Esoterica
It’s hard to tell if there’s such a fragmentation of visual culture that the post-ironic, repurposing crowd exists at a convex location from the materialist/idealistic crowd or if they’re right next to each other but, because of how we project them, they get split in half and floated away on an imaginary ocean. You know, like Greenland when you run a Lambert Asian Conformal Conic.
To muddy the water a bit, I offer this piece of <3000 viewed Youtubedness:
What’s going on here? Is it an attempt to show how absurd dancing is, or to show how absurd arguments are? Or is it just playing a game with highly responsive digital tools (that’s about the only excuse I can imagine for the Brendan Frasier clapping meme) and the actual message isn’t a message at all, other than, “Look, I did something cool with Final Cut!” which is, ultimately, so idealistic as to be childlike, and hence the exact opposite of the ironic implication of much of these memes. I think there’s a serious schizophrenia in modern underculture media production, to the point where I’m no longer sure if anyone is reflecting at all about what they’re producing and how it’s communicated.