A Facebook post with actual writing in it got my attention a few weeks ago. I’d been mulling about doing something I don’t often do. I finally did it and you can see the results right above. Yeah, I made a meme. (Tip of the hat to our art director, Ken Stubbs, for his custom flame work.)
When you work for a magazine, imagining combinations of text and pictures is sort of second nature. Though memes in the contemporary sense, of course, have become much more than that.
“Memes are sort of an evil product of marketing,” said Phoenix-based Jewel Jones, herself with a marketing and design background. I know her in association with past work with Over the Road Apparel, which her sister Amanda Roth founded. Roth also heads up the Meadowlark Transportation brokerage and fleet out of Montana, founded by their father, Rick Jones.
Today, Jewel Jones added, “I struggle to even work in marketing. I find a lot of the practices that you use in marketing, targeting people based on their demographics” or “psychographics” to be questionable.
Like me, to an extent, for years she didn’t have much of an issue with the widespread collection and use of what she calls individuals’ “personality” data for targeted marketing via so-called social media platforms. “They’re just going to try to sell me stuff,” she said. No big deal. People are trying to sell us stuff all the time.
Yet using the meme as a tool — what Jones called the “easiest way” to dilute a message to its essence — has been picked up of course by the legions among us. It’s been propagated by the attention-holding nature of those so-called social media platforms’ algorithms. And boy, we might just have a problem here, one that’s hard to capture/explain in a meme. Or a Facebook post, really. Which brings me back to Jones’ own post, excerpted here:
