“A picture is worth a thousand words” is a popular idiom that expresses the idea that an image can convey multiple meanings. The origin of this idiom can be dated back over a century and has been widely accepted. What if I were to tell you there was a term that perfectly encapsulates this popular idiom? Well, that term would be visual rhetoric. When it comes to the digital sphere, visual rhetoric is most commonly portrayed through memes. Doug Eyman discusses visual rhetoric in a much more academic manner than I will. That being said, let’s get into the visual rhetoric behind the meme.
What is a Meme?
What exactly is a meme? According to Merriam-Webster, a meme is “an amusing or interesting item (such as a captioned picture or video) or genre of items that is spread widely online especially through social media.” Under visual rhetoric, memes would be considered “representational images.” Since the invention of the internet meme, some meme have become quite complex, often needing the context of other memes. For my analysis, I will be focusing on a meme that would be deemed old or classic as of 2023, but is great when discussing visual rhetoric. This meme does not necessarily need a ton of context to understand the message.
“This is fine”
This is fine is an image that surfaced in the mid 2010s. As we can see, the image is pulled from a comic strip. The panel on the left features a dog calmly sitting at a kitchen table while a fire erupts around it. The panel on the right adds a speech bubble to the dog that reads “this is fine.” This meme represents trying to stay calm and collected while feeling overwhelmed. Recently, I mentioned this meme to some coworkers and they understood immediately. For some context, I work as a server in a restaurant. On this particular night everything that could go wrong went wrong; the system was down, the kitchen was backed up, we were all stressed and tired. So, during the middle of the chaos I had mentioned that I felt like the “this is fine” dog and all my coworkers related.
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