Do Memes Change How We Remember History?

“Some memes may actually dissolve the original significance of iconic photographs and potentially degrade, rather than enhance, public culture.”

This is Digital Hope, a column by Jake Pitre that sifts through the exhaustion, poison, and unease in contemporary digital culture to find in it the hope we need today.

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In the 1997 Simpsons episode “The City of New York vs. Homer Simpson,” Barney Gumble borrows the Simpson family car and abandons it outside the World Trade Center, and the family must travel to Manhattan to retrieve it. After 9/11, producers and executives for Fox decided that the episode should be pulled from syndication out of sensitivity (the episode later returned to broadcast).

Likewise, The Sopranos removed a shot of the Twin Towers from its opening title sequence; Sex and the City even had the Towers digitally removed from certain scenes. The pilot episode of 24, which aired in November of 2001, removed a shot of an exploding airplane that many had seen in ads for the show. I could go on like this.

How do we change history? It may seem hyperbolic to suggest that these small changes in a variety of TV shows could change history, but we shouldn’t underestimate the circulatory power of mass media. Particularly since the 1970s, television and its repetitions have helped to foster a cultural memory of the past, creating what the scholar Derek Kompare calls a “television heritage.”

One reason for this is simple: I didn’t live through a lot of history—most of it, actually—so my historical memory is often tinged by images I see on TV or in films depicting those events. (While I was born before the OJ Simpson trial, American Crime Story’s version is the one that will immediately come to mind for me.) But also, even things I did consciously live through can be altered or impacted by the images that come at the same time, or after.

We may not think of it this way normally, but just as Mad Men presented a specific take on 1960s America, shows that take place in the present, from Veep to Homeland, are making similar decisions, helping us to imagine how to define this time and offering historical benchmarks that blur fiction and reality. Which is to say nothing about how Better Call Saul has been reimagining the recent visual history of the aughts in stunningly accurate, if wry, ways.

As such, we should consider audience awareness of television’s unique temporalities, wherein we are always negotiating our knowledge of production and broadcast (for example, what has changed since the writer’s room decided on this joke?). This sort of doublethink practically forces us to reckon with past and present.

When specific changes are made, either in between production and broadcast or years later, and even under the most logical and earnest of circumstances, there are potentially serious historical consequences. As Philip Scepanski wrote in a journal article about retroactive edits of TV following 9/11, these changes “affect the construction and maintenance of popular memory, which, even when unintentional, can have political significance.”

One study found that teachers believe students are more eager to learn about history through films, but it makes me wonder about how we trust these images. The Bourne Identity underwent extensive reshoots after 9/11 to avoid appearing anti-American with the CIA as the villain—you can’t tell me there’s not a political valence to that decision.

Of course, it’s not just 9/11. These decisions are made often, the surprisingly and depressingly routine process of delaying episodes with school-related violence following real-life school shootings among them (as though the buffer of a week or two will make all the difference)—from Buffy the Vampire Slayer post-Columbine, to last year’s TV adaptation of Heathers post-Parkland. There are even lists online, counting down all the times something like this has happened.

We’ve come to accept this as the natural cultural reaction to horrific realities and the fictional stories we tell about them. We have to do something, it seems. But what are the implications on public memory, unforeseen or otherwise? Do we remember the original, or the edited version? And as Scepanski suggests, perhaps even more troublingly, are these decisions political?

We’ll never know if the original Bourne Identity was truly more critical of America and its intelligence agencies, just as we are probably more likely to notice the missing Twin Towers in the new title sequence for The Sopranos precisely because we haven’t forgotten the rhythms of the original sequence and the Towers within it. History, it would seem, is fluid.

What are the implications on public memory, unforeseen or otherwise? Do we remember the original, or the edited version?

History—specifically its images—can be repurposed and repackaged as it happens, and much later. Images have power. It’s why we feel compelled to address their influence under exceptional (and unintentional) circumstances, wary of the sway they can have over hearts and minds. Likewise, we are watching every day on social media the ways in which history can be remixed and remade.

For example, scholars looked at over thirty examples of the so-called “Accidental Napalm” meme, which uses the famous image photographed by Nick Ut featuring the Vietnam War napalm girl, Phan Thi Kim Phuc, in 1972. In analyzing several specific examples, the scholars took note of how “some memes may actually dissolve the original significance of iconic photographs and potentially degrade, rather than enhance, public culture.”

I’ve seen some of them on Tumblr or Twitter, and it’s never particularly clever. The authors cite some particularly ill-inspired versions, including the implantation of the now-forgotten Cigar Guy meme, which caught on as a photobombing Photoshop exercise, onto Phuc’s face, trivializing the iconography even further. In light of that, it’s hard not to be persuaded by the scholars’ argument.

The traditional assumption about the sharing of iconic images (loaded with symbolism, widely circulated, and prompting discussion) is, of course, that it will act as a generative force, leading to civic engagement, and even protests or other actions. The napalm girl image, like the striking photo of Alan Kurdi, the drowned Syrian refugee child, seemingly changed the narrative for the wider public about these conflicts, or at least, as Susan Sontag put it, “photographs cannot create a moral position but they can reinforce one—and help build a nascent one.”

The memed versions of the napalm girl, though, threaten to change its original meaning and ultimately degrade its significance. As our society has moved from consuming what mass media has fed us to the creation of our own media, the cultural appropriation of icons and images has become a democratic process. Common sense suggests that image reproduction occurs because of their cultural (and moral) meaning, leading to canonization—the napalm girl image was printed and shared in the media repeatedly due to our public right to knowledge and the moral failure it depicted. But at the same time, the more it is reused, the more fluid its meaning becomes.

Thinking back, it’s useful to remember that even Nick Ut’s original image was routinely cropped or edited to fit certain narratives in certain contexts by different news organizations (President Nixon apparently mused about the original, “I wonder if that was fixed”). More recently, videos are shortened or elongated by social media users and, subsequently, by the media to tell particular stories that fit their mandate, most obviously with the Nathan Phillips ordeal in January, which was manipulated to suit the purposes of Breitbart and Bustle alike.

At the very least, the internet and social media create unprecedented methods of mass distribution, while everyone also has access to manipulation tools like Photoshop to alter images however they want. An image like the napalm girl can take on a universal meaning—say, injustices performed on the innocent—but that seems to lead to a trivialization, especially in the digital age.

Some of the memes the scholars considered in their study directly reference the Vietnam War, while others (including Banksy) repurpose its anti-war valence onto other conflicts or contexts. One could find some value in these interpretations, which build from the meanings we recognize to expand its social and moral use.

The scholars cite Banksy’s characteristically simplistic version here, as Ronald McDonald and Mickey Mouse escort Phuc (suggesting, of course, that America’s citizens, placated by capitalism, allow horrific militarism to run rampant), whereas an even more effective example by cartoonist Dennis Draughon depicts the “Hooded Man” of Abu Ghraib behind Phuc, bringing attention to their strikingly similar stances to make a point about America’s cyclical history of traumas inflicted on others.

Still others, though, completely recalibrate the image’s cultural power into something more provocative and, potentially, insulting to the integrity of the image or the dignity of those depicted, particularly the girl herself. For example, this iteration of the meme with Jimmy Savile, the late British TV presenter accused of pedophilia following his death, inserted into the image undermines its purported message by entirely ignoring the original meaning to make a separate mocking and shock-inducing impact.

Of course, the humor or “commentary” of these memes are supposed to come from this incongruity—we recognize the tragedy of the original image, yet are invited to laugh at the absurdity of Savile’s placement, supposedly chasing these children, including Phuc, whose nakedness is now cynically and nihilistically reconfigured (Facebook faced backlash when its algorithms seemingly censored the original image for nudity, disregarding its historical provenance).

Frankly, though, if this is your method for offering political critique, I think you’re woefully misguided. That aside, a postmodernist might argue that all this re-appropriation serves to build our way outside the hegemonic canon of culture and meaning. Forget your sacred icons; let’s laugh at these clever juxtapositions. Here’s the problem with that: Memes of this nature ultimately exist only to pat the backs of their creators, and those in on the joke. That’s hardly what I would call an effective counter-cultural move.

Transforming meaning can be entertaining and intelligent, of course. But I’m worried that this solipsistic loss of context can, in fact, change our perception of history. If an image can be simplified to its basest of meanings—war is bad—then what does it mean for it to be dislocated from even that?

Memes of this nature ultimately exist only to pat the backs of their creators, and those in on the joke. That’s hardly what I would call an effective counter-cultural move. 

Yasmin Ibrahim wrote about the “Tank Man” of the Tiananmen Square protests, arguing that parodic memes of it can provide an outlet for political resistance (seemingly in line with the image’s original purpose), while simultaneously being “stripped from context, re-hashed and endlessly circulated as cultural artifacts bearing the burden of history yet being disenfranchised from it,” emphasis mine. In other words, muddying the context, but committed to carrying on the torch.

Popular and collective cultural memory is delicate, and unfortunately, our social networks seem to be built to facilitate this disenfranchisement. Images become phantoms, literally just another template for memeification, a shorthand or reference point that can serve any purpose and dilute the potential for public value it once possessed. To be clear, the point isn’t that the Vietnam or Syrian wars can’t be commented on with humor, but that we risk letting the parody speak for itself. To put it simply, it’s like showing an alien that’s never seen a horror movie before the Scream franchise and then expecting them to take Friday the 13th seriously.

Are we to understand that our media can be edited or repurposed according to no political logic? I don’t think so. LGBTQ+ series like Steven Universe are often censored in some markets, for political and “moral” reasons—the people who watch the show there will only know that version. And the Twin Towers, digitally removed from the Sopranos title sequence, out of . . . what, exactly? Respect? Historical accuracy? Sensitivity to trauma and its triggers? We seem confused about why we make these changes, or what impact they’re intended to have.

When iconography is so readily available to be transformed, it risks letting meaning become nothingness. I don’t think you can draw a straight line between our willingness to accept the retroactive edits of television leading to the narcissistic memes that trivialize the horrors of history, but you could probably draw a dotted one. Letting go of artistic conviction, or just expecting audiences to accept a redrawn past, allows us to accept any past, or to forget the political power that images can have.

Examples like Chinese users sharing the “Big Yellow Duck” version of the “Tank Man” photo in order to bypass Chinese censors (who like to pretend Tiananmen Square never happened) show that there are ways to recontextualize these iconic images meaningfully. Memed history has the potential to take advantage of the web’s circulatory power, reveling not in postmodern trivializations but in the political value of creativity that uses history constructively. Ideally, we would be learning from the images of our past to comment on our present or imagine a better future. Prove me right, memelords.