During a week (I know, it was supposed to be two weeks, but I have a semi good excuse) I collected pictures that, to me, should synthesize the day. It is becoming more common than ever to express yourself in pictures - what was once the domain of the semi professional photographer or the tourist, that entity whose eyes and hands seem sometimes to be fused to a camera, is now an everyday happenstance thanks to the likes of Instagram and its super-easy way of destroying applying cheesy effects to otherwise good mundane pictures.
Instagram is most definitely not the only culprit of this renewed culture of communicating by pictures. There is 4chan, the western equivalent of the Japanese 2chan forums. It's an anonymous forum where people feel free to express themselves in slurs words and porn pictures, home to the meme phenomenon. Below, a rare image of a rather innocent 4chan picture thread (they are usually a lot less suitable for a blog post you want your professor and colleagues to see):
The pinnacle of this type of textless communication is the recent rise of Relay, an instant messaging application where instead of writing, you can search a collection of community-curated animated GIF images to express that hard-to-put-in-words feeling you want to convey. It's specially addictive when talking to close friends, with whom you already have strong non-verbal communication skills:
So back to my week. I had a very stressful week, I had visits (something I love, but can't cope very well with), shitloads of work, schoolwork and, in the weekend, a birthday party to organize. I see the narrative rather well in my sequence of images, but your mileage may vary (even after lightly describing my week, you probably won't be pointed to the same feelings those pictures express to me). These pictures carry a lot of prägnanz, as in they carry a lot more significance than their concise nature seems to imply.
As the culture of non-verbal expression sees a rebirth and more and more people use memes outside of internet context, it's fairly clear that this multi-dimensional forms of expression will only become more commonplace, as they allow us to express things where verbal communication simply falls short. Walk around the streets of Tallinn and you'll see meme faces pasted to light posts, announcing parties and sometimes even replacing spokespeople in advertising. The meme culture is here to stay (which only confirms Richard Dawkins' idea that the meme is the cultural equivalent of the gene, spreading our cultural phenomena in the zeitgeist the same way sex spreads our genetic material in the gene pool).
