A Complex Image: CANCEL CULTURE!!!
BCM 110 [Blog 2]
A few years ago whilst scrolling through Twitter, I somehow came across a page called “Cursed Boomer Images”, and no… I’m not joking. I spent a long time scrolling through the page and its media, it actually took me a while to figure out whether the page was mocking younger generations or mocking older generations. I soon realised what was really going on. The page finds images that have somehow made their way to the internet that are typically used by right-wing, older people in an attempt to be humorous or make political statements, maybe because they want to be oppressed or something?
“CANCEL THIS” the image says with three beloved childhood cartoon characters sticking their middle fingers up to politically correct people. I found this image a few weeks ago on the twitter page and thought it was pretty interesting. Let’s take a deeper dive into what the hell could possibly be going on here and what in the world has got good old Kermit so enraged!
Considering the dimensions of the image, the denotations include Mr Potato Head, The Cat in The Hat and Kermit The Frog being rebellious and giving somebody a big “F*ck you”, we can also see the phrase ‘Cancel This’ written above them. The connotation of the image concerns these three characters and their franchises have been cancelled by the “woke”, “left”, “politically correct culture”. It’s hard to wrap your head around why they’re being cancelled, alas, I’ve done the research for you! Mr Potato Head has apparently been “cancelled” as Hasbro dropped the ‘Mr’ and went for a more gender neutral approach in the beginning of 2021. Kermit the Frog and the Muppets have been “cancelled” because Gonzo wore a dress in an episode last year. In 2021, Dr. Seuss Enterprises announced it was going to discontinue the publication of six books due to “insensitive and racist imagery”.
The person who created this image (I’ve spent some time trying to dig into its origins and haven’t tracked down an artist yet) is obviously being defiant of the “cancel culture” concept and its connection with society’s recent strides towards inclusivity. People of colour and the LGBTQ+ community have received a lot of attention from the media and corporations in the past few years as the divide between conservative people and socially accepting people seems to widen.
But here’s the thing, cancel culture is not real! Not many people were actually calling for Mr Potato head to change its title, or Dr Seuss Enterprises to pull its racist archives from shelves, or hoping that The Muppets would put a male character in a dress. These three cartoon characters were in no danger of being “cancelled”, because the people who are actually fighting for a more inclusive world realise there are much bigger fish to fry. But the changes these companies have made really don’t harm anyone… in fact they may very likely help someone; a little boy who wants to wear a dress won’t feel so different after all, a young black person won’t stumble across a racist Dr Seuss story and feel like such an outsider.
Instead, ‘cancel culture’ is spun into a negative notion by the media when people in power face criticism or consequences for their bad actions.
So now that I’ve clarified the two semiotic components of the image and identified the politically charged relationship between the two, it can be concluded that there are a wide range of ways that a viewer could possibly interpret this image. The image communicates a contemporary set of values through visual signs.
References:
Link to analysed image on twitter:
@CursedBoomers available on Twitter
The Marketing Study Guide, date unknown, The Communication Process: Encoding and Decoding, Available at: <https://www.marketingstudyguide.com/communications-process-encoding-decoding/> [Accessed 2 April 2022]
Lee J, August 2021, Disney's 'Muppet Babies' TV show features cross-dressing Gonzo, Christian Today [online] Available at: <https://www.christiantoday.com/article/disneys.muppet.babies.tv.show.features.cross.dressing.gonzo/137209.htm> [Accessed 1 April 2022]
Hagi S, November 2019, Cancel Culture Is Not Real—At Least Not in the Way People Think, TIME [online] Available at: <https://time.com/5735403/cancel-culture-is-not-real/> [Accessed 2 April 2022]
Ng E, July 2020, Reflections on Cancel Culture and Digital Media Participation, Ohio University USA Available at: <https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1527476420918828> [Accessed 2 April 2022]
Kommentare