#185: The Painted Word

As streams of such content endlessly flow by, we rarely have time to ponder them long enough to absorb their more complex or nuanced implications. Memes rely upon text because it’s the most efficient way to convey a specific message. What would all that DALL-E art amount to if we cropped out the written prompts?

the essential characteristic of “Instagrammability” is readability: “The viewer could scroll past an image and still grasp its meaning, e.g., ‘I saw fireworks,’ ‘I am on vacation,’ or ‘I have friends.’”

Social media virality increasingly positions the human user as a relay stations for memes rather than a source of original material—a disembodied avatar with a countable pair of eyeballs and a hand for clicking, for whom sharing is less and less distinguishable from creating.

Avery Trufelman compares this to the “random” humor of the ‘00s internet a... See more