The Photograph within the Photograph
When looking for a meme’s I realized that the old aspect of the digital media was usually some aspect of a music video. Whether it is the actual audio or the visual aspect of the music video that was iconic and causes people to think of memes that could be associated with the video. The digital media that I chose was a perfect combination of everything I just mentioned. The digital media I chose stems from a Nickelback music video, the song “Photograph” was a song of All The Right Reason. This album came out in 2005 and the music video became very popular and people began to make memes out of it.
The music video takes place in the band’s hometown where they went to high school and performed in the gym, although the meme takes is extracted from the beginning. Like I mentioned before the meme either uses a visual or audio aspect of the video and changes it, but this one does both. At the beginning it shows Chad Kroeger, the lead singer, holding up a picture frame while singing “Look at this photograph”. In the original video, the picture in the picture frame is one of Kroeger’s friends but since with new media and the technologies that it possesses you can put almost anything in that box. People found something to put in that frame and also put things that rhyme with the word photograph. I’ve seen the photograph being replaced with a graph, giraffe, and ass. That was just the ones that rhymed, I’ve seen like a never ending loop of the photo just zooming into each other. It has also been a base meme for other memes that are just pictures. When the meme had the rhyming aspect to it too, they also changed the audio. They changed what he said to the world “graph”, “giraffe”, and “ass”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3T6OQH8JLAc
Another aspect that makes this and an adequate digital media is that average length of the meme. I have seen this meme a lot on multiple social media apps and the length of the meme has always varied depending on what photo is in the picture and things like that. Although I’ve never seen the video last longer than 30 seconds. This is a principle of new media because it would never be in a movie or television show. It is shorter usually because it is uploaded on social media, and the objective of content on social media is short and constant interactions so you wouldn’t want the content to be too long because people would be bored by it. Though memes look so simple, there’s a lot that goes into a popular and good meme. Since most of the time you would see this meme would be on social media, that is why so many people add such different things in the meme. Usually when people originally see the video and make the meme, they eventually find a place to put something else in there that they enjoy and usually isn’t from the group or thing the original meme is from. There is a fair amount of intersectionality within meme’s and this one is no exception. This meme did not have as many as others but there were examples such as the “giraffe” in the picture frame. The picture could have been of a regular giraffe and you would have understood the meme very well but that isn’t what happened. The giraffe they used was from “Madagascar”, this doesn’t have anything to do with Nickelback, the video, or the original picture that was in the frame. There’s many great positives to that aspect of the meme. First, the intersectionality of the meme allows it to appeal to multiple different audiences. In a social media app, specifically twitter, it is easy to share repost and like the meme to where it becomes more popular. The way to optimize how many people would enjoy the meme is to put different messages for different audiences and see who grasp onto it. This also expands the life of the meme due to the fact that it interest so many people.
This form of digital media is probably one of my favorite meme’s and will always have a special place in my heart. I know that sounds weird but I pride myself on keeping a lot of memes and funny photos in my phone. This meme is in my “Favorite of the Meme Library” album because the version of the meme where it says “Look at this___”, and the one that I have in the album is the one with ass at the end. My friends and I always crack up when we send memes to each other. We tend to be a little bit immature with the memes we send in to our group chats that we have, but we feel like it’s a safe place to crack some jokes and it is a safe space. Meme’s, that qualify as digital media are the most influential aspect of digital media in my own life and I feel like it will always be an important part of my generation’s culture. This is partly why I tried to pick a meme from the previous proposal I had. I was thinking deeply about an immensely difficult and complex form of digital media and was able to change my topic by thinking about what is and is not a digital media concept and not what’s the most complex digital media.
