Actually, while I understand Charles's reaction to this video, Let's remember that most memes tend to be offensive, racist, and some downright repulsive. This is the 4chan culture and they don't care about being PC at all (at one point they had the "Happy Negro" meme floating around, qtd. in Encyclopedia Dramatica). So when you work with them or on a topic about them, or on internet culture in general, you just have to accept it for what it is. For me, it was ironic because from what I saw in the video, most of the things that's been tossed around as "digital humanities" aren't the main focus of digital humanities. When the discipline is being discussed, the topics that appear are digital archiving, textual variants of digital texts, digital authorship, data mining, data access and retrieval etc... but I may be horribly wrong because apparently what I do isn't either. burcu On Fri, Jan 22, 2010 at 11:58 AM, Alex Leavitt <alexleavitt@gmail.com>wrote:
Reference: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/downfall-hitler-meme
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Alexander Leavitt Research Specialist, Convergence Culture Consortium Comparative Media Studies, MIT http://doalchemy.org Twitter: @alexleavitt
On Fri, Jan 22, 2010 at 11:45 AM, jeremy hunsinger <jhuns@vt.edu> wrote:
It is actually just a spin off of a meme that uses this clip from that movie, there are probably 30 or so different re-texts and mashups i've seen of this clip. The joke, i think, of the meme is that it never ever comes close to the German, nor is it ever supposed to, nor is the content really supposed to be evil or really related to the clip, it is a play of contrasts and a play of hyperbole. I think you hit it on the head, it is supposed to be contrary to intentions, that's sort of its point. Sometimes people re-vocalize the video, but usually they just subtitle it. True it does for some play off the general ignorance of germans, but then the meme has traveled quite far and wide, however, i'm pretty sure that neither german, nor evil is supposed to be the point here. I think the point of the meme centers around the banality of the reproduction and reconstruction of the meanings, well if it has a point at all and isn't, which it frequently is just a form of nihilism of the /b/ sort.
I posted this one because there was recently a big debate across a series of blogs about digital humanities versus media studies and I think the use of the meme here captures elements of the mutual critique.
I'm sorry you didn't find it worth watching. On Jan 22, 2010, at 11:31 AM, Charles Ess wrote:
Very sorry to have to say this ... How profoundly disappointing, if not on the edge of insulting. If (a) you know German reasonably well, and especially if (b) you've seen the terrific film, Der Untergang, that is ripped off here - it doesn't strike me as funny at all. The kindest thing that I can say about it from my standpoint is that it is a weak attempt at humor that depends first of all upon complete ignorance of German, and secondly a strikingly uncritical willingness to accept the now very tired trope of Hitler as the archetype of reactionary evil. (Part of the irony here: I don't think he was all that reactionary, especially with regard to new technologies.) As sympathetic as I am to the argument attempted to be made here - this seems to me to thereby works directly contrary to its intentions.
Sorry - no one bats a thousand, not even the redoubtable Jeremy!
- charles ess Institut for Informations- og Medievidenskab Helsingforsgade 14 8200 Århus N. Denmark mail: <imvce@hum.au.dk> tel: (+45) 8942 9250
Distinguished Research Professor, Interdisciplinary Studies Drury University, Springfield, Missouri 65802 USA
Exemplary persons seek harmony, not sameness. -- Analects 13.23
in case you've not seen this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VREJV--VHSw
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