“You’ll never really know anything about me” -100 gecs: mememe
“The worst thing in life is ending up with people who make you feel all alone.” -Lance Clayton: World’s Greatest Dad
“Dumb people are always blissfully unaware of how dumb they really are.” -Patrick Star: SpongeBob Squarepants

I had an english class where I had to bring items in to explain my personality and like the low social IQ neutered soul I am I brought in a bunch of pieces of media that I thought worked for me. I was accused of not understanding the assignment and that I was hiding myself, but I genuinely did the best that I could with that. Are we not the sum of our personal experiences? If I’m media brain am I not the video word made flesh?

Maybe there is something dangerous about your formative experiences being a personal reaction to something unchanging, infinitely rewatchable, and easily experience by others like a movie. If you’re a normie from the 50s or something, the experiences that shaped your core are probably physical ones with no record, can never be rexeperienced by you in a different context, and other people can never know what that experience was truly like. But with physical expereinces like that it’s understood that they were deeply personal experiences and that recounting it doesn’t do it justice because “you had to be there”. But with media dominated personalities you aren’t given the same treatment. Since the other person has also seen the same piece of media they have their own idea of what that piece of media meant, what the experience was like, and what value can be taken away from it. And it’s almost impossible to convey what you took away from that piece of media. Maybe there’s something sick in being able to relive the same piece of media over and over, in a similar vein to the archetype of the 50 year old guy who keeps watching his college football tapes.

Chat GPT tells me about this idea called Symbolic Interactionism, the main part of it is that everything is symbols whose meaning is derived from interacting with the world around you. Crucially though this meaning changes in different contexts. By remembering we allow the experiences to reshape based on our new symbolic understandings, but with media rewatching is almost a process of destroying the original memory and a betrayal of what you first saw. Remembering an experience is the memory of the sensation of the experience, rewatching a movie is supplanting the past experience with a memory of what it used to be and what is now.

Symbolic Interactionism also poses interesting issues since we live inside of our phones and constructed lifestyle enclaves, grouping devoid of any real meaning or unity outside of a mutual enjoyment of a thing, our symbolic interactionism between people in our actual community is rendered inoperable. The way our minds work is fundamentally fractured and balkanized because we lack that unit of a symbol. In a way TikTok is an attempt to rebridge the community where users will repeat phrases to each other to prompt responses, as if it affirm their symbolic understandings. Same can be said with memes and the internet running jokes into the ground. It’s a social capital of symbols.

So this is me.