Blog #3 - Teja Garrido

    For this week's blog post, I have chosen to examine the "Woman yelling at cat" meme and Martin Luther's 95 Theses concerning articulation #3. The spatio-temporal locations of production and creation had witnessed an expanse of collaboration; those of which had been previously unheard of without advanced technologies within each of these time frames. 

    Luther's "pamphlets were distributed at markets and taken by cart to other cities and read aloud publicly for those unable to read" (Mohn, 2016). People used their own resources of walking, orality, and in-person social engagement to create an open space of public debate. By way of distribution and consumption, any literate and illiterate person could converse on the subject of Luther's 95 Theses. Print was the primary source of communicative distribution in his time, and by nailing his 95 Theses to a church door, Luther encouraged the sharing of his content from person to person; the recipients of the content took care of distribution (Standage, 2013). Within this articulation, readers can recognize how copies of Luther's text were produced by hundreds in the vernacular of Latin, then German, in a relatively short period.

    Over the past two decades, social media has infiltrated our lives on an entirely global scale. The well-known social media meme of a "woman yelling at cat," is only one example of popular memes that the majority of social media users are aware of ("Woman yelling at cat", 2019). This is due to the constant use of a meme in a particular context, which had subsequently created its own societal norm for its usage. The same distribution and collaboration tendencies seen in Luther's 95 Theses distribution were transformed onto a digital platform. The meme used consumption and circulation in almost exactly the same ways that the participants of Luther's content had engaged in. With the ability to change languages, topics, and moods, this meme creates a public centre of knowledge for people to collaborate on. 

    Both the "Woman yelling at cat" meme and Luther's 95 Theses manifest the thoughts from articulation #3 by appealing to the public body's need for shared content. The speed at which both texts were spread and discussed on such a large scale can have positive and negative effects on society as well. However, over time we have learned that spaces for people to debate on a particular topic are what allow us to grow in areas of culture and finally through created media ecologies.

This article from 1991, explains the threats to mass-circulation pre-digital era; a very interesting read for anyone curious. https://www.nytimes.com/1991/01/07/business/media-business-magazines-threats-mass-circulation-demographic-landscape.html 

References

Mohn, T. (2016, October 28). Long before Twitter, Martin Luther was a media pioneer. The New York            Times. Retrieved fromhttps://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/30/arts/design/long-before-twitter-martin-         luther-was-a-media-pioneer.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=wide-                    thumb&module=mini-moth®ion=top-stories-below&WT.nav=top-stories-below&_r=0

Standage, T. (2013). Writing on the wall: Social media - The first 2,000 years. Bloomsbury USA.

P. (2021, November 16). Woman yelling at a cat. Know Your Meme.

    Retrieved from https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/woman-yelling-at-a-cat 

The Daily Dot. (2021, May 20). “Woman Yelling At A Cat” is derived from two popular memes.            Retrieved from https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/woman-yelling-at-a-cat-meme-origin/