From the editors
UNSOPHISTICATED SOPHISTICATION Words Jonas Althuis
About ten years ago, at the dawn of my pubescence, there was one pastime you could often find me and my peers doing. It wasn't trying to charm girls. It certainly wasn't sporting. It wasn't even gaming (though I did plenty of that too). It was spending time on the internet, and it was glorious.
The internet was exciting, there was always new things to discover. In those days, it felt endless and grand, but not in the omnipresent and immeasurable way that it does today. You had a handful of websites that you knew, perhaps they were in your bookmarks, or you knew their URLs by heart. Sometimes a friend would stumble upon a cool new website and share it with everybody. A new discovery. A new location on the World Wide Web that you could visit; all you had to do was type in the URL and you would be transported to an entirely new place, as if you had just gotten on a plane to a country you were visiting for the first time. If the website was any good, you could spend hours, days or sometimes even months coming back to visit it. Despite frequenting different websites over the years, there was one thing in particular that was always there. Present throughout my days. One thing to which the majority of my time on the internet went: looking at memes. nostalgia noun a sentimental longing or wistful affection for a period in the past Memes are a phenomenon that I perhaps take for granted, but which we all have a shared experience of. I've seen them so much over the years that I've spent on the internet that they feel self-evident; inherent to the world that I live in. So much so that I assume everybody knows what I mean when I say the word 'meme'. If, like me, you were born in the late 90s or later, then you probably do. At the very least, you have seen one before, willingly or unwillingly. If that's not the case, let me try to explain it to you. In its simplest and most common form, it's an image accompanied by some text that together tell a joke or communicate something humorous. It's a format that has by now been perfected, yet paradoxically is always changing. Memes evolve in such a way that every new iteration is different enough to be interesting yet familiar enough to be understood. meme noun an image, video, piece of text, etc., typically humorous in nature, that is copied and spread rapidly by internet users, often with slight variations
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