Dina Seremet
When discussing “Intertextuality and the Discourse Community” by James Porter, it further emphasized the idea we have been discussing since the first day of class, remixes. Since our first day, we have talked about how almost everything is built off of previous ideas, texts, or movies. This discussion began with the documentary discussing the idea of remixes. This was the first time I was introduced to this idea. It never occurred to me before. Everything from popular books, TV shows, and movies are compilations of several sources. Porter believes all written works are compilations of previous works. Porter even argues that the Declaration of Independence, a document our whole country is based upon, is not an original text. There are various areas that they can pinpoint that show that it is not fully original. However, Thomas Jefferson is usually always credited with all the credit. We further examined the idea of remixes and compilations in class on Friday. On Friday, we discussed the memes we sent in. We talked about the presumptions required to understand the memes. Memes typically consist of images and captions that are a compilation from several other sources. This could be a quote from a movie, a funny image that went viral, or a quote from a celebrity. It could be a combination of all three. The memes are targeted at my generation, but even I didn’t get some of the memes. I didn’t have the background information to understand them. For instance, the meme with Groot from Guardians of the Galaxy and a character from the Incredibles required lots of background knowledge that I did not have. For this meme, I had only half of the knowledge. I knew that the second image was from the Incredibles, but I still didn’t know what the purpose of the image was. I had no idea what was being said in the image from the Incredibles. I also had no idea what the first image was since I have never seen Guardians of the Galaxy. Thus, I was not able to make sense of the meme and enjoy it. It was not funny to me because I did not understand it. Even though the quotes that occurred in the image were explained to me, at that point it wasn’t funny to me because it had to be broken apart. However, throughout class, there were several memes that I did enjoy because of all the previous knowledge I had of the memes. The Post Malone one was very funny. Another one of my favorites was the one that Matt posted. Although it wasn’t the most appropriate meme, it was enjoyable. Watching Professor Stockman try to understand the meaning of the memes showed me that you truly do need the prior knowledge to understand it. I also showed my mom the memes that I sent in for class. She didn’t understand the purpose of the memes. This further showed me that presumptions are often a requirement for humor. Almost all jokes are based off of prior information.
I really liked how you showed our progression of knowledge about remixes. I think that it is so weird that the Declaration of Independence was technically not an original document. In history classes, it has always been said that the US was the first to write a declaration of independence and that every country who did it after got the idea from us. It was weird to see that the declaration of independence was really a remix of other countries' ideas and the colonists' experiences with Great Britain. I would also like to say that I did not really get the Guardians of the Galaxy + Incredibles one and it was not because I did not know what either movie was. I have watched both movies multiple times but when I saw the meme on the screen, I could not figure out what the Incredibles one was. I had so many different catchphrases associated with the Incredibles that it did not occur to me that it was "Honey, where's my supersuit". Even though I had all the previous knowledge required to understand the meme, I was unable to understand the meme because I associated that movie so many different catchphrases. I guess my experience with that movie was a little different from most people's which is why I did not get the meme.
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