Obi Wan Obama, Bin Laden’s Death, and Tumblr

In Monday’s post, I explained how I learned about Osama Bin Laden’s death via Twitter. Today, I want to look at the way President Obama and Bin Laden are currently being portrayed on another social networking site, Tumblr.

For those who don’t maintain one, a Tumblelog is a microblog (like Twitter) that “lets you effortlessly share anything: text, photos, quotes, links, music, and videos, from your browser, phone, desktop, and/or email.” According to Tumblr, the average user creates about a dozen original posts each month and reblogs roughly three posts from those whom they follow. At least half of these are photos while the remainder are split between text, links, quotes, music, and video. Indeed, most of what comes across my dashboard (i.e., my homepage) are photos, the main items for which I created a Tumblr account. Specifically, I turn there to locate and gawk at images from classical Hollywood (Bogie and Bacall! MGM studios!) as well as film stills, candid shots, and publicity photos of Gene Kelly and Colin Firth.

But (normal?) people who are not obsessed with Hollywood’s Golden Age, dead celebrities, and/or Colin Firth often use Tumblr to post and recirculate “LOL memes” (rhymes with cream) and other funny/clever/silly photoshopped images with captions. (Internet memes are links, videos, pictures, sites, concepts, hashtags, words, or phrases spread rapidly via social networking sites. Two of the earliest and cutest LOL or humorous memes are LOLcats.com and I Can Haz a Cheeseburger.)

For the past two days, I’ve kept an eye on Tumblr’s LOL and Obama tags, each of which features several funny Obama and Bin Laden memes. In them, our current president is positioned as Batman, the Terminator, Uma Thurman’s vengeful character in Kill Bill, a cowboy, and the best video-game player ever. Interestingly, not once is Obama or the situation depicted in a demeaning (conventional Republican?) light. For instance, there are no photoshopped pics crediting George W. Bush for Bin Laden’s capture/murder or images blasting Obama for refusing to release Bin Laden’s photo. Rather, they’re all pro-Obama/anti-Bin Laden. With this in mind, some questions:

• Why are there no potentially right-wing memes circulating on Tumblr?
• What do these funny photoshopped and captioned images/memes mean?
• Do they have any real bearing on the way their repeat viewers think about or perceive a situation such as the death of Osama Bin Laden?
• Do these photos, which are shared rapidly by various people across all parts of the world, aid in constructing a view of our immediate culture that’s narrow, potentially cut off from a real-world history? Or are they an accurate although heightened reflection of our shared views? (For more on this, see Garry Marshall’s “The Internet and Memetics.“)

“Evolution of Memes on the Network” and The Guardian remind us that memes have been around a long time and that they’re, of course, not limited to Internet phenomena: “religion and ritual are memes, as are fashions, political ideas and moral codes.” Some would also add to this list the Salem witch trials and Nazism, whose carriers spread and then acted upon their own horrifically skewed ideologies.

But again, what about seemingly silly memes like the aforementioned LOLcats, “Kilroy was here,” Rebecca Black’s “Friday,” puking rainbows, and Obama riding a unicorn (below)? What’s their ultimate purpose? They’re just entertainment, right? Comical, tampered-with images to pass on quickly to a friend/follower? Or delivered en masse to my Tumblr dashboard, do they represent something else? What say you?

Images/Memes on Tumblr (May 3-4, 2011)

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