By Josie Breck, Periodicals Department

Okay, But Where Are The Memes?

Defined very broadly, a meme is like an in-joke for a mass audience. The sources of memes are often copyrighted, but not as a rule – it’s more about what little chunks of culture resonate with people than the legality of using that chunk for your own purposes. Relaxed attitudes towards copyright allow for memes to spread. That attitude was as endemic in underground press as it is in online communities. 

A notorious example was R. Crumb’s “Keep on Truckin’!”, a comic which spread across the underground without his explicit permission. The meme became so popular that companies like A.A. Sales made unofficial merchandise. When Crumb tried to sue A.A. Sales, the comic was ruled to be in the public domain due to a since-rescinded technicality. (Crumb’s appeal to the Sixties underground aside, he often used racial caricature and sexual violence in his work, something he intensified to shake off his popularity. As such, recent critical assessments don’t favor him.)

There are Similar stories of meme ascension for digital-era cartoonists such as Matt Furie, whose Pepe the Frog became a right-wing signifier. K.C. Green’s work has also hit meme status several times, most famously his “This is Fine” comic. Each of these artists has responded to their work being used in this way with new works which subvert (or rebuke) the audience’s expectations.

A few other memes of the Sixties underground include satirical portrayals of Nixon, the cryptic “Paul is dead” rumors regarding Paul McCartney, and the chorus of Arlo Guthrie’s Alice’s Restaurant, a song which encouraged its own memetic spread.

Here’s a look at the American Library Association’s 2024 Youth Media Award Winners that are available on Hoopla. You can download these eBooks and eAudiobooks with a few quick clicks!

By Josie Breck, Periodicals Department

Marshall McLuhan said “the medium is the message” – meaning every new medium changes the way we interact with the world, including the message within that medium. While obvious in the present day, where the internet has dramatically shaped our daily lives, we need not stray far from Mcluhan’s own time for another poignant example: underground newspapers. While not strictly a “new” medium, the US underground press boom of the Sixties rose out of a newly available process – offset printing made it possible to start a publication with a smaller investment of time and money than with the previously dominant process of letterpress, resulting in a massive boom in independent publications.

From there, we can see similarities between the underground boom of the Sixties and the online boom of the past few decades. Both were made possible by newly available technology, opened up dialogues which were not possible under the oversight of the previous mass media monopoly gatekeepers, and radically changed society.

To make more of these underground papers accessible, I have digitized a few papers which I could not easily find online. You can find them on my Internet Archive account. Note that the presence of a digitized publication on my account does not amount to an endorsement. The underground press scene was run predominantly by cis heterosexual white men. As such, there is much transphobia, homophobia, racism, misogyny, and other chauvinistic expressions within the papers.

Embracing Subjectivity

A feature of most radical press movements is the throwing out of journalistic “objectivity” – the idea that a journalist should state facts plainly without pushing any particular agenda. While this idea of objectivity is the bread and butter of most mainstream news media, the radical press has no use for this concept – the agenda of radical publishers is rarely concealed, because the purpose of publishing is agitation into action.

(It is worth noting that Jabara and his clients were targets of the National Security Agency (NSA) in the late 60s. Decades old at that point, the NSA was still not known to the general public, operating mostly in secret.)

In the present, this issue continues to challenge the so-called “objectivity” of mainstream media. Often it is framed as being “too complicated” for the subjectively-minded masses to fully understand. This appeal to “objectivity” ironically conceals what the occupation objectively is: a textbook case of settler colonial occupation and genocide, to which according to international law the Palestinian people have a legal right to resist. A powerful resistance to this facade of “objectivity” has swept social media platforms on an unprecedented scale for going on half a year, thanks in part to mobilization by Palestinian and anti-zionist activists over social media.

Happy New Year! Here’s a look at the latest books to hit the Pratt Library’s shelves and eLibrary. We hope that you enjoy reading them.

Celebrate the new year by checking out a new book! Here’s a look at the latest titles in Young Adult Fiction.