarely worth it, though, and think that when most people do it, they are taking themselves far too seriously.

[lysana.livejournal.com]

Agreed, and as someone who works within a culture that has had multiple aspects of it adopted and adapted, it does get annoying. The reason it gets annoying is that people will take the newer definitions as ancient, and it gets hard to explain the history without sounding pedantic or strident. It wouldn't be so bad if the people doing the adopting and adapting admitted they were changing it. Too many of them don't.

It's my experience that American mainstream culture has no memes to speak of that it holds particularly dear, preferring to claim others as its own. It takes being in contact with a minority culture and learning its truths to grasp the other side of the story.