blog post 3

 We were assigned the task to relate one of the three articulations addressed in class to the viral texts "Martin Luther's 95 Theses" and "Women Yelling at the Cat Meme" for this week's blog post. For my post I will be using the first articulation which entails how a message is distributed, who contributed to its creation and dissemination, what format it is presented in, and who is on the receiving end.  In the New York article the author claims that Luther “nailed his 95 theses to a church door in Wittenberg, condemning the Roman Catholic Church’s sale of indulgences” (Mohn, 2016). The Standage article claims that Luther disapproved of the whole idea of selling indulgences because it would be the pious defrauding of the faithful. Luther's writings were translated into a variety of languages such as Italian, German. Copies were circulated in manuscript form and in 1517 printed editions in the form of pamphlets and broadsheets appeared and were spread and paid for by Luther’s friends travelling merchants and preachers at markets and taken by cart to other cities and read aloud publicly for those unable to read (Standage, 2013). People read and discussed his pamphlets at home with families, in groups, with friends. And our contemporary world that we live in today we can see how Luther’s 95 Theses is still being spread through media for example the Newyork times Magazine. In addition, it's being disseminated at institutions in Manhattan, Atlanta and Minneapolis (Mohn, 2016). 

“Women Yelling at the Cat Meme”, in This meme has Taylor Armstrong from The Real Housewives of Atlanta with a Tumblr cat image. Meme sharing is typically done among close friends or within a social media-based community like Twitter, where the meme received over 78,000 retweets and 275,000 likes in just over three months. Since 2019 this meme has been manipulated by different users and used as a versatile to fit our modern dynamic world. Due to ancient and modern forms of media both texts went viral and respond to slack &wise first articulation through the way they are disseminated. 

Mohn, T. (2016, October 28). Long before Twitter, Martin Luther was a media pioneer. New York Times.   

Standage, T. (2013). How Luther went viral: The role of social media in revolutions. Writing on the Wall: Social Media – The First 2000 Years. Bloomsbury Publishing.