The Problem with Memes

I just got back from the Digital Media and Learning conference in La Jolla sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation. While much of the conference was devoted to youth media and the conference theme, namely diversifying participation, one of the panels addressed fair use specifically, with powerful presentations by Pat Aufderheide and Renee Hobbs, among others. Fair use allows people to use works created by others, as long as that use is somehow transformative. Perhaps one of the easiest ways to illustrate fair use is through video remixes, which take existing video footage and transform it. And a good example of video remix is the Hitler-in-the-bunker videos which borrow a particular scene from the 2004 film Downfall in which Hitler explosively denounces his enemies, only to slump over his desk in the end as he realizes defeat. This scene has been used repeatedly - Virginia Heffernan covered the meme (meaning a thing that gains popular currency and gets passed around repeatedly) back in 2008 in The New York Times. But the scene keeps getting remade, with reputedly more than 100 different versions. Recently, a colleague made one in support of Critical Commons, a fair use advocacy site supported by the IML. Titled "Digital Humanities and the Case for Critical Commons," the video imagines a battle between old and new kinds of scholarship as Hitler defends tradition, arguing for fair use by using fair use. He was delighted to get almost 20,000 views. However, another recent example, which has Hitler railing against the limitations of the iPad, earned more than 325,000,000 views....