This Is Fine

• Published in: Representations (Berkeley, Calif.) Vol. 168; no. 1; pp. 48 - 54
• Main Author: Cohen, Kris
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Berkeley University of California Press Books Division 01.11.2024
• Subjects: Appropriation
• ISSN: 0734-6018; 1533-855X
• DOI: 10.1525/rep.2024.168.3.48

In the archive of memes, it’s striking that one of the most famous and enduring memes, This is Fine, is rarely appropriated. Repeated, yes, enduring far beyond most meme’s short life spans.1 But it is rarely altered or adapted or personalized, except through its insertion in different contexts. This flies in the face of the prevalent and probably correct way to understand memes: through their amenability to adaptation, appropriation, and reuse—their role in the Web’s remix cultures of participation. In this understanding, one apprehends memes first through the fact that one participates in them, makes them one’s own. Sometimes appropriation makes the joke less funny, sometimes more—because quality isn’t the point. That’s just part of what it means for memes to propagate as personalizable, which is to say, possessable, which is to say, as appendages to a self that is active in and not dominated by the world