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I was in a bathroom yesterday that had a bunch of what I’d consider Facebook inspo posts pasted to the door and I was really taken aback by the comic in the middle. Not because of what it says, but because of how it ended up looking that way.
After a quick search, this is the comic. It’s obvious this original image has gone through a series of changes that pivot on the shared poverty of saving the same image over and over
Beside the fact to get to this low grade image quality requires a significant amount of the image being saved and having loss over time (similar to handling a photograph in real life and the oils on your hands fucking it up,) the thing that sticks out most is the chat bubble
The chat bubble on the butterfly was clearly added afterward. It& #39;s not even the same shade or type as the caterpillar& #39;s, and it actually semi ruins the (already obvious) joke about linear growth in the self by clarifying the position of the butterfly.
So here MAY BE the original comic, without the added bubble. Notice the butterfly& #39;s wings are orange like a monarch now, instead of the pale yellow. The more viral version of the comic was the one edited to be a tad bit snarkier, the one that most proved a point about "change"
Even more interesting: other edits of the comic exist in which both chat bubbles are edited, or some where the original edited chat bubble takes on different formatting.
Or sometimes you get the wings totally changed up to. Whoever shares an edited version of it feels it necessary to totally change the original comic in these minor ways because it seems purposeful to either accentuate the original, or make it more viral
Posts like these are shared everyday, even by non boomers, and the hand of man touching upon each re-upload, every edit, is taken at face value constantly. The Poor Image lives on in stolen content that is Remastered, Enhanced, and the enhancements always come with image loss.
What becomes evident, after more reverse image searches, is how often people seek to replicate (plagiarize? plagiarism in the context of shared posts becomes iffy) the original comic in another style. See examples below:
You even get the same comic, the tables turned, under a new author.
What makes this realization for me kind of ironic is that had it not been printed, had I not experienced this comic off of Facebook and in my own material world as a Pinterest board of quotes pasted on a door, I would have never cared to remark on how much this had been shared
So it took the image being plagiarized/consumed into an entirely new one, ripped and re-authored, then transitioned from technodigital object to material, for me to have really noticed this.
On another related note, the original artist of the comic, Maria Scrivan, runs into this theme a lot and has many comics on the same theme:
What makes the original comic more poignant for FB viral sharing is obviously the bluntness upon which "you& #39;ve changed" could be delivered. But it& #39;s also the most easily prone to be changed, because the narrative shift/mis en scene it captures is just ripe for editing
In other words, for the sake of popularity as its own sake, it helps if your original work can be changed at a whim to suit whatever is the current need for the person sharing it. It& #39;s one JPEG with a thematic flexibility that invites your destruction of the original.
https://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/
Anyway">https://www.e-flux.com/journal/1... this kind of shaped my thinking on this in a way, have a read, have a nice day.
Anyway">https://www.e-flux.com/journal/1... this kind of shaped my thinking on this in a way, have a read, have a nice day.
