Thursday, December 15, 2016

Recycle, Reduce, Retweet?



             IN THE BEGINNING

When looking for an area of focus for this assignment I was dumbfound on what exactly I wanted to analyze. Everything that I decided on doing had already been taken or was too boring to tickle my fancy, but instead of waiting around I decided focus on social media accounts of universities and their effectiveness on campus. Some of the questions I created were are campus social media accounts pushing resourceful information to students, what percentage of students follow the social media page(s), and are there more than one and if so what the reasoning for multiple accounts? There were so many variables that came into play and many questions that I wouldn’t be able to find an answer for due to not following the social media accounts of various college campuses long enough to find data. Though this would appear to be a failure in most books I viewed it as successful because this topic, by accident, showed me the topic that I truly wanted to analyze, meme recycling.

SO WHAT ARE RECYCLED TWEETS?

There is no true definition as to what recycled tweets are but we’ve all seen them all around twitter. It’s basically when you see a tweet, meme, or gif, being used in the same exact format on multiple websites. A prime example of this would be the tweet where Dexter from the hit 90’s baby television series “Dexter’s Laboratory”.

The picture consists of Dexter standing in the shower with his but facing the viewer. The quotation at the top says something along the lines of, “When my friends tell me to be ready at 8:45, me at 8:45,” which shows a naked Dexter still showering. Even with all of the humor the question still remains why do recycled tweets exist? Personally I hate seeing the same tweet in multiple places on social media sites, Twitter being the point of reference. They tend to be worse than pop up’s if anyone remembers those, but in picking this topic I could not stop asking myself why recycled tweets exist. This simple question became the foundation of my topic and almost immediately many questions began to pour into my mind. Is recycling tweets stealing and if so, are there any boundaries? Why do we retweet recycled tweets even though we have seen it on various different occasions in many different places? Does timing happen to play a role in whether or not a recycled tweet retweeted? Does account credibility have anything to do with whether or not a meme gets retweeted by regular people? Well personally, I believe that the need for accounts to create or push content in a particular manner results in the creation of recycled tweets due to their popularity, credibility, crowdsourcing, and flow. In order to prove this to be true I will be discussing the popular Kermit the Frog Memes along with my data and research on the topic.

KERMIT THE FROG



Whether Kermit is giving his opinion on something and saying, “but that’s none of my business”, or looking at his inner self contemplating on whether or not to make the right decision, most people would agree that Kermit the Frog memes are funny; but why Kermit? Why does Kermit the Frog the face of meme goals in social media? As I began searching for answers I didn’t find myself sitting in the dark for too long, so to speak. In the Designing for Spreadability chapter in “Spreadable Media” there is a section speaks about Spreadability and how the content produced must be relevant to multiple audiences. The popularity centered on Kermit the Frog is reason enough to continue creating multiple memes about him. It goes back to that old saying “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it”. The chapter then reads, “Content that appeals to more than one target audience, both intended and surplus audiences, has greater meaning as spreadable data. That is to say that the reason of how and why Kermit is so popular for memes is irrelevant. What is important is the resources that it provides when attempting to push content. I guess the question now becomes why these memes are continuously recycled?

SPREADABILITY IN DETAIL

When discussing the design for spreadability the authors of the book, “Spreadable Media”, expressed the concerns of creative industries and their struggle with the uncertainty principle. The section reads, “The creative industries have had a long struggle with predicting and measuring their products success (Henry Jenkins, 2013).” The section even goes on to talk about how no one really knows if their approach to creating spreadable content is going to work, which is the reason by you continuously recycle the content periodically. This is called “Over Production and Formatting”, which is used by many entertainment companies. Amanda D. Lotz, a Communication Studies professor at the University of Michigan, discusses the degree to which success is unpredictable by saying that 80 percent of what is produced by the Television, film, and recording industry will fail commercially. It’s the other 10 to 20 percent that has a chance at being successful and though it’s not resourceful, industries must producer more creative goods than might succeed. Spreadable media creates a focus on availability, which is having the content available when and where the audiences want it, along with making content portable or shareable, reusable  and relevant to multiple audiences, and creating a steady stream of material. All of the factors for recycled memes to exist stem from these ideas of Spreadability. Those ideas of reusing content along with making it relevant and portable allows for multiple accounts to pass off tweets, memes, or gifs as their own, which is why recycled tweets are created. With the excessive amounts of retweets the meme then becomes credible and then continuously recycled.
After analyzing the existence of recycled tweets and how they are formed the question and or discussion begins to make a shift towards analyzing their success. There are multiple websites who have gone from the darkest depths of the twitter abysses to the top because of recycling tweets. After a while you have to wonder why and how are they able to do this. Sure, I could create an account, throw a cool picture in the background, title the account “Men R Us”, and go recycle all of the already recycled tweets on the “Men’s Humor” page, but what will that get me? Nothing! I theorize many factors that could serve as an answer to the different results of a new account such as (Dank Memes @Hooded_Kermit), compared to a fairly established account like “Hooded Kermit @KermitHooded”.


DATA ANALYSIS

While analyzing the data from the Dank Memes account it is clear to see that the tactics used to create popularity of the account are along the same lines of the things discussed in earlier sections of the paper. You are also able to immediately see content and it’s located in an accessible place. There is an abundance of recycled memes and retweets flowing throughout the page that are sharable, portable, reusable, and the account in itself is relevant to multiple audiences.

 DANK MEME ACCOUNT STATS

 With that being said the stats of the account do not reflect the apparent work put into making this account spreadable. The amount of followers for the account is about 400, while they only follow about 50 people. The account was created in November of 2016 and of their 160 tweets, 70 of them are either pictures or gifs. Looking at the last 20 tweets specifically the highest amount of retweets capped at 50, and the highest amount of likes capped at 40. When analyzing the Hooded Kermit account I was surprised to find that the account structure resembled the same ideas presented in the Designing of Spreadability chapter in “Spreadable Media”. 
HOODED KERMIT ACCOUNT STATS
The Hooded Kermit account in comparison to the Dank Meme account showed Hooded Kermit to be far more prosperous, but why? A few factors that could potentially play a role in this is the account activation date which was in October of 2016, a month earlier than when the Dank Memes account was created. Perhaps one could argue timing being a factor? Next I looked at the stats of the account which placed their number of followers at about 52,000, along with 378 pictures or videos out of the 382 tweets made. That is the difference of 16 tweets compared to the Dank Meme account whose pictures and videos only account for less than half of their tweets. I guess an argument that can be made against the Dank Meme account is their lack of strategic planning when pushing content and poor timing. Personally, I think that the real argument goes much beyond this.


CREDIBILITY AND FLOW

Both of the accounts prove to be almost identical in their appearance and methods but what if I told you that that isn’t the only thing needed in order for them to prosper? What if I told you that “Account Credibility” and “Flow” have a big amount of influence in deciding the fate of Recycled Memes and whether or not they will prosper? Would you agree? It’s okay if you don’t because it’s my argument anyway. Just like anything else in social media we want a credible source. I’m not speaking in the aspect of all of the content presented by an account being entirely true, but instead acceptable by our followers. As the head of an account you might feel a sense of responsibility to your “twitter fans” to like, retweet, recycle, and tweet things that they might find interesting or relevant to themselves. We tend to look for a sense of approval which is why subconsciously we will not retweet memes or content that is not already popular and or credible by thousands of others. This need for credibility comes from a sort of crowdsourcing, the internet’s judgement day(s), which question the validity of some it not all of your content. Yes, all of twitter seems to run on a check and balance system and by group effort, other accounts will come for you if you are not being a productive member of the twitter society. Twitter accounts who have more followers or high amounts of retweets and likes per post are seen as worthy of the 1 second that it takes to retweet or like their content. Whereas a less popular account could potentially harm your reputation and in doing so cause you to loose validity within your own tweets. I tried experimenting with this by taking the popular hooded Kermit Meme and making it relevant to the final project for this class.

 The meme stated, “Me: Start working on your final project so you can finish early”. The meme then stated, “Me to me: Wait until the last minute, you work better under pressure anyway.” Though this is actually pretty relevant while also being funny I only received 20 retweets, 33 likes, and 1 comment about how I suck at life, compared to the 118 people who clicked on it and the 3,321 impression it made. The same comparison can also be made by examining the Dank Meme account vs the Hooded Kermit accounts. There are a few recycled tweets that they have in common that they both share to their pages. However, the results are polar opposites. With that being said many accounts like the Dank Memes account I follow works extremely hard to become more popular in the twitter world by using the same methods of more credible pages to build credibility. With that being said it is possible for new accounts to pop up and attempt to gain credibility by recycling a popular meme.
On the other hand it doesn’t take too much time for us to decide whether or not an account is credible and this is paid in part to the process of flow. As we scroll through our timelines just to pass the actual time we began to subconsciously retweet or like random things including recycled tweets regardless of whether or not we’ve seen them before. I imagine it being something similar to watching a rerun of a random television series and as soon as it cuts to a commercial, flipping the channel to something else. There are many recycled tweets that are no longer entertaining to ourselves per say, but when we’re looking to pass time for a couple of minutes it becomes almost more convenient to retweet or like a recycled tweet. They allow us to leave sort of a twitter footprint to show your activity for that small amount of time. During the process of flow, account credibility is subconsciously checked and if the retweets and likes have a high number, let’s say 300+, then the recycled tweet will get liked or retweeted continuing the cycle.

FINAL THOUGHTS

So what does this mean? Recycled tweets, memes, gif, whatever you choose to call them, are the products of spreadable media. A series of many attempts of pushing specific content which resulted in the popularity, credibility, and validity of the once regular tweet. Once popular and credible they are basically fair game to all who use the internet which results in the popularity or credibility of multiple twitter accounts. Popularity and credibility create a separation within twitter making it easy for basic accounts like yours, yes I called you basic, to see so we can identify the top accounts to retweet, like, or follow. SHADE! The separation is subconsciously analyzed when reading the recycled tweet because we are able to see the number of people who liked and retweeted it before us which due to flow, creates an endless cycle of reused tweets. It there ever and end to this recycling cycle? They say that the internet is for life and I can believe it. It won’t be long before a new popular meme/tweet is being recycled and no one will even wonder what happened to Hooded Kermit. Until he pops back up throwing sneak shade and telling us, "But that's none of my business", to soften the blow. 
Special thanks to Dr. Vrooman for teaching me how to blog a little bit. 

Bibliography

Henry Jenkins, S. F. (2013). Spreadable Media. New York: New York University Press.


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