Description
- Abstract:
- Social media networks enable frictionless transmission of information, creating a new subject of media analysis: the meme, gathered by both an appeal to relatable affect and subversion of expectation. Recently, global meme culture has been shown to have material effects on the economy, mobilizing day traders to share strategies and directly collaborate to influence the markets. There are three novel developments within the world of meme-stock trading that point to larger responses and adaptations to the current economic-cultural climate. 1: Personal Incorporation: The infiltration of finance capitalism into every function of being has incentivized perceiving the self not as a human but as a corporation. 2: Mediated System Absurdity: The styles of communication deployed by these personal incorporations mirror economic chaos via artistic chaos through the double-arm of risk and abstraction. 3: “Communist” Capitalism: Despite operating under the premise of hyper-capitalism, the methods by which online traders actually move markets rely on rhetorical appeals to communism, socialism, and unified labor solidarity. Each of these transformations has varied causes and effects, but they're bonded by an inability to both take and be taken seriously by the structures of finance capitalism. Therefore, if the study of cultural movement cannot be incorporated into traditional economics, we must begin to build instead a theory of “Memenomics” - a pervasive economic-cultural atmosphere of self-aware antagonistic absurdity.
- Notes:
- Senior thesis (AB)--Brown University, 2022
- Concentration: Modern Culture & Media
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Citation
Ehrhardt, Evan G.,
"Memenomics: A Pseudo-Economic Theory of the Collectively Absurd"
(2022).
Modern Culture and Media Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.26300/3tst-mt26
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Modern Culture and Media Theses and Dissertations
Theses and Dissertations for the Modern Culture and Media department....