Scenes from the Algorithm is an analysis of one meme per post. Each one is a small case study in how online communication and culture evolve, and the kinds of digital artifacts those interactions leave behind.

I show this Columbo meme within the first couple days of each college writing class I teach.

The students don’t know either of these men: the characters nor the actors. They’ve never even seen Tumblr. I put them in small groups and ask them what guesses they can make about the meme just by looking at it. Considering their lack of background knowledge they do pretty well, but they can’t really guess much.

Why do I show it? To teach context. The students know nothing about the context of this image. Then we watch this video:

Now the students have all the context they need and they can explain almost everything about that first Columbo meme. They know that the man on the left is Lieutenant Columbo, a Los Angeles detective, and the man on the right is a suspect (though they still don’t know he’s played by William Shatner). They understand that Columbo operates by lulling a suspect into revealing some kind of contradiction in their story. He plays dumb and they underestimate him and let their guard down, and then suddenly he says “Just one more thing!” and cracks the case wide open. They are able to infer that the meme is supposed to be funny because of the mismatch between the 70s detective and the 2010s social media reference, and they’re able to grasp that Columbo has picked up a contradiction in the way the suspect has talked about Tumblr.

The easy thing about the Columbo meme is that it’s obvious that context is missing, the solution just depends on knowing where to find more context. It’s usually at our fingertips these days. When it comes to memes, knowyourmeme.com is the best first stop to learn more. However, a lot of times, we don’t know what we don’t know. It’s not clear that context is missing. Therefore, we should always try to acquire a bit of context for any message we receive when our interpretation matters. It’s usually takes just a couple of extra steps.

When it comes to a piece of writing, for example, we can think about certain fundamentals, like: where was it published? who is the expected audience for that publication? what can we learn about the author? And from there we can peel back as many additional layers as we want.

After excavating the context behind the Columbo meme, the next thing we do as a class is to read an essay called “Outcomes, Testing, Learning” by the comparative literature scholar Peter Brooks. The students think the text was written for them and they interpret it accordingly, but it was written for a different audience, which makes them completely miss the essay’s main point. We spend an entire class unraveling this difficulty and confusion in order to practice our contextual reading abilities.

Brooks is writing about a concern that the desire to measure education quantitively in order to make sure that students are getting their money’s worth would lead to further reduction of humanities offerings, because the values of humanities subjects is difficult or impossible to measure quantitatively. He is afraid that if the humanities’ value can’t be measured quantitively, people might make the mistake of thinking that the humanities don’t have much value. He likely intends to reach policymakers, college administrators and fellow humanities professors, people who have some influence over the problem. However, he starts by explaining the discourse about how college is too expensive and might not be worth it. This is obviously very salient to the students, and they have been taught that the main thesis of an essay is usually found right in the beginning. But the cost of college is not Brooks’s main concern in the essay. He’s using that concern to set up his real argument and establish its urgency.

We are able to figure out his real audience and argument when we look at where the essay was originally published: A special issue of the academic journal Social Research about the future of higher education. Gradually the students are able to reason that they were not the main audience for the essay, because they would be so unlikely to encounter it if it had not been taken out of Social Research and reprinted in our textbook.

The students do eventually grasp what the essay is about, whom it was trying to reach, and why. But it’s a bit disorienting for them to realize how easily any of us can completely misread something we think we completely understand. It shows them how context is the basis of all interpretation and understanding, which prepares us as a class to begin our first writing assignment in which the students will read the writing of another author in order to respond with their own point of view. They have to make sure they understand the context of the discursive conversation they are about to enter.

Almost all memes work this way now. They depend on a specific context and establish insider and outsider groups based on who can or cannot understand. The early memes were easy to understand right away. They were animals on a colored pinwheel background with a funny saying . . .

or they were cats speaking in a cutesy version of English.

The internet was a lot smaller back then and virality meant almost everyone would see something. That was before social media algorithms sorted us into separate silos.

So much of our media communication these days does not supply context, because we are algorithmically sorted, and it’s assumed that we’re already part of the in-group that will understand. That’s why we need to learn about context and become effective contextual readers if we want to break out of our algorithmic silos and try to encounter the wider digital world.

Scenes from the Algorithm analyzes one meme per post. Each one is a small case study in how online communication and culture evolve, and the kinds of digital artifacts those interactions leave behind.

Remember advice animals? You probably do if you’re a millennial or a Gen X-er. They started with Advice Dog which Know Your Meme traces back to 2006.

Advice Dog was simple. A yellow Labrador Retriever puppy against a rainbow pinwheel background. This was one of the first widely recognizable image-macro templates which could be repurposed by other users who would add their own meaning by adding their own text.

The memes usually gave humorously bad advice, like:

I guess this was because there was a resistance to sincerity on the 2000s internet. A lot of people couldn’t enjoy a cute dog without adding irony and sarcasm.

Once Advice Dog established the concept of modularity in which users could swap elements of the image in and out and still be participating in the circulation of the same meme, Advice Dog spun off into a series of various “advice animals.”

These spin-offs took the modularity of Advice Dog and spread it across many different character types. Suddenly, it wasn’t just the text that was the source of variation, the possibility opened up for an infinite amount of new characters who represented various social types and situations. Some highlights included Philosoraptor, a raptor who would pose philosophical questions while scratching his chin, Courage Wolf, a wolf who aggressively told viewers to do things that required confidence, Foul Bachelor Frog, a frog who lived like a gross guy living on his own for the first time. Finally we reach our subject: Socially Awkward Penguin.

Socially Awkward Penguin was one of the most wholesome of the advice animals, because of its relatable “we’ve all been there” vibe and its gentle and non-mocking humor.

The image of the Socially Awkward Penguin was a photo taken by wildlife photographer George Mobley for National Geographic.

People took that image and placed it in front of a pinwheel like they did with all of the other advice animals. However, the text on this meme tended to be more wholesome than the other advice animals. They mostly depict harmless and extremely relatable moments, like this one:

Or this one:

This transformed embarrassing moments from a private shame to a publicly shared experience and gave people a shared language through which to confess without confessing.

This is what memes often do: they allow us to express our flaws or insecurities without committing to full vulnerability and transparency. They mediate our emotions through humor, cuteness and irony. They give us legible ways to express certain feelings and thoughts, and then we find out other people have those same feelings and thoughts too!

I think memes have gotten a lot more complex, more creative and weirder in subsequent years, but there’s a joy in the innocence and straightforward legibility of Socially Awkward Penguin, and I think a lot of later memes build on the principles of indirect confession and relatability that we find in such a concentrated form in this delightful meme. When I teach the rhetoric of memes as a way of introducing students to multimodal rhetoric (in other words, communication that makes use of multiple media forms at once), they usually single out relatability as their first answer to why memes appeal and why they catch on and spread. I think Socially Awkward Penguin might have been one of the first internet memes to capitalize on relatability in such a powerful way. (Here is the assignment description for my meme project, in case anyone is curious as to how that works).

Stayed tuned for more explorations in meme culture and meme history.

In the comments: What was your favorite Socially Awkward Penguin meme? What are some of the contemporary equivalents of Socially Awkward Penguin in today’s meme landscape? Are there any particular memes you’d like to see me write about in the future?