Recently, a friend pointed me to the Tumblr blog "What Should D' Call Me," specifically to a short clip of Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow, wearing an expression on his face that I find hard to describe. It was part surprise, part embarrassment and part regret. But the expression can perhaps best be summarized by the clip's caption "When I throw my paddle and I spill all the beer."
The blog contains many similar clips of pop culture figures conveying an experience or emotion to which Dartmouth students can universally relate. Key to the universality of these clips is their visual expression of what can be difficult to express verbally. The Jack Sparrow example above is a case in point. Although one could use words to encompass the range of emotions felt when one spills all the beers while playing pong, such a written description would be harder to digest and harder to reproduce. Most importantly, it's harder to relate to words than to visual images that seem to encapsulate such common experiences. Captain Jack says it better than I ever could.
"What Should D' Call Me" allows a divided campus to engage in the simple joy of shared experience. But the website also worries me because, like a lot of the upshots of the meme culture, it indicates a growing trend to turn away from words in favor of something easier and more compact. If I share an animated GIF file that "perfectly" captures the way I feel right now, am I really expressing myself? Or am I finding a cheap, homogenized means to channel my story through a middleman, in a way that will suck out the individuality in the story itself and make it something less personal and more universal?
As a generation of social media junkies, we have trained ourselves to derive fulfillment from involving others in our personal experiences. When these experiences are wholly our own, we can claim that the fulfillment we get out of sharing them is genuine. But when something pops up in our news feed that makes us say, "Wow, that's exactly what I think, and 4,000 other people happen to think the same way," we must be careful not to mistake the feeling of solidarity for self-actualization.
The experience of "not being alone" is valuable, but only to a degree. As refreshing as it is to know that someone feels the same way, there is something inherently homogenizing in admitting that an experience you've had is identical to an experience someone else has had. In truth, these experiences can't be identical because they were internalized by two completely different individuals. With the oral tradition of storytelling, we are able to convey not just the particularities of the story, but the particularities of the storyteller and his or her individual voice. This is the value that is lost when we choose to express ourselves through memes, GIF picture files or any of the forms of crowd-sourced media that currently dominate the social networking landscape.
Obviously, "What Should D' Call Me" wasn't established to further intellectual discourse on campus. I'm sure its anonymous creators did not intend to question Dartmouth students' individuality or suggest that all Dartmouth students are the same. But given how prevalent this blog and other meme derivatives are in our daily lives, it would be naive to assume that this meme culture isn't having even the slightest damaging effect on the way we see ourselves as unique human beings. The expression of our individuality is what ultimately defines it. A reliance on crowd-sourced media not only discourages individual expression, but also unavoidably blurs the lines between the universal and the individual.
