Journal #2

In McLuhan’s The Medium is the Message, he essentially asserts that the way that we access information is just as important, if not more important, than the information itself. I technically found this particular meme by searching Google for “I was there 3000 years ago meme” (it was the first result that popped up under the “images” tab), but the more accurate answer is that my roommate found it and joked to me that when she takes digital rhetoric (she’s a writing minor) she’ll use this meme in her capstone meme project (assuming Cicci does this project every year). In keeping with how McLuhan views media, I guess this says something about how I find funny memes: through my friends, who find them through their friends, and so on and so forth. Most memes I see are on Facebook (I’m outdated and ancient, I know, I’m not even on twitter and frankly I hate Snapchat), and though most of them come from shares from other facebook pages not tied to a person they’re all shared to my feed from my friends (who probably shared them indirectly from the page anyway). According to McLuhan, this means that the more important factor here is that my relationship and communication with my friends and family matter more than the meme itself, which in this particular case, I’m inclined to agree with. It’s not necessarily that I care about this meme in particular (or about memes in general), or that I find it somewhat funny, the reason I picked out this meme to discuss for this journal has far less to do with the fact that it’s a funny meme and more to do with the fact that since she’s the one who shared it with me, it sticks in my head.