MEMES A Guide for the Internet Uninitiated Words & Drawings by Hayden Nagin
MEMES: A GUIDE FOR THE INTERNET UNINITIATED
INTRODUCTION
What Do You Meme? With the inception of social media and the increased interactivity of the WWW that was spawned in 1999 with the inception of Web 2.0 1 came the birth of the Internet meme. An Internet meme is an activity, concept, phrase or piece of media, which spreads (often through mimicry or re-appropriation for humorous purposes) between users on the Internet at a rapid pace. An Internet meme may be as tangible as an image or the structure of a joke or as abstract as a specific sound. Internet memes are democratic, they’re widespread, and (most importantly) they must evoke an emotional response – usually funny, but sometimes also saddening, shocking or 001 Web 2.0 is a computer nerd term that basically just means that users could now participate in person-to-person communication on web pages rather than just access passive information. Like, imagine if the whole Internet was just Wikipedia for like 40 years and all you could do was read what was already on there, and then they were like, “BOOM, here’s Facebook, ya dorks” and then all of a sudden you could talk to your great aunt in Toledo that you haven’t seen since you were in diapers. That’s what Web 2.0 did for the Internet.
offensive. Beyond stupid Internet humor (and yes, some of them are really, really stupid), the propagation of Internet memes points to larger trends and cultural anxieties among Internet users. Internet memes have the
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Introduction: What Do You Meme?
power to revolutionize language, sell products, sway
of art and culture through generations.
But ok, I’m going to pump the brakes here before I get too ahead of myself, and let’s talk about where the term “meme” began. It all started in 1968 with a man named Richard Dawkins. [cue shimmery wind chime noise and dreamy screen transition]
"Honey, I Invented the Meme" Richard Dawkins is an English ethologist and evolutionary biologist, whose 1976 book The Selfish Gene was an attempt to understand why some behaviors, from an evolutionary perspective, seemed to make no sense but, were somehow then found to be very common amongst human societies. Dawkins claimed that the flow of these ideas from one mind to another
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Dawkins himself became a meme in 2014 when he changed his Twitter avatar to a photo of himself in a t-shirt that read "We Are All Africans," and memers replaced the quote on his shirt with text referencing various internet in-jokes, Like “We Are All Anime” and “We Are All shitposters.”
public elections and have a long history in the spread
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is analogous to the way genes carry biological information from one generation to the next, but unlike cells, who rely on some chemical science mumbo jumbo that I can’t remember from when I took biology, memes are spread though learned cultural behaviors. These ideas begin in the brain and spread outward, jumping from one vessel to another, growing rapidly and eventually declining into obscurity as they are supplanted by newer memes, like big, dumb stars. Dawkins likened memes to “mind viruses,” in that they take over human consciousness and lead them to create cultural trends which do not directly benefit them evolutionarily.2 For a meme to survive and spread in a competitive environment, it must have attributes which give it advantages over 002 An example Dawkins gives in The Selfish Gene is martyrdom, a completely human concept in which one puts their ideals above the value of their life. This is obviously not an evolutionary benefit to humans, so its proliferation in human society is due merely to the idea of selflessness - a culturally crafted human reaction. Dawkins hypothesized that ideas are in competition in a process analogous to natural selection, through which some ideas prove successful and spread whilst others die out.
other memes, regardless of their inherent biological benefit. When Dawkins found that he needed a name for this concept, he proposed calling it mimeme, which comes from the Greek word meaning “something
replicated.” But that was kind of pompous and pretty lame, so he shortened it to just “meme.” He wrote in his book, “I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. It should be pronounced to rhyme with ‘cream.’”
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Introduction: What Do You Meme?
Internet memes are a subset of the larger concept of the meme specific to the culture and environment of the Internet. In 2013, Dawkins characterized an Internet meme as being a meme which is deliberately altered by human creativity. Put simply, a meme evolves organically, though years of the diffusion of information from generation to generation
“It should be pronounced to rhyme with ‘cream.’”
as in Darwinian selection, whilst an Internet meme evolves intentionally through cognizant human activity. Internet memes are participatory methods of communication in which humans assign them meaning and shape they way they evolve. For the purpose of this guide, I will heretofore refer to Internet memes solely as “memes” because I’m the author here, and you can’t tell me what to do.
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WH AT MAKES A MEM E
The Part Where We Draw Lines in the Sand
MEMES: A GUIDE FOR THE INTERNET UNINITIATED
CHAPTER 01: WHAT MAKES A MEME
The Part Where We Draw Lines in the Sand So now that we know what a meme is, how do we know what a meme looks like? Well, the short answer is: it can look like anything! A meme is not bound to a specific medium but can exist depending upon the way it is propagated and conceptualized. A meme could exist as an image, a text phrase, a combination of text and image (an image macro), an activity, a video, a sound, I could go on, but really anything could be a meme. What’s important is not the thing itself, but the meaning that we, as Internet users and active participants in the spread of the meme, assign to it. Often, the images or concepts that are used to create a meme are stripped of their original meaning and assigned new meaning over and over and over again as they become re-appropriated each time they are remade and spread. Let’s take for example, Roll Safe, a meme which gained popularity on Twitter in late 2016. The
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meme features a photo of Actor Kayode Ewumi grinning and pointing at his temple captioned with various jokes mocking poorly made decisions and lack of foresight or critical thinking. The first instance of the Roll Safe meme was posted by Twitter user @FootyHumor, with the image captioned “When you piss her off on purpose so she can say goodnight at 6pm and you can just play FIFA for the rest of the day in peace.” Other popular captions include “You can’t be broke if you don’t check your bank account,” “You can’t get cheated on if you don’t get into a relationship,” and “YOU CAN’T GET FIRED IF YOU DONT HAVE A JOB.” There are hundreds of examples of similar captions on the Roll Safe meme but they all convey the same idea of hubris and false confidence. The image of Ewumi comes from a YouTube video posted by the BBC Three YouTube channel on June 1st, 2016 as part of the Hood Documentary series, but that’s not important. What’s important is the image of Ewumi pointing at his temple and looking
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The original screencap of KayodeEwumi portraying the character of Reece Simpson, a.k.a. “Roll Safe” from the BBC Three web series Hood Documentaries.
Chapter 01: The Part Where We Draw Lines in the Sand
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directly at the viewer. When you strip the image of its context and you don’t know who Ewumi is, or what Hood Documentaries is, you’re left
What matters is the universal concept behind the meme and the way that concept can be re-interpreted by anyone
with an image that conveys a look of naïve confidence and hubris. You don’t need to know who that man is, or where the image came from because it’s not integral to understand the universal meaning behind the image. This is what makes memes different than traditional joke structures or other viral trends. The actual image, or video, or phrase, or whatever it is, doesn’t actually matter.
What matters is the universal concept behind the meme and the way that concept can be reinterpreted by anyone who can think of a clever way to twist that concept and put it online. Memes level the playing field when it comes to comedic and cultural touchstones in contemporary society, and they illustrate the ways in which simple emotional resonances can overcome barriers of language, distance or perspective. Not many people will know who Kayode Ewumi is, but everyone knows the sting of thinking you have something in the bag when you clearly don’t.
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Chapter 01: The Part Where We Draw Lines in the Sand
It Is What It Is (Except When It Isn't) Ok, so now we know what a meme is, and we know what a meme looks like, how do we know what isn’t a meme? Memes must adhere to a strict definition of rules to distinguish them from similar viral Internet content. According to Dawkins, what makes a meme a meme, something that is successfully spread or adapted from person to person, are three key traits: copy-fidelity, fecundity and longevity. Copy-fidelity refers to a meme's ability to be accurately copied. For something to be considered a meme, it must be very easily replicatable, meaning anyone
1. Copy-fidelity 2. Fecundity 3. Longevity
beyond the first person to post the meme can recontextualize it with their own twist. Memes must reach beyond the barriers of geography, classism and verbal language to get at the ubiquitous ideas that lie within the meme, so that anyone who happens upon it can quickly understand what it’s trying to convey and come up with their own way to connect with that human truth. In this way, memes differ from traditional viral Internet content. A meme consists of a single piece of content that is edited and re-interpreted each time it is shared,
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whereas viral content is merely spread without editing the original video, but is not inherently exploitable. Memes often need to reach virality to become popular, however a piece of content must be participatory for it to be considered a
Memes must reach beyond the barriers of geography, classism and verbal language.
meme, not just a piece of content that is rapidly shared. A meme must have a record of existing spoofs, remixes, re-enactments and parodies. Viral videos are often lumped in the same category as memes, and while they do overlap, not all viral videos can be considered
memes. Take, for example, The Lonely Island, the comedy troupe of Akiva Schaffer, Andy Samberg and Jorma Taccone, who created digital content for Saturday Night Live from 2005-2008. A number of The Lonely Island’s SNL digital shorts went viral online, most notably “Lazy Sunday” and “Dick in a Box,” which stars Samberg and singer Justin Timberlake as R&B singers who package their genitals as Christmas gifts. The video went on to reach millions of views on YouTube and beyond after it aired on SNL in 2007. But it’s not a meme. It reached vitality and has a cult following on the Internet, but it is inherently static in its content.
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Chapter 01: The Part Where We Draw Lines in the Sand
Though it’s been shared thousands of times over
Take alternatively Numa Numa, a video uploaded by American blogger Gary Brolsma to the website Newgrounds in December of 2004.The video features Brolsma kip-synching the song “Dragostea Din Tei” with lively gesticulative dance moves and facial exaggerations. Within 3 months, the video had been viewed more than 2 million times on Newgrounds, and The Viral Factory, a UK-based advertising agency, estimated that by November 2006, the video had been viewed over 700 million times. Where Numa Numa differentiates itself from Dick in a Box is in it’s remixability, or its “copy-fidelity,” as Dawkins might have put it. As soon as Numa Numa had
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“Dick in a Box” first aired on SNL on December 16, 2006 and went on to gain internet notoriety in the months that followed, and even won a Creative Arts Emmy Award for Best Original Music and Lyrics in 2007.
online, the context of the video remains the same.
Numa Numa features Brolsma lip-synching to “Dragostea Din Tei” by Moldovian Eurodance trio O-Zone. The title is a vocalization of the Romanian phrase“nu mă nu mă,” which is featured in the refrain of “Dragostea Din Tei” and means “I’m not me.” #mood.
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Chapter 01: The Part Where We Draw Lines in the Sand
reached virality, thousands of users had uploaded their own versions of the video, lip-syncing to “Dragostea Din Tei” and mimicking Brolsma’s iconic movements. In this way, Numa Numa surpassed traditional viral content and become (we’ll get to that a little later, just be patient).
VIRAL CONTENT
THAT GOOD SHIT
MEMES
Fecundity refers to the speed at which something is replicated. For something to be classified as a meme, it must grow rapidly in order to take hold in the cultural consciousness and spread beyond the community of the person who originally created it. The speed at which a meme reaches virality and is adopted into the Internet lexicon is directly linked to its copyfidelity, but also to its inherent value to Internet users. Often, memes are driven to popularity
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FIG. 01 This venn diagram illustrates the realtionship between viral content and memes, which are often incorrectly used interchangably. While some memes can go “viral,” it is not necessary to the evolution of a meme, and just because a piece of content goes viral does not automatically make it a meme.
one of the first examples of a performative meme
MEMES: A GUIDE FOR THE INTERNET UNINITIATED
by their proximity to the greater anxieties of
The first example of the Arthur’s Fist meme was posted by Twtter user @AlmostJT on July 27, 2016, who first pointed out the emotional power of the image. Other captions for Arthur’s Fist include “me: 'what we eating for dinner???' mom: 'food' me:" and "white person: *breathes*."
contemporary culture. Take for example Arthur’s Fist, a meme which rose to prominence on Twitter in the summer of 2016, featuring an image of the character Arthur’s clenched fist, from an episode of the PBS children’s show “Arthur.” The image went on to be associated with feelings of frustration and anger and holding back one’s true emotions. This resonated with Twitter users in a time when the political climate in America was at its most tense, and they used the meme to connect with cultural anxieties about race relations in America, foreign policy and the 2016 Presidential election, as well as simple expressions of humor and pop culture references that come with all memes. The fact that Arthur’s Fist resonated so deeply with Internet users is directly linked to its inherent meaning in relation to the frustration of American culture in the time of an election, and this connection helped propel its fecundity, and there for its like span as a popular meme in the Internet zeitgeist. If a meme has the power to grab a person’s attention,
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Chapter 01: The Part Where We Draw Lines in the Sand
convince them to help spread it, or inspire them to create a derivative work, it can grow. Finally, Dawkins asserted that memes must have longevity, or staying power, in the greater consciousness of a culture. If something spreads but cannot take hold in a culture as an ongoing reference point, then it cease to exist and (in biological terms) goes extinct. Often, content that is created in reference to a specific event of occurrence do not live on to become memes because once that event has passed, their value is lost on users. A meme must connect with a greater human certainty that allows it to be infinitely remixed and continue
Memes are driven to popularity by their proximity to the greater anxieties of contemporary culture.
to thrive in the minds of a culture. The One Does not Simply meme is an example of one with great longevity, rising to popularity in the early 2000s and continuing to be used in meme circles today. One Does Not Simply began as a simple text remix structure in which the quote “One does not simple walk into Mordor� by the character Boromir from the 2001 film Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the
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Ring was remixed to “One does not simply X into Y” in which the memes could replace X and Y with whatever they pleased to make a joke. The meme later evolved to “One does not simply…” followed by any number of humorous things. This particular phrase has been adopted colloquially into the
ONE DOES NOT SIMPLY
language of Internet users and is still widely used. This is largely due to the simplicity at the heart of the meme, as it can be remixed and re-applied to any situation which gives
WRITE A BOOK ABOUT MEMES
the meme incredible
The One Does Not Simply phrase is often paired with this corresponding image of actor Sean Bean with his hand raised to the camera in a pedantic pose.
longevity, and though it references a piece of pop culture your knowledge of the Lord of the Rings trilogy does not inhibit your ability to interact with it. The image of Sean Bean’s thumb and index finger pressed together are enough for anyone to understand the meaning of the meme. The length of time in which a meme remains in the public’s consciousness does not define its status as a meme, but it does define its power. Evolutionarily, a meme must persist through multiple generations for it to be absorbed into
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Chapter 01: The Part Where We Draw Lines in the Sand
the cultural zeitgeist, and similarly, an Internet meme must persist beyond its original place of posting to reach the audience necessary to make it a meme; however, no specific length of time is required for something to become a meme. With the advent of the Internet and social media networks, the spread of information is almost instantaneous, and a meme can be created, exploited and forgotten in a matter of hours, but if it has the power to be infinitely recontextualized, it exists forever as a meme. The place a meme is cultivated also affects the time it takes to mature. On a social media outlet like Twitter, in which posts are limited to 140 characters and can be retweeted to reach massive audiences outside of the original poster, something can become a meme and spread very rapidly. On an image forum like 4chan, where many evergreen memes were created; however, things may take much longer to become memes because the community of people is smaller and the function of the website is not sharing outside of a specific circle. What constitutes a meme, though, is the spread outside from the original place of conception out to other social media communities.
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So How Do I Meme? Now that we know a little more about memes, how do they work? Memes spread due to their inherent universal values. If a meme has the power to grab a person’s attention, it has the power to be reproduced and gain traction in online spaces. Like Richard Dawkins hypothesized, memes compete, reproduce and evolve just like genes do, and only the strongest survive. Like a virus (hence, “viral” content *wink* *nudge* *finger guns*), memes vie for space in our brains and our behaviors, and the ones that succeed though widespread repetition have been best evolved to reach the widest audience. Oftentimes, the simplest memes live on to become the most popular. The easier the concept is to understand, the more widely a meme can be shared and the more likely it is to be remixed.3 003 That’s copy-fidelty! Remember that term? The one we talked about like 3 pages ago? Well, I hope you do because there’s going to be a test. You didn't know there was going to be a test? Fine, it’s open book, but I hope you brought a Scantron.
A study by Drake University Law School's Intellectual Property Law Center saw that shorter memes were 2.8 times more likely
to be shared, and template memes (a.k.a. “image macros,” which we’ll cover in the next chapter) were 2.2 times more likely. Because they’re so simple to understand and to replicate, these memes allow
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Chapter 01: The Part Where We Draw Lines in the Sand
users of any level of Internet experience to interact with them, and that’s the driving force behind the growth of a meme: interactivity. While the scientific meme can involve random change and slow evolution of cultural practices, Internet memes are deliberately and directly altered by human ingenuity. The participatory action of a meme is what makes it grow so quickly, and what makes it live on in the hive mind of Internet consciousness. This also means that the power of a given meme is entirely of the audience. The people who understand the meaning behind a meme and exploit it to make it their own become the author of the meme by reinforcing that meaning and propelling the meme forward to new audiences. The original poster of the meme, therefore, is not the author, and cannot take credit for starting the meme. Memes cannot actively be created;
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Salt Bae found popularity in January 2017 following a viral video of Turkish chef Nusret GÜkçe flamboyantly sprinkling salt over a piece of meat. Salt Bae very quickly rose to popularity on social media, but the popularity quickly waned because of its lack of remixability.
dependent on the tastes and ideals
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they are created by the collected consciousness of a large group of people. Copying a meme and making your own interpretation of it does not mean that you made the meme, but that you’re participating in it, and likewise, creating a piece of content with the intent of it becoming a meme does not inherently make it one. Memes are fueled not by the ideals of the person who started them, but by the ubiquitous concept they portray, and the creator does not imbibe the meme with said concept, the people who understand it implicitly and recreate it for themselves do. And finally, like all good things, all memes must come to an end. Memes just aren't built to live forever. You must accept this fact if you’re going to take part in Internet culture. Even the Internet’s most evergreen memes wane in popularity 004 “Die” might be the wrong word per say, but “live on in the liminal aether of dedicated meme circles and group texts awaiting their inevitable ironic renaissance (more on that later) or wither slowly in Meme Purgatory (a.k.a. Facebook) until they pass softly and with little aplomb” felt a little too wordy.
and eventually die4, replaced immediately by another meme in its wake. Meme death can be swift, like the example of Salt Bae, who rocketed in popularity
in January 2017 only to quickly be replaced by gifs of Drew Scanlon (White Guy Blinking); and meme death can be gradual, like Harambe the gorilla, which New York magazine’s Brian Feldman declared was too dark to be corporatized and
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therefore too weird to die. Memes reach their end time when they lose their foothold in the public consciousness; however because they’re intangible beings, they never truly go extinct, because the human truths and emotions that give them power can live on infinitely in the minds of those who take part in their life. The meme is dead. Long live the meme.
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L ET'S GE T ME TAPHYSI CA L
Putting Square Memes Into Round Holes
MEMES: A GUIDE FOR THE INTERNET UNINITIATED
CHAPTER 02: LET'S GET METAPHYSICAL
Putting Square Memes Into Round Holes While, yes, pretty much anything can be a meme, many memes follow a similar structure, which allows for a type of shorthand, in which those who understand how memes work can quickly grasp the concept of a new meme because they are aware of how similar memes have functioned within the same set of rules. For the purposes of this guide, and to help you understand the myriad of ways in which memes can be presented, I propose that memes can be placed among 5 distinct categories: 1.
Reaction Memes
2. Narrative Memes 3. Performance Memes 4. Remix Memes 5. Ironic Memes
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Chapter 02: Putting Square Memes Into Round Holes
Reaction Memes Perhaps the easiest and the broadest category of memes is the reaction meme. A reaction meme refers to a meme in which a punchline is made in response the universal concept behind an image, video or animated GIF. Most reaction memes can be classified as “image macros,” which is an image paired with a small piece of text, in which the image remains the same but the text of the meme is remixed to give the image new meaning. Roll safe, the example we looked at from the previous section is an
Reaction memes can also include “reaction images” which are images, or often animated GIFs, which are meant to portray a specific emotion in response to something that has been said. Reaction images are different from image macros, but they work in a similar manner. Both distill the content of the image to its most universal aspect and use that to portray a universal emotion or truth; however, while image
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Bad Luck Brian is a image marco that features a photo of a teenage boy nicjnamed Brian accompanied by captions that describe a variety of embarrassing and tragic occurrences. Popular example include "Tries to far in public. Shits." and "Takes SAT. Forgets to use #2 pencil.
example of an image macro.
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macros use language to respond to the ubiquitous meaning of a specific image, reaction images use the ubiquitous meaning of images to respond to 005 Editor's Note: This is a terrible analogy. If you pour the milk first, you’re a monster and you absolutely need to rethink the way you navigate the world. Your friends and family are all here, and this is your intervention.
language. They’re like reverse image macros. Like pouring the milk first and then the cereal. Different, but just as good.5
Reaction memes can also include examples which do not adhere to the strict text/image relationship of image macros and reaction images, but can also include comics, composite images and many others. A reaction meme simply
Reaction memes distill the content of images to their most ubiquitous aspect and uses them to portray a universal truth or emotion.
refers to a meme in which the author is reacting to something using the language of a meme, and using the objectivity of image-based communication to transcend verbal language and convey an emotion beyond the preconceived context of a particular image. A contemporary example of the reaction meme is Mocking SpongeBob, whose popularity
peaked in the summer of 2017 when Twitter user @OGBEARD posted a screenshot of the character
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SpongeBob SquarePants shown in an insulting pose with the caption “How i stare back at little kids when they stare for too long” on May 4th, 2017, which received more than 73,000 retweets and 147,300 likes in five days. The Mocking SpongeBob meme quickly grew in popularity after the Twitter user @lexysaeyang re-posted the same image of SpongeBob with the caption “Bf: ‘I don’t even know her like that’ Me: ‘I doNt EveN KnOw heR liKe thAt,’” which catalyzed a with the Mocking SpongeBob meme using this style of capitalization in text captions. Notable captions include “Americans: 'I need healthcare because I’m dying' Republicans: 'I NeEd hEaLtHcArE bEcAuSe I hAvE caNcEr aNd iM dYinG'” (-@DaniLevyyy) and “me filling out FAFSA: 'tuition and books are expensive' FAFSA: 'tUiTiOn AnD bOoKs ArE eXpEnSiVe'” (-@ruhtwhut)
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Like Arthur’s Fist, Mocking SpongeBob clearly articulated the ways in which contemporary Internet users use memes as part of larger conversations on oppressive societal structures.
new methodology of interacting
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Narrative Memes While reaction memes rely on specific imagery to convey a universal idea, narrative memes hone in on specific formats and structures and exploit them in endless ways to tell infinite different
Narrative memes hone in on specific formats and structures and exploit them in endless ways to create a near infinite number of iterations.
narratives. They are often text-based, but could also be formatted as comic strips or series of photographs of the self. What makes a narrative meme is that it does not rely on any supplemental imagery to connect itself to meme culture. While reaction memes use the same imagery over and over but assign it new meaning each time by inserting their own
interpretation
of
the
image, narrative memes use
a repeating structure that allows the user to tell their own specific narrative, joke or turn of phrase. They do so by following the structure of the meme, but changing the way we get there. For example, every one of a specific narrative meme may have the same punchline, but the setup is always going to be different.
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A good example of a narrative meme, and a cornerstone in the history of Internet humor is the Rage Comic. Rage Comics are a series of web comics featuring a slew of… lovable?… characters (colloquially referred to as “rage faces”), often
crated
with
crude digital drawing software like MS Paint. The comics are used to tell stories about and end with the same punchline, punctuated by the specific rage face the author is crafting their story around. Rage faces rose to popularity in 2008 on 4chan’s6 /b/ board with the introduction of Rage Guy
Rage comics all follow this same basic structure of a paneled story which culminates in the emotive drawing of the rage face.
real-life experiences,
– a poorly drawn face contorted in an angry scream, with red text that reads “FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU-“ (likely the beginning
006 4chan is an image-based imageboard website in which users can post anonymous content onto theme-based forum boards. /b/ specifically was the “random” board on 4chan and is easily its most popular, comprising of about 30% of its daily site traffic.
of an extended expletive). Rage Guy comics (usually a four-paneled grid with the final panel
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ECSTASY
Many Faces of Rage
PEACE
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RAGE
FIG. 02 This diagram illustrates the spectrum of emotion that can be conveyed using rage comics, with characters spanning emotions from misery to ecstasy and peace to rage.
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reserved for Rage Guy) detailed stories that always ended in the same place: Rage Guy’s glorious scream. Rage Guy went on to spawn a number of characters who starred in their own rage comics – referred to as “rage faces” but each having their own identity tied to an emotional resonance, such as Okay Guy, Fuck Yea Guy, and Forever Alone. Rage Comics are an example of a narrative meme because they aren’t referencing a specific image like the reaction meme, but
Forever Alone is an exploitable rage face sued to convey sadness and disappointment. The Forever Alone rage face is used in both narrative comic style memes and reaction image macro style memes, and reached peak popularity between 2011 and 2013.
create a system of their own imagery which exists in a rigid structure. What is “memed” then is not the image of Rage Guy but the structure of the joke – the art of telling a story and ending in a cathartic release. Rage comics may contain any number of characters (and often more than one in the same comic), but they always rely on the same structure to craft a narrative that ends in a universal human truth, be that rage, acceptance, loneliness or triumph. Narrative memes can also exist entirely devoid of imagery and rely simply on the memory of language to trigger the meme. Phrasal template
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memes, colloquially known as “snowclones” are sentences structures in which words in a common phrase are replaced in order to alter the meaning of the original phrase. They become memes not because they reference a popular quote but because they use the structure of a culturally relevant turn of phrase and remix it to give it their own new meaning. A good example is “X’ers Gonna Y,” in which two (usually rhyming) words replace X and Y to create a humorous phrase. X’ers Gonna Y is most widely seen as “haters gonna hate,” but at its popularity in late 2011/early 2012, memers were remixing the phrase to things like “skaters gonna skate,” “gators gonna gate” and “potaters gonna potate.” These snowclones are often seen with images, but what makes them narrative memes is that the aspect of language that is being “memed” is the phrase itself, building on our collective cultural conscience to make a phrase that’s recognizable, but original.
Performance Memes Performance memes exist as physical actions and not just online entities, which means they often have a much larger spread outside of internet culture and are more easily understood and
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accepted by those offline. Performance memes differ from those we’ve previously discussed because they require physical action to be completed as opposed to simply recontextualizing a piece of existing popular media. They are considered memes, however, because they require the user to alter the original concept of the meme and make it their own, while still following the set of rules established by the meme. Most are documented as videos, but the videos itself is not the meme, but the performative
In July 2013, following the rise of his famous Vine, creator Ryan McHenry was diagnosed with bone cancer. His friends leveraged the popularity of the meme to create an Indiegogo campaign that exceeded its $10,000 goal in less than a month.
action captured in it. The most common performance memes are “challenges,” in which people are challenged to perform a meaningless, often silly and sometimes harmful task and tag one of their friends to complete it as well. These are the most mainstream examples of memes because they have been used to raise awareness for causes outside of the internet, such as the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, which challenged people to film themselves pouring ice water over their head or make a donation to to a charitable organization
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dealing with research and treatment of ALS. Other examples of “challenge” videos include the Cinnamon Challenge, the Mannequin Challenge and the Kylie Jenner Lip Challenge, which saw users enlarging their lips by suctioning them inside a shot glass to emulate the look of Kylie Jenner. I never said all memes were good. Another example of a performance meme is Ryan Gosling Won’t Eat His Cereal, in which the memes holds a spoon full of cereal in front of a screen playing Ryan Gosling in the middle of an emotional acting scene. Gosling appears
to
approach
the
cereal, as if to take a bite before backing away. He won't eat his cereal. First posted in a Vine7 series by user Ryan McHenry in a series titled “Ryan Gosling Won’t Eat His Cereal,” the meme grew when users began making their own videos of actors refusing to
00 7 Vine was a short-form video-hosting social media platform in which users could share six-second looping videos before its shutdown in October 2016. Vine users embraced Internet humor and a number of memes were propagated on Vine. Vine was a good boy and we miss him. Rest in peace.
take bites of cereal, including Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt and Justin Bieber. Ryan Gosling himself endorsed the meme and made his own Vine of himself finally savoring that elusive bite of cereal.
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Remix Memes Where reaction memes rely on images and language as catalysts to convey universal ideas and emotions by changing the context of a specific image over and over, what does it mean
Remix memes are characterized by how many ways they can be reinterpreted and redefined.
if the actual image itself is the meme? Remix memes are those in which meaning is not derived from the context of the image, but meaning is assigned to the image itself and the meme is defined by how many ways that image can be remixed in a new way by redefining its context.
A good example is the Sad Keanu meme, which is based on a paparazzi photograph of actor Keanu Reeves sitting alone on the park bench and sullenly eating a sandwich. The first instance of Sad Keanu can be found on a 4chanlike archive called green-ovale.net’s /tv/ board, dating back to May 23, 2010, in which the image of Keanu sitting alone on the bench paired with a number of sad captions, like “I really enjoy acting… Because when I act, I’m no longer me” by user rockon4life.
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Sad Keanu quickly grew in popularity on the internet with numerous blogs and news aggregate sites reporting on the meme, and it grew beyond its initial image macro state to include Photoshop parodies and online initiatives to cheer up Keanu. The Photoshop parodies show Reeves removed forth original background of the image and placed into various other scenes, still sporting the same depressing pout. Examples of the Sad Keanu Photoshop memes include him on the bench next to Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump, in the board room with President Obama and Hillary Clinton or hidden in a Where’s Waldo? drawing, always looking longingly down at his sandwich. This is where Sad Keanu becomes a remix meme rather than a reaction type meme, because the meme is dependent upon the understanding of Sad Keanu as a meme. Where reaction memes can rely on the apparent meaning of their image and the strength of their audience to use context
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Sad Keanu is based on a paparazzi photograph of Reeves sitting on a park bench eating a sandwich.
during the Benghazi attack
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clues to piece the joke together, remix memes must rely on the audience’s keen understanding of meme culture to know they are, in fact, looking at a meme, and not just a silly photo of Keanu Reeves alone on the moon eating a sandwich and being sad. Remix memes could also be a catch-all term for memes who do not fit neatly into the aforementioned
categories,
but rather abide by their own rules among the established constructs of meme theory. Memes can also evolve from the These examples of the Sad Keanu meme illustrate the many ways it is exploitable as a remix style meme and what gives it such great longevity.
first three types to become a remix meme, in which the meme-able aspect of it is no longer about the original image, text, etc. but about the nature of the meme itself.
Ironic Memes Ironic memes are probably the trickiest to understand for inexperienced memers. Like conceptual memes, they require an established
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knowledge of meme culture, but where conceptual memes rely heavily on the precedents of meme culture, ironic memes abandon these precedents and use memes in a satirical and anarchic way, by deliberately humorless or derivative. Often describe memes that are intentionally bizarre or absurd and have exhausted their comedic value to the point of being trite or cliché. Ironic memes can take the form of many things and encompasses shitposting, anti-memes, wholesome memes and surreal memes and deep fried memes, among many others. Shitposting refers to an internet slang term describing behavior an rhetoric meant to derail a conversation off-topic. Shitposting can also refer to any content that does not ascribe to the conventional structures of memes that we’ve discussed so far. Undoubtedly the greatest example of shitposting is @dril. In September of 2008, @dril posted its first tweet with a simply message reading only “no.” Since
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Though the identity behind @dril is unknown, the account is personified by a blurry photo of Jack Nicholson smoking a cigarette.
referred to as “dank memes,” ironic memes
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then, @dril has posted almost 8,000 tweets, each ore absurdist than the one before it. Some notable examples of @dril’s tweets include “if your grave doesn't say "rest in peace" on it you are automatically drafted into the skeleton war,” “another day volunteering at the betsy ross museum. everyone keeps asking me if they can fuck the flag. buddy, they won't even let me fuck it” and “Food $200, Data $150, Rent $800, Candles
Ironic memes are both a criticism and a celebration of the ridiculousness of meme culture.
$3,600, Utility $150, someone who is good at math please help me budget this. my family is dying” and their reply to someone who suggested they spend less on candles, simply “no.” This tweet exemplifies @dril’s power as an ironic meme because that structure went on to become a popular
narrative meme in 2013, with memers replacing “candles” with any number of absurd things, but this reference back to @dril makes these ironic. The context of the joke is not from some outside concept like conventional narrative memes, but to the concept of memes themselves. Anti-memes are image macros which engage with traditional reaction meme structures but
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culminate in a resolution that is neither funny nor satisfying in an attempt to poke fun at the structure of the meme and catch the viewer of guard. Where
conventional
memes
aim to make a joke or reach an emotional resolution, antimemes are intended to be both unfunny and unresolved. What makes them ironic; however, and not just poorly constructed the meme structures they are intending to break down. For one to create an anti-meme they must understand the full scope of the meme their ripping off. Experienced memes often use antimemes to poke fun at memes that they think have gotten too mainstream and have lost their appeal. Often an ironic meme can contain references to multiple established memes at a time. Similarly, wholesome memes are a subgenre of image macros in which creators subvert audience expectation by taking established meme templates and using them to express supportive, caring sentiments rather than making the jokes usually associated with each template.
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The example above contains references to popular the memes Bae Come Over, The Barber, Nut Button and Doggo.
memes is their understand of
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Surreal memes are similar to anti-memes in their “funny-by-way-of-being-not-actually-funny” attitude, but are marked by their absurdist visuals and especially pessimistic language surrounding meme culture. Surreal memes subvert even ironic memes by commodifying the concept of irony as a source of humor. Layers of Irony is an exploitable four-panel comic similar to narrative rage comics featuring a character called Meme Man (a poorly rendered 3-D head) having a conversation with another character in which they
According to the original poster, the 3D model of the head originates from “a wonky attempt at a human head posted on 4chan’s 3DCG board long ago.”
refer to irony as an intoxicating substance. Surreal memes are also notable for their misspellings and lackadaisical approach to design. This casual approach to the creation of content reflects the malaise of ironic memes – the want to revert back to a simpler time in meme history echoed by a reversion to childlike language and aesthetics. Deep fried memes refers to ironic memes which have been passed through dozens of photo
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Chapter 02: Putting Square Memes Into Round Holes
filers to appear grainy, washed out and strangely colored, and often contain multiple images and text phrases on top of one another. This is meant to imitate the look of .jpegs which have been reposted and passed through filters so many times that they break down and lose their original stricture. This methodology reflects the carelessness of inexperienced or casual memers in oversharing and exploiting image files. Ironic memes are both a criticism and a celebration of the ridiculousness of meme culture, which is considered by some to have become overused and unfunny as memes have become more mainstream in recent years. Ironic memes reflect the exhaustion and frustration of overly-exploited content and the malaise of meme-making and aim to critique meme culture in the only way they know how – by participating in it.
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TH E DARKEST TIMEL I N E
A Brief History of Memes: From ayy (lmao) to Z
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CHAPTER 02: THE DARKEST TIMELINE
A Brief History of Memes: From ayy (lmao) to Z The Internet is a scary place; a once barren landscape of spreadsheets and databases now laden with society’s darkest characters: the hackers, trolls and web bloggers who prowl the Internet under the guise of digital anonymity. Amidst all the chaos there is but one constant: memes. Websites and Internet communities may rise and fall, but memes have been a constant on the world wide web since the early days of the dial-up, and they don’t seem to be going anywhere any time soon. Memes are like the cockroaches of the Internet. It’s nearly impossible to be an active user of the Internet without seeing memes, whether you’re a mom on Facebook sharing wine memes or a seasoned memer dwelling in the dark depths of a 4chan image board. We’ll now take a (condensed) look at the history of memes, from their humble beginnings to the dank memes of today.
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Chapter 03: A Brief History of Memes from ayy (lmao) to Z
The Early Internet: 1980–1999 It’s hard to pinpoint exactly where the meme as we know it began. More likely, memes evolved out of man’s natural tendency to mimic behaviors and suited itself to the 21st century’s new mode of global communication: the Internet. As the Internet changed the way we talked to each other with the advent of such archaic technologies as e-mail and, later, instant messengers, and expanded the scope and speed of global communication, new evolutions in language were necessitated to overcome the dryness of textbased correspondence. And thus, emoticons were born. In September 1982, USENET 8 user
008 USENET was a worldwide discussion system available on computers that was established in 1980. It was billed as “the original text-only social network” and it looks boring as hell but it gave us emoji, so I suppose we should be thankful.
Kevin Fahlman realized that the lack of visual social cues in online message boards led to frequent miscommunication when posts included humor and sarcasm. He proposed that posts intended to be humorous be marked with ‘:-)’ and posts intended to be taken seriously be marked with ‘:-(‘. The smiley quickly gained traction in online communities and began to be referred to as
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emoticons, pictograms of faces created by putting certain text characters in a certain order. Emoticons were a way for the early pioneers of the Internet to experiment with the undiscovered landscape of online communication, and this one experiment had a lasting effect. Their pragmatic use is evident still today with emoticons evolving from text-based pictograms to graphical smileys and now to emoji. The concept of the meme as a vehicle for communicating ideas is wholly present in emoticons and their ability to be remixed to create new emotional states is exemplary of their status as an early Internet meme. Another experimentation with new technologies and one of the earliest examples of the remix meme was
Bert is Evil was one of the first memes to garner a reputation outside of the Internet.
the website Bert is Evil, created in 1997 by Filipino artist and designer Dino Ignacio to collect “documents and images that show that Bert (a character from Sesame Street) is evil.� Ignacio populated the site with images in which Bert is Photoshopped into existing photographs showing him in incriminating situations
(like, at the assassination of President Kennedy or in the company of Adolf Hitler) in an effort to
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prove that Bert was evil. Bert is Evil is an excellent example of the beginnings of Internet humor, with parodies and mirror sites popping up to participate in incriminating (or proving the innocence of) Bert. What started for Dino Ignacio as an innocent joke turned mainstream media grappled with its first instance of Internet humor off the computer screen. In 2011, Photoshopped images of Bert and Osama bin Laden appeared on posters in a pro-bin Laden protest in Bangladesh. Many Western new organizations picked up the story and shrouded Ignacio’s once innocent joke site in controversy. Bert is Evil illustrated the ways in which a misunderstanding of memes and Internet culture can be detrimental in misinterpreting the context of a memed piece of content, and how memes can grow and evolve outside of the artists original intent once they get into the hands of the public. Evil Bert was one of the first memes to garner a reputation outside of the circles of the Internet and cause chaos, but he certainly wouldn’t be the last. One of them even helped elect our president.
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Sesame Street released the following statement in response to the image of Bert being used in protest: “Sesame Street has always stood for mutual respect and understanding. We’re outraged that our characters would be used in this unfortunate and distasteful manner.”
to something darker as the
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The Pre-Memebrian Era: 2000–2005 With the inception of Web 2.0 in 1999 came an evolution in the history of Internet memes at the turn of the century. Learning from the popularity of viral websites like Mahir Cagri’s,9 advertising agencies began experimenting 009 Mahir Cagri was one of the Internet’s first celebrities. In 1999, he created a personal website, where he introduced himself in broken English and posted domestic pictures of himself. Unintentionally humorous, his was one of the first viral websites in Internet history. Not a meme, persé, but an Internet hero.
with what would later be dubbed “viral marketing” with campaigns like Super Greg for Lee Jeans in 1999 (a character played by Sacha Baron Cohen.
Before the turn of the century, the creation of memes was relegated to a chosen few. Access to specific chatrooms and forums were memes were generated was required at a time when very few still had open access to the Internet. Also, image manipulation was relegated to Photoshop, an investment that would have set you back $700 in 1999. Thus, the means with which memes were created was not accessible to very many of the Internet’s users. This all changed in 2000 with the advent of Web 2.0 and the exponential growth of users and sites on the web. Online forums like Something Awful and 4chan, as well as flash video hosting websites like funnyjunk,
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Albino Blacksheep and Newgrounds, opened up the world of memes to new communities, and integrated meme generation softwares, most notably memegenerator.net allowed memes to be generated directly in the websites where they were posted. This made other more expensive software like Photoshop redundant, as the entire process of meme creation and distillation could be done on one webpage. One of the most significant Internet phenomena in the early 2000s that took advantage of this newly expanded meme marketplace was All meme that spawned from the butchered English translation of the 1989 Japanese arcade game Zero Wing. Early examples of All Your Base sate back to 1998, but its popularity reached unimagined heights in 2000 when the first Photoshop thread dedicated to the meme was opened on the forums of Something Awful. The thread garnered over 2000 remixes of the All Your Base meme, including manipulated images of street signs, restaurant awnings, cinema
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Super Greg became one of the internet's first viral marketing videos, an early example of Internet humor off the computer screen.
Your Base Are Belong to Us, a
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marquees, celebrities quotes, cartoons, tattoos and pretty much anything with text that could be replaced with the iconic phrase. All Your Base was popular enough to reach out of the abyss of the Internet and into he mainstream. The story of All Your Base was in multiple major papers in early 2001, and is still one of the most well-known examples of Internet memes to this All Your Base attracted much mainstream media attention in the latter parts of 2001 as people grappled with one of their first examples of Internet humor offline. Even Fox News awkwardly covered All Your Base.
day. Characteristics of All Your Base went on to become mainstays of Internet language. The bastardization of the English language would go on to influence the Internet’s vernacular (known as “lolspeak” – pronounced like “lawl”, not “L.O.L.”), and the pounding techno music in the background of the original All Your Base would soundtrack many video memes in the future.
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Also popular during the Pre-Memebrian Era were Demotivational posters, which were modeled after motivational posters one might find in an office building. They were first created in 1998 by Despair Inc. as a spoof on the kitschy posters decorating office buildings all over the country, but gained popularity online when Despair created a Parody Motivator Generator on their website in 2004. Though demotivational posters did not have nearly the scope of popularity of All Your Base, it pointed toward a number of trends in meme culture that would show up in later Meme Eras, particularly the structure of the language, which would late evolve into the “Top Text, Bottom Text” image macros we know best, as well as begin an early example of an anti-joke, which we wouldn’t see again until ironic memes gained traction in 2012. The dynamics of the Internet and the integration of online image editing softwares provided the perfect environment for spreading false information and creating hoax imagery. In September 2001, following the 9/11 attacks a Hungarian man named Péter Guzli took an old picture of himself standing at the top of the World Trade Center in New York city and Photoshopped a plane heading towards him in
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the background and sent it to his friends, intending it to be a joke. The image went viral when a story circulated about how an undeveloped camera was found in the debris after the collapse of the towers and the picture of Guzli was taken moments before the collision. The photograph was spammed to email accounts and incited conspiracy theorists and nonbelievers alike. On September 20, 2001, a Something Awful The original Tourist of Death photo manipulation and a memed version of Gulzi in the car with the Kennedys preceding the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
thread was created for remixed photo manipulations of Guzli, now dubbed Tourist of Death, showing him int he background of photographs of historical and fictional tragedies, from the assassination of Abraham Lincoln to the bomb-rigged bus from Speed. Little Fatty also came from a similarly unexpected source: a private photograph of 16 year old Qian Zhijun from Shanghai, China, originally posted by one of his teachers in 2002. The image soon rose to prominence on Chinese image forum, and people started photoshopping Qian’s face onto celebrities and movie posters. The remix meme reached US forums in 2003 and its popularity
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Chapter 03: A Brief History of Memes from ayy (lmao) to Z
skyrocketed. Tourist of Death and Little Fatty digital photograph. The advances in digital photography and the accessibility of the Internet resulted in a large number of private photographs being posted online, at the meme community’s disposal. This trend continues to this day with incredibly popular memes like Ermahgerd (2012) and You Know I Had to Do It to Em (2017) rising to popularity from private photographs of unsuspecting people.
The Memebrian Era: 2006–2012 The Memebrian Era contains some of the most prominent examples of meme culture and set the standard for what a meme could be and what it could look like. All of the characteristics we associate with
memes
were
refined
during this Era and continue to this day. This is largely in part due to growing access to the Internet and its changing demographics, with the first generation of humans who
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Ermahgerd was popularized in 2012 following a found phootgraph of a young girl with a handful of Goosebumps novels and developed a new evolution in lolspeak. Though it did not gain popularity until 6 years after the end of the Pre-Memebrian Era, Ermahgerd was canonized following the precedents of memes from the previous era.
are instances of a meme spawning from a private
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were raised entirely dependent on the Internet coming into adolescence, as well as further
Two popular examples of the Advice animals format: Socially Awkward Penguin and Philosoraptor.
evolutions in technology and web development, and most notably of all: pictures of pets. Alongside domestic photographs of people, by the mid-2000s, the incredible amount of pet photographs uploaded to the Internet played a part in formulating new trends in memes, the two most famous instances being Advice Dog, and LOLCats, both originating in 2006. Advice Dog is the first example of the Advice Animals, a series of reaction memes that follow the same format: a cut-out photo of an animal, pasted over a generic colorful background with text above and/or below the animal. The original Advice Dog was used without text as a reaction image and was soon followed by not only remixed versions of Advice Dog but entirely new spin-off entities featuring different animals and figures, such as Socially Awkward Penguin, Philosoraptor and Success Kid.
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Advice animals are the most popular example of the “Top Text, Bottom Text” image macro style, which would go on to achieve popularity in memes outside of the Advice Animals color wheel style. In 2009, memegenerator.com created a web application to create their own text over a number of color wheel animals as well as upload their own picture. This exponentially
increased
the
visibility of Advice Animals, whose popularity rose steadily to its peak in 2010. Many pop culture entities became memes
The animals in these memes become facsimiles for human emotion.
defined by the Advice Animals style among specific sub-communities of memers, particularly Professor Oak from Pokemon and Ariel from the Little Mermaid, whose Hipster Ariel image macros skyrocketed to popularity in 2010. LOLCats also began in 2006 on 4chan in their weekly feature called Caturday, which featured images macros of pictures of various cats with “Top Text, Bottom Text” written in lolspeak. I Can Has Cheezburger, easily the most popular LOLCat site to this day, opened in January 2007 and launched funny cat pictures into the mainstream. Like Advice Dog, LOLCats catalyzed a number of
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Index of Advice Animals 478K
Advice Dog Animal
667K
Animal
Bad Pun Racoon
Anti-Joke Chicken
Animal
Animal
Animal
1.58M
Character
478K
322K
Socially Awkward Penguin
Socially Awesome Penguin
Animal
Animal
160K
Success Kid
49.2K
Courage Wolf
313K
Anxiety Cat
307K
291K
127K
Stoner Dog Animal
762K
363K
Successful Black Man
Scumbag Steve
Joseph Ducreux
Character
Character
Character
# of Google hits*
ADVICE
Category
ANTI-HUMOR
Meme Imagery
CHARACTER BAIT-AND-SWITCH
*as of July 2014
EMOTION
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811K
687K
Philosoraptor
Hipster Kitty
Rich Raven
Business Cat
Animal
Animal
Animal
Animal
86.5K
207K
16.9K
88K
Depression Dog
Paranoid Parrot
Professor Oak
Animal
Animal
Pop Culture
210K
Condescending Wonka Pop Culture
2.78M
Y U NO? Rage Face
928K
359K
Hipster Ariel Pop Culture
2.52M
Forever Alone Rage Face
1.24M
Me Gusta Rage Face
FIG. 03 This diagram illustrates a number of characters used in the Advice Animals format and the popularity of specific examples. Advice Animal memes can be used to give legitimate advice, tell anti-humorous jokes, and convey specific emotions. Many examples are specific characterizations with individual distinctions. Some also use a bait-and-switch method of joke telling, in which the top text leads the viewer toward an expected punchline, which the meme circumvents.
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popular characters, like Happy Cat, Grumpy Cat, Ceiling Cat and even its own Advice Animal, Business Cat. The popularity of these animalcentirc memes is no surprise given mankind’s obsession with anthropomorphized animals. The animals in these memes become facsimiles for human emotions, and people see themselves in the identities of these animals and the trials they face. Theses The original Tourist of Death photo manipulation and a memed version of Gulzi in the car with the Kennedys preceding the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
memes reflect literary depictions of animals dating back to ancient times where the beast fable genre is used to tell a moral story depicted by animals who speak and behave like humans. This genre of storytelling can be traced throughout human history, from ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs to manuscripts from the Middle Ages, Aesop’s fables and Disney films. The animals in these stories become a proxy for the spectrum of human emotion, and they often portray a single stereotype that transcends culture, such as the cunning fox, the brave lion and the wise owl. These animal memes, then, are merely a continuation of mankind’s historic obsession with humanized animals and explains their
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immense popularity, especially among those not fluent in Internet culture. Ask your mom if she’s seen any cat memes lately. I’m sure she has. Also popular during the Memebrian Era were Rage Comics, which we talked about as an example of narrative memes. The first of these character, Rage guy, appeared on 4chan in 2008 in short comic from, followed quickly by a sub reddit in January 2009 in which people could create their own comics. This generated a great number of new characters in the Rage Comic universe, such as Forever Alone Guy, Trollface, Y U NO and Me Gusta. Many of these iconic characters were adapted in the Advice animal style as well, illustrating the connections between these iconic meme formats. These 3 forces in the memeiverse cemented the style of memes that would continues into the next decade and remain the most recognizable to this day. With the popularization of these new styles of meme came more mainstream popularity for memes in general. Whilst image forums like 4chan and Something Awful, and later, Reddit, had long been the gate keepers of meme culture, new social networks like became popular hubs for memes in the new decade. Tumblr became a well
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Rick Roll is easily one of the most widespread memes, with the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, MTV Movie Awards and even the Obama White House referencing it.
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known spot for casual memers and the Advice Dog and Rage Comic styles gained widespread popularity there. Blogs dedicated entirely to individual memes were created and users could submit their own content to have it featured. This helped to aggregate memes on this new platform similar to the ways they’d been sequestered on specific image boards previously. Tumblr also introduced the Reblog function, which allowed users to share someone else’s post to the people that followed their blog, which allowed memes to be spread to new users much more quickly. Rather than have to know specifically where to look for memes, Tumblr users could be introduced to new memes much more quickly and spread them to their audience, which multiplied the scope of a meme’s reach and how rapidly it grew.
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Another important social network of the Memebrian Era was, of course, YouTube. Released in 2005, YouTube allowed for video content to quickly and easily be shared amongst Internet users and birthed a number of meme trends. We’ve talked about Numa Numa and the difference between viral content and memes, but YouTube became a popular hub for meme content that had traditionally lived on video hosting sights like funny junk and Newgrounds, and the popularity of YouTube introduced video memes to a much larger audience. Youtube birthed a number of memes in its early adolescence, similar to the found photograph remix memes that popularized the early aughts, notably I Like Turtles, Charlie Bit My Finger and David After Dentist. YouTube also popularized Rickroll, which
The popularity of YouTube introduced video memes to a much larger audience.
was a prank that involved hyperlinking to the music video for Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” under the guise of a link relevant to the topic at hand in an online discussion. The Rickroll meme peaked in popularity in 2008 but continued to be seen in meme circles throughout the decade and into the 2010s. The Rickroll is also a precursor
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to clickbait, in which online media or news content would include a ridiculously sensationalist headline to accumulate page views, despite the lack of depth or accuracy related to the title. YouTube also became the home for performance memes, most notable challenge videos, in which users complete an odd and humorous dare on camera and posted it to YouTube. Notable examples include the Cinnamon Challenge, the Condom Challenge, the Harlem Shake and
the
Ice Bucket Challenge, all
Dodson’s full on-air quote: “Well, obviously we have a RAPIST in Lincoln Park. He’s climbin’ in your windows, he’s snatchin’ your people up, tryin’ to rape ‘em. So y’all need to hide your kids, hide your wife, and hide your husband cause they rapin’ everybody out here.”
popularized in the 2010s. YouTube also became the source for meme-able video content, like Bed Intruder and Ain’t Nobody Got Time For That. Bed Intruder was taken from a 2010 on-air interview by NBC affiliate WAFF-48 News from Huntsville, Alabama with local man Kevin Antoine Dodson following a local police search for a man who broke into the Dodsons’ home and tried to assault one of his sisters in her bed. Dodsons’ on-air quote went on to be memed incessantly, with particular attention paid
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to “hide your kids, hide your wife, and hide your of remix videos featuring Dodson’s on-air diatribe. Similarly, Ain’t Nobody Got Time For That was taken from a 2012 video by local Oklahoma City news station KFOR News featuring a woman named Sweet Brown following a three-alarm fire that broke out in her apartment complex. Brown’s on-air quote was similarly memed, particularly the phrase “ain’t nobody got time for that” and many remixes were made in the same style as the Bed Intruder videos. Antoine Dodson and Sweet Brown illustrate a particularly upsetting aspect of meme culture in which the suffering of others (notably in this case, Black pain) is used as a catalyst for meme creation and exploited as a source of comedy for (at this point in meme history, largely white and male) memers. Arguably the most important new website for the spread of meme culture, Facebook also became a popular place for people to repost and share memes nearing the end of the 2000s.
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Brown’s full on-air quote: “Well I woke up to get me a cold pop and then I thought somebody was barbequing. I said, ‘Oh, lord Jesus, it’s a fire.’ Then I ran out, I didn’t grab no shoes or nothin’ Jesus, I ran for my life. And then the smoke got me, I got bronchitis. Ain’t nobody got time for that.”
husband,” and Bed Intruder spawned a number
Characterized by their snarky, sarcastic comments over black and white illustrations over a pastel background, someecards can be seen as a direct descendant of the “Top Text, Bottom Text� image macros that popularized the early Memebrian Era.
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Often, Facebook was the last social network to see a meme, having first been fostered on 4chan, then popularized on Tumblr before being shared on Facebook, at which point the community would declare the meme was dead. Facebook, however, introduced memes to an incredibly wide audience, having a much larger user base than either 4chan or Tumblr. Easy to understand image macros were the most popular type found on Facebook, as it contained an older demographic and thus its users were largely uneducated in Internet language. Regardless, Facebook users quickly clung to reaction memes, particularly Someecards, which saw most of their popularity on Facebook. Very little content was created specifically for Facebook, but it allowed the everyday Internet user to interact with memes without even knowing they were a part of a global evolution in language and culture.
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As memes became more popular, their humor became more individual. Whereas prior, the most popular memes had focused on conveying a universal emotion through a meme-able substrate, in the 2010s, meme humor became more focused on individual communities in space and time. For example, sub-communities on the Internet would take existing meme structures and use them to make in-jokes specific to their community. These often featured characters form pop culture and rarely extended outside the reach of that specific sub-community, but worked amongst the larger framework of meme culture. Memes also began to talk about celebrities and specific moments in pop culture and noted a change toward more timespecific memes whose popularity was meteoric but their longevity suffered. On September 13, 2009, at the MTV Video Music Awards, as singer Taylor Swift was accepting her award for “Best Female Video,� rapper Kanye West stormed on stage, ripped the microphone from Swift’s hand and gave his now infamous speech about how Beyonce should have won the award. The moment blew up in mainstream media, scandalizing Kante and martyring Taylor, and from the infamous moment came the Imma Let You Finish meme. Imma Let Your Finish quickly
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became a phenomena in meme circles and
West’s entire speech was quickly turned into a catchphrase by the Internet: “Yo Taylor, I’m really happy for you, Imma let you finish but Beyonce had one of the best videos of all time…one of the best videos of all time!” Particularly the phrase “Imma let you finish, but…” became the skeleton for a very popular narrative meme.
in mainstream media, with videos and image macros recontextualizing the phrase and a screen cap of Kanye hushing Taylor used in a number of contexts. Notable examples include the clip dubbed over then-president Barack Obama giving a 2009 healthcare speech in Congress when he was interrupted by Representative Joe Wilson shouting “You lie!” as well as a number of the Imma Let You Finish clip being used similarly to Rickroll, in which a memorable video would begin but then be interrupted by Kanye. The meme came full circle in 2012 at the BET Awards when Kanye and rapper Jay-Z won Video of the Year with their collaborative album Watch the Throne. Shortly after handing Kanye the microphone, Jay-Z interrupted his speech saying “Kanye, Imma let you continue but…” which was met with a round of laughter and applause for the audience, as well as a notable increase in tweets related to the BET Awards at the time of the incident.
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The Imma Let You Finish meme points to a larger trend in online culture that evolved during this time, in which young people are interacting with the news in the only way they knew how: with memes. With the increase of free time among the educated population and the spread of participatory media, memes became a way for people on the Internet to respond to popular news stories of the time, be they pop cultural or political. Memes show that, even if only for the sake of making a
Memes became a way for people on the Internet to respond to contemporary news stories.
joke, more and more people are engaging with what is happening in the world around them and trying to make sense of it for themselves. Social media allows instantaneous reactions and encourages virality, so people can comment on current events in a safe community that they have curated. In that way, the late memes of this era are more closely tied to political cartoons. Journalists noted that addressing political and social issues in a humorous and iconographic way is much more effective for reaching an audience that a traditional article. Popular news stories of the time that were canonized as memes were In Soviet Russia‌, Binders Full of Women and
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an absurd amount of meme content about vice president Joe Biden. A number of the most popular memes of the time came about largely in part due to the 2012 presidential election, which proved a rich source of meme material.
The Ironic Renaissance: 2012–2015 With the rise of memes’ mainstream popularity came a general malaise amongst dedicated memers. The longtime staples of the meme community (Advice Animals, Rage Comics, etc.) had long grown tired and had largely been abandoned in favor of the fresher, more easily expendable pop culture memes that popularized the turn of the decade. But following the re-election of Obama in 2012, the meme community (and the country at large) entered into a time of relative easiness. This did not bode well for memers, who thrived off of strife within the world culture as a catalyst for new material to meme. Memes, of course, went on without them, but it was a dark time. 2012 saw the release of Vine, a short-form video hosting application that allowed users to post 6-second looping videos. Vine became popular
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vines on to reach iconic Internet status, not all of them resulted in memes. Like viral video content, most of them only were relegated to Vine and were often shared, but not spoofed. Some of Vine’s characters did go on to become memes that existed across several platforms, notably Welcome to Chili’s, who is she?, Squidward Dab, Freshavocado and, of course, Gavin. Vine also allowed its users to use the conventions of meme language in videos outside of YouTube. A number of meme-able tropes arose in Vines, like They Ask You How You Are and You Say That You’re Fineand Mmm Whatcha’ Say, a vestige of video memes from as early as 2007. Vine became a popular hub for meme culture in its short life (2012–2017), and its impact was widely felt amongst those starved for content following the height of the Memebrian Era. Easily the most popular memes of the time was Someecards, which were largely distributed
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On March 21st, 2015, Viner Adam Perkins uploaded a video titled “I’m really proud of this one,” in which he approaches the mirror in his bathroom while wearing boxer underwear and says “Hi, welcome to Chili’s”.
amongst social media users, and though many
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on Facebook. Characterized by their snarky and sarcastic comments over black and white illustrations over a pastel background, Someecards can be seen as a direct descendant of the “Top Text, Bottom Text� image macros that popularized the early Memebrian Era. Though most were created by Someecards staff, there was a generator similar to those found on memegenerator.com where users could create and share their own. Also popular at the Despite their incredible popularity, Minion memes have garnered an anti-fandom online. On June 5th, 2015, the subreddit /r/ MinionHate was created in which users post minions intruding in brands and social media while having a negative reaction to them.
time, and popular on Facebook were Minion memes, which featured the yellow, alien-like characters from the Despicable Me movie franchise in image macros that referenced the Advice Animals. They were often paired with similar snarky comments and were largely geared toward an older audience unfamiliar with the evolution of memes to this point. Facebook, therefore, became the new breeding ground for poorly researched, derivative, and downright bad memes. Though they were obviously influenced by the iconic memes that
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came before them, these new Facebook memes were largely unoriginal and pandered to the a step backward among meme communities, who had made strides in the previous months which were notable for their politically conscious and rapidly ascendant memes. The golden age of memes was over, and hardcore memers grieved the death of the meme to the mainstream audience. There was a general laziness amongst the meme community and a desperate need to cling on to something they could meme and give themselves purpose. And rather than give up and wallow forever in the shadow of lesser memes, they persevered, and the ironic meme was born. An early example of ironic memes is doge. Doge is a slang term for “dog” primarily associated with pictures of shiba inu. These remix memes are often photoshopped to change the dog's face or show the dog in an interesting place, captioned with interior monologues, often in Comic Sans font.
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The Doge image was co-opted from a photograph that was originally posted by Japanese kindergarten teacher Atsuko Sato of her rescue-adopted Shiba Inu dog Kabosu. On October 28th, 2010, a photo of Kabosu was submitted to the /r/Ads subreddit[3] with the title “LMBO LOOK @ THIS FUKKIN DOGE,” where it received 266 upvotes and 48 comments prior to being archived.
sensibilities of Facebook’s audience. This felt like
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The image of doge comes from a set of photos of a shiba inu named Kabuso, one of which where he sits on a couch glaring at the camera with eyebrows raised became notable for the doge genre. Photos of doge also became synonymous with interior monologue captions, in which the interior thoughts of doge would be typed over the photo, often in comic sans. There were noted for their use of lolspeak and very reductive language, withe phrases like “wow” “so hip” “much cool” and
Ironic memes are particularly absurd and are characterized by their casual language and aesthetics.
“very yes,” as well as numerous misspellings. This trend became integral to the success of the Ironic Renaissance. Whereas memes had previously been socially engaged, ironic memes were often completely absurd and were characterized by their casual language, hearkening back to a simpler time in meme history. Doge also became the
basis for “doggo” and “pupper,” Internet slang terms popularized in 2015 for dogs. It is notable that these terms are reflective of “kitteh,” a similar slang term from 2008 for cats. Another notable meme from the Ironic Renaissance is Pepe the Frog, whose illustrious history
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throughout meme culture simply can’t be summed up in words. If meme culture had a mascot, it would be Pepe. Pepe the Frog originated in a comic series by artist Matt Furie called “Boy’s Club,” which stars the teenage monster characters Pepe, Brett, Andy and Landwolf. A particular drawing pf Pepe from 2008 was popularized on 4chan, along with the expression “feels good man,” and Pepe was largely known as Feels identity was revealed as Pepe. Pepe has been the source of a number of similar reaction memes as well including Feels Bad Man, Angry Pepe, Smug Pepe and a number of remixed characters. Though Pepe was a popular character during the Memebrian era, he was canonized as one of the greatest memes of our time during the Ironic Renaissance. Countless drawings of Pepe in any number of scandalizing, embarrassing and triumphant situations have littered the Internet, and Pepe has become a symbol of meme culture. He is revered, he is hated, and he has become a litmus for those who are fluent in meme culture. His presence has become so iconic that simply the combination of colors green (his skin), blue (his shirt) and brown (his lips) is recognizable.
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The rumored first example of Pepe the Frog is from a 2008 issue of the "Boys Club" comic in which Pepe pulls his pants down to his ankles in order to urinate .
Good Man on the Internet until his
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The Ironic Renaissance is also notably characterized by the presence of wholesome memes and anti-memes. Wholesome memes used traditional meme structures that we know, but rather than tell a joke or make an inflammatory statement like most memes do, its punchline was simply a wholesome or On February 8th, 2012, the /r/antimeme subreddit was launched. Anti-memes reflect the inevitable entropy of Internet humor in which jokes are rapidly run into the ground and cynically re-appropriated.
kind remark of love, peace or friendship. Anti-memes used traditional meme structures but do so in a way that is intentionally wrong or not funny, confusing multiple meme formats or using an end-joke from one meme in the structure of another, or simply using the memes to make an obvious and unfunny joke. Both wholesome and anti-memes are a response from memers to the way memes had been corrupted by casual users on Facebook most notably and reflect the anxiety of meme culture at the time. Rather than look forward to new things, these memes look backward to what already existed and re-appropriated them to illustrate their disapproval of the mainstream’s alteration of their culture. Whilst these reflect the Ironic Renaissance’s tendency to look back at a simpler time in meme
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history for inspiration, some other iconic memes of the time simply materialized from the aether, begging to be memed. Dat Boi is a 3D model of a green frog riding a unicycle, with catchphrases like “here comes dat boi” and “o shit waddup” that gained popularity at the end of the Ironic Renaissance. Dat Boi is a particularly interesting late meme era character because he is entirely devoid of context. Whereas many memes of the time sprung from existing pop culture references or existing meme characters, Dat Boi was wholly original, created entirely by memers, for memers. The name Dat Boi comes from a photoshop image of a criminal whose name is replaced with “dat boi” from 2013. A Tumblr post from 2014 by user “phalania” includes a picture of the video game character Pac-man wearing sunglasses and waving witht he caption “here come dat boi!!!!!! o shit waddup!”. Only until April 2015 did the Facebook page Fresh Memes About the Mojave Desert and Other Delectable Cuisines post the first instance of Dat Boi as we know him today, in a .GIF format riding his unicycle. Dat Boi became one
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In the middle of March 2017, Dat Boi surged in popularity on /r/me_irl as users began reposting the original frog and making experimental variations.
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of the era's greatest ironic memes, with both his image and his iconic saying remixed into a number of other meme structures. These memes form our understanding of ironic memes, which would go on to include more conceptual meme content like surreal memes and shitposting, but they also reflect the changing culture of memers. New and newly revitalized memes like Dat Boi and Pepe galvanized the meme community to march bravely on into the unforeseen territory of meme possibilities and colonize a new era of meme history, with a new tool in tow: Twitter.
The Dank-Memebrian Era: 2016–???? As meme demographics changed from dedicated Tumblr trolls and /b/tards to more casual memers, so too did the platforms in which memes were created and proliferated on during the Dank10010 “Dank” is an ironic adjective used to describe memes that reach a certain status of popularity amongst meme circles. A dank meme is one which has exhausted the comedic value of its original form and begins to be remixed in intentionally unfunny and ironic ways rather than dying out and being replaced like a lesser meme.
Memebrian Era. Sites like 4chan, Reddit and Something Awful, once the cornerstones of meme genesis, were no longer the goto for hot n’ fresh new memes
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following the Memebrian Era. Tumblr continued to partake in meme culture, particularly in the evolution of meme language and narrative memes (the reblog function easily facilitating the use of text-thread and chat-based narrative memes), but rarely was a new meme entity born there. Sites like Instagram and Facebook, though never known for the synthesis of new memes, were relegated to reposting and remixing memes created on Twitter, the new heavy hitter in meme creation. Twitter rose to prominence during the Ironic Renaissance and has dominated meme creation ever since. This is due to a number of factors, but most notably: speed. The nature of Twitter’s function – short text and picture based posts, limited to 140 characters (and later 280, which of course became a meme) –encouraged quick, succinct thoughts and was a very fast paced atmosphere
Twitter's fast-paced, concise format encouraged expediated new meme content.
compared to other sites that encouraged more carefully curated and longer form content. Like the Tumblr reblog function had done previously, Twitter’s fast pace and retweet function created an atmosphere in which new memes could
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The Crying Jordan meme is based on a cutout image of former professional basketball player Michael Jordan crying during his 2009 Basketball Hall of Fame induction speech. Online, the image of the tearful Jordan has been frequently used by sports fans to convey sadness in reaction to their team losing. Crying Jordan is an excellent example of a Supermeme, with an incredible surge in popularity in spring 2017, which quickly subsided.
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be created, rapidly shared and remixed in a fraction of the time it took in the Memebrian Era. Coupled with Vine’s 6 second video limit, Twitter’s rapidly updating timeline of abridged posts meant that memers attention spans had shortened, and saw a new evolution in the popularity of memes: the Supermeme. Supermemes are memes that dominate meme circles for a short amount of time, reaching massive audiences very quickly through a rapid succession of creation and appropriation. Supermemes are the result of perfect synchronization between memes and social media. Twitter became the perfect facilitator for Supermemes, as it allowed for content to be shared and remixed at an alarming pace that dwarfs the rate they were shared in the Memebrian era. Supermemes grab hold of the meme community’s consciousness and dominate social media for a time, quickly eclipsing the memes that preceded it, very rapidly being remixed and reinterpreted until they either become ironic or are overshadowed by an upcoming new meme.
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This accelerated speed at which new memes are shared means that memes of the DankMemebrian Era have much shorter lives than those of previous eras. Whereas the memes of the Memebrian Era would need a long time to grow and evolve, some remaining at the forefront of the cultural consciousness for years, memes of the Dank-Memebrian are characterized but their very fast rise to prominence and subsequently fast fall to meme obsolescence. At the tail end of the Memebrian Era, memers grew tired of the same memes being used again and again, and the Dank-Memebrian Era circumvents this problem by circulating new memes at such a rapid pace that as soon as a meme becomes tired and its possibilities exhausted, there’s a new meme on the horizon, ready to be exploited. A number of the Supermemes that characterize the DankMemebrian Era can be seen as evolutions of the memes that
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came before them. The image macro style of memes like Advice Animals and LOLCats can be seen in contemporary reaction memes like Arthur's Fist, Spongegar, Crying Jordan and Exploding Kid. These memes dilute the image to its most universal meaning and exploit that meaning to make jokes. Narrative memes like Bernie V. Hillary and the Record Scratch/ Freeze Frame allowed memers Kermit the Frog was the main character of a number of Supermemes during the Dank-Memebrian Era, most notably the But That's None of My Business image macro series featuring Kermit drinking a glass of tea and punchlines poking fun at a wide range of faux-pas and questionable behaviors in everyday social situations.
to set up narratives in the vein of the rage comics. Performance memes continue to be seen in their usual state with dare videos like the Mannequin Challenge raising to prominence in 2016, as well as with memes like Damn Daniel that encouraged video remixes. Remix memes like Petty Skai Jackson and Confused Mr. Krabs facilitated remixed photoshop memes in the vein of Sad Keanu and Little Fatty. A number of ironic memes rose to prominence at the time of the Dank-Memebrian Era. Pepe continued to be edified as a symbol of meme
The original Bee Movie But... video, titled "bee movie but it gets faster" accrued more than a million views, 500,000 comments and 300,000 likes. It has since been removed by Dreamworks Animation for infringing copyright law, but has been reuplaoded and remixed a number of times.
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purists through 2017. Kermit the Frog, another amphibious character that memers quickly identified with, became the subject of a number of memes in 2016, including But That’s None of My Business and Evil Kermit, as well as appeared in a number of popular vines. Dat Boi also continued his popularity into the Dank-Memebrian Era and these three green princes became the subject of a number of remix memes
Supermemes are the result of perfect synchronization between memes and social media.
together. By 2016, frogs had become the ultimate symbol of the Internet every-man: the perfect canvas for society to imprint themselves onto.
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Bee Movie rose to prominence in 2016 as the focus of a number of ironic memes, including On May 28th, 2016, a 4-year-old boy crawled into the enclosure of the Western lowland gorilla Harambe at the Cincinnati Zoo. The gorilla then grasped the child and began dragging him about the enclosure before a Cincinnati Zoo employee fatally shot Harambe with a rifle.That day, YouTuber maxi uploaded footage of the incident to YouTube, where it gathered upwards of 12.6 million views and 41,000 comments in the next 48 hours.
Bee Movie Script, in which the entirety of the movie’s script would appear in a single image, as well as the exploitation of the film’s opening line, “according to all known laws of aviation, there is no way a bee should be able to fly;” and Bee Movie But…, a series of video and audio remixes of the film in which the film is edited in an alarming or funny way reminiscent of the editing style of
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early YouTube Poop. Popular Bee Movie But… videos include “Bee Movie But Every Time They Say Bee It Get’s Faster,” “Bee Movie But Every Time They Say Bee the Seinfeld Theme Plays,” and “Bee Movie Without Bees.” The Dank-Memebrian Era also say the rise of one of meme cultures most unlikely heroes: Harambe the Gorilla, a silverback gorilla who was tragically shot and killed at the Cincinnati Zoo after a child fell into his enclosure in May 2016. The incident quickly gained traction online, with many blaming the child’s parents for the gorilla’s death, and Harambe became a martyr amongst meme circles. #JusticeForHarambe quickly gained traction online with a change.org petition gaining over 400,000 signatures in 48 hours. Twitter tributes to Harambe grouped him in with the other sudden celebrity deaths of 2016, including David Bowie, Prince and Alan Rickman. Dicks Out For Harambe became a popular phrase on Twitter and Vine, with users threatening to
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Around the 2016 Presidential election, memers grappled with a fractured political system through memes. Here, the Crying Jordan and Conflicted Steve Harvey meme. It is notable that they convey feelings of emotion and confusion, respectively, an emotion mirrored by many during this time.
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avenge the death of their hero, and a vine by comedian Brandon Wardell that shows he and actor Danny Trejo saying “dicks out for Harambe� has gained over 10 million views since being posted in July 2016. A Cheeto in the shape of Harambe sold for $99,900 on February 7th, 2017. The 2016 Presidential Election also proved a viable breeding ground for new memes, much in the way that the 2012 reelection of Obama fueled meme creation at the end of the Memebrian Era. As always, memers pull from real life experiences in the politics and pop culture in the creation of new memes and expression of existing ones. Now more than ever, memers are radicalized to create more and more and more content, always replacing memes that have grown stale with new fresh ones, in perfect synchronicity with the social platforms in which the live and grow. One wonders how long this process can last and if there will eventually come an
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end to the cycle of meme culture, but as long as our culture is growing and expanding and new ideas and experiences are being created, then there are new memes to go with them. If the immortalization of Harambe is any indication, I don’t think social media will ever let memes die. Forever may they reign.
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As long as our culture is growing and new ideas and experiences are being created, then there will be new memes to go with them.
WEL L ME ME 'D, MY FR I E N D
Contemporary Impacts of Meme Culture
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CHAPTER 04: WELL MEME'D, MY FRIEND
Contemporary Impacts of Meme Culture Memes are, undoubtedly, an entirely new and contemporary cultural phenomena, having only been adapted into the lexicon of the greater consciousness in the last decade. Though they have their history in the evolutionary patterns of human culture, memes as they exist today are an entirely new beast, relegated to live in infamy on the Internet, but whose effects are widespread and have the potential to affect change in communities large and small outside of the realm of the web. Memes have the power sell products, to teach languages, to foster communities and to convey new ideas. We even memed a man to the presidency. Let’s explore some of the ways memes have impacted contemporary culture.
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Memes & Capitalism: The Good, the Bad and the Buttery With the rise of the Internet and social media, the way people are consuming media and new is changing, and that’s especially true of millennials. The average person now spends between six and eight hours a week on social media, and memes are the native language of those social media platforms. Memes dominate
the
social
media
landscape, whether they’re the dank ironic memes of Twitter of
When this many people are paying attention, brands want in on the action.
the wine memes on your mom’s Facebook feed, and when this many people are paying attention to something, brands want in on the action. A number of brands have attempted to use memes to reach millennial consumers, to varying degrees of success. A good comparative example would be Denny’s and IHOP, two juggernauts in the mediocre pancakes market. Denny’s is notable for being one of the most meme-literate brands and their social media platforms are repeatedly some of the most engaging across Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. Denny’s drew significant attention
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when it hired then 23-year-old Amber Gordon to oversee their social media. Fluent in meme aesthetics, Gordon launched the brand’s Tumblr page and began posting Denny’s-related memes that were praised by the Tumblr community for feeling genuine and not out-of-touch for sponsored content on the web, which often aims to connect with younger consumers but badly misses the mark. The memeliterate style has also come to define Denny’s Twitter account, as the brand regularly shitposts Denny’s Zoom In meme was captioned “zoom in on the syrup” and eventually landed on “has this distracted you from overwhelming existential dread lol.”
on their Twitter, often tweeting things having nothing to do with Denny’s products, but which garner a high number of retweets. They often engage with popular memes of the time, such as the Zoom In11 meme of March 2017, which gained over 119,000 retweets in one week. In contrast, the social media platforms run by IHOP, another heavy hitter in the grease-laden world of 24 hour breakfast, try to make posts in reference to meme culture, but they often don't stick the landing. They show a repetition of meme
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language, such as on fleek and deez nuts, but they obviously don’t understand the meaning of these memes. They attempt to use hip language to appeal to
011 The Zoom In meme involved posting a photo with very small, unreadable text in various part of the image with a caption telling you to zoom in on a specific section of the image. This would reveal the hidden text, which would contain a joke, or would lead you to another section of the image, until you eventually reached a punchline hidden somewhere in the image.
a younger audience, but since they clearly don’t know the meaning and context of these memes, their posts come off as patronizing and are very off-putting for millennial consumers, who can tell they’re being advertised at. They also notably do not understand the aesthetics of memes. In an attempt to reference the Doge meme for their 2106 National Pancake Day campaign, they posted an image of pancakes with the inner monologue texts “wow,” “such free” and “much pancakes,” among others. While the context of the language is correct, the typography was not presented in Comic Sans, which is indicative of the Doge style of meme. It’s a small mistake, but it’s part of what makes Doge so recognizable, and why consumers quickly realized that IHOP isn’t actually interested in meme culture, only in using it to sell to young people. It's clear that Denny’s takes the (pan)cake here.
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So how can business use memes to reach young consumers in a way that feels authentic and genuine? Well for starters, hire a young person
The millennial generation was raised by the Internet and it has shaped the way we think.
to run your social media. The decision to hire a 23-year-old to run Denny’s social accounts was likely a contentious one, but it paid off for them in spades. The millennial generation was raised by the Internet and it has shaped the way we think, speak and interact with the world around us, and memes are an
important aspect of that digital language. So rather than spend your time trying to understand memes and run the risk of getting it all wrong, just hire a 20-something to teach you. Second, don’t take yourself too seriously. Part of what makes Denny’s socials so engaging is that they don’t feel like a brand’s social presence, they just feel like another person on your feed making casual jokes. It makes consumers want to engage with them and follow what they’re doing, and all the while they don’t even realize their being marketed towards. Another good example of this method is Arby’s and their relationship with Nihilist Arby’s, a parody account that features bleak,
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pessimistic tweets about the meaninglessness of life and inevitability of death that conclude in unenthusiastic recommendations for the fast food chain. Rather than send Nihilist Arby’s a cease-and-desist, Arby’s let the account be and even invited the creator to Arby’s HQ for some free sandwiches and swag, a small gesture that earned the chain respect from the meme community. Arby’s wasn’t afraid to alienate an older, more conservative market by interacting with Nihilist Arby’s, but knew that they could target the niche demographic that the parody account was reaching that they couldn’t. Finally, be timely and stay up to date with meme trends. While the image macros of the mid-2000s are the easiest genre of meme to understand (and the easiest to replicate), they will also instantly
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Memes compete to stay relevant in our mind, fighting to keep hold of our limited cognitive resources.
age the person trying to use them in earnest. If you want to use memes to reach young consumers, then you need to be looking at the same things they are and keeping up to date with what’s popular. If a company can pull of a meme that’s part of the current Supermeme sweeping Twitter at this very moment rather than post an
image macro that could’ve been made 10 years ago, that’ll earn them a lot more respect from memers. Take Denny’s Zoom In meme for example. The first Zoom In meme was posted to Twitter on February 25, 2017 and Denny’ tweet was posted March 1, at the height of the meme’s popularity, and the engagement with the tweet shows. Adweek dubbed it one of the most successful brand tweets ever, and in an interview with the magazine, Denny’s Chief Marketing Officer said, “It’s critical that our content be current and relevant to the conversations that are happening across America."
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Memes & Language: Talk Ironic to me , Baby Memes are not only changing the ways people interact with the outside world, but they’re literally changing the ways we interact with each other. As memes become more integrated into mainstream society, so too are memes affecting our relationships with one another. Like genes compete within a species for which is the most evolutionarily relevant, memes compete to stay relevant in our mind, fighting to keep hold of our limited cognitive resources. So if memes are competing with one another, then those that are easier to remember should have an advantage. As Stephanie Huette, a professor of psychology at the University of Memphis, explains, with memes, ”Every word, every syllable matters.” The key to a meme’s popularity is in its simplicity and its universality. The easier a meme is to understand, the more likely
The key to a meme's popularity is in its simplicity and its univerality.
it will be shared by all different kinds of people. Therefore, the most popular and widespread global memes are those which can convey an
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idea that exists outside of the traditional barriers of verbal and written language. This phenomena points to a number of evolutions in language that are tethered to the increasing popularity of memes. Memes hint at a larger global democratization of online platforms. Memes are not tethered to the boundaries of geography, language or class,
Memes are simply vehicles for emotional expression.
which positions memes as the great equalizer amongst online communication. Memes are simply vehicles for emotional expression. They are the shell of an idea, that we must fill with our own beliefs and experiences,
and they can allow underrepresented people access to the global resources of the Internet, knowledge that had heretofore been relegated to the educated aristocracy. Memes can also be used to teach languages via their universal emotional resonances. In 2008, Cott Stillar, an English as a Second Language professor at the University of Tsukuba began using rage comics to teach English as a foreign language. “Rage Comics are special because they consist of well known faces or expressions,” Stillar wrote, “which are meant to show universal emotions of varying
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degrees under a wide variety of circumstances.� Stillar used Rage Comics to transcend the barriers between English and Japanese speakers to come to a mutual understanding using the emotions on display in Rage Comics. The evolution of language as a byproduct of the Internet can also seen in the proliferation of lolspeak. This truncated and childlike version of American English is notable in mid-2000s memes as a kind of Internet shorthand that was preceded by online acronyms for text-based conversation like LOL and OMG. This method of shortening and infantilizing language refers back to the meme as an agent of evolution,
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Stillar noted this rage comic as a good example of how memes can convey simple emotions through visual and contextual expression. One can see how it would be simpler to understand how emotions like fear and joy can be conveyed via language through the universal expression of emotion.
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meaning the language of a meme needed to be as easy as possible to understand for it to grow in popularity, thus lolspeak became the standard method of language for memes at the time. Though lolspeak in it truest form is not often seen today, the ironic Internet language of today is largely informed by it. The colloquial Internet language of today is simultaneously calm and void of emotion whilst also being punctuated with moments of intense hyperbole. Whereas in normal circles one might
Context and meaning are hidden under a shroud of metaphors and implications.
say, “she’s so pretty,” in an online forum one might say, “I would let her murder me” and like-minded tech-savvy people would understand that these two mean the same thing. A response to this might even be “me” or “lol same” to show their agreement. These short aphorisms are traded back and
forth to mean a number of universally meaningful things. “Me” could be an appropriate response to almost anything from an embarrassing anecdote, to a heartwarming image to a gif of a lizard. Replying “me” (or “same” or similar) says everything all at once without saying really anything at all. This is
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the nature of language in the digital age. Context and meaning are hidden in a shroud of metaphors and implications, and while nothing is said outright in such clear terms, everyone understands what the other is trying to convey.
and what is meant is indicative of another trend in meme culture: the reaction image. Memers and the Internet-savvy alike will often use images or animated GIFs to express a reaction or emotion to another person in lieu of written or verbal language.. The Internet is a landscape devoid of emotional nuance, so these pieces of digital culture allow is to filter our emotions and express
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Distracted Boyfriend is a narrative meme in which a man looks at the backside of a woman walking by while another woman, presumably his girlfriend, looks on disapprovingly. The meme conveys one of the more nuanced emotions in contemporary meming and illustrates the resonant power of communicating through memes.
This dissonance in language between what is said
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ourselves by summoning other people to feel our feelings for us. This method of outsourcing one's emotions to a digital artifact is the cornerstone
Outsourcing one's emotions to a digital artifact is a cornerstone of meme culture.
of meme culture, as memes are simply digital vehicles for humans to assign their own values and beliefs onto. This methodology of co-opting images and language structures can get complicated though, as we appropriate other people’s emotions in guise of our own.
Women of color are used alarmingly frequently in GIFs to express our emotions for us, whether it’s an unknown Black woman clapping in the audience of the Wendy Williams show to Mariah Carey saying “I don’t know her” or even Oprah, who has transcended the role of talk show host
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to become the ultimate expression of feeling in reaction gif form. According to Giphy 12, the GIF most commonly used to express happiness is one of Oprah waving her arms in the
012 Giphy is an online application that let’s users search through a library of animated GIFs and save them to their devices to be used as reaction imagery.
air and screaming, while the GIF most commonly used to express sadness is of a Black woman looking despondent and blinking slowly. GIFs of women of color are used disproportionally by Michele Jackson coined “Digital Blackface,” in which Black women become proxy for white emotions. White people use GIFs of Black women to inhabit a digital black persona and cash in on black attitudes and outsource their emotional labor to Black people. This appropriation of cultural reactions can be seen in the appropriation of Internet language
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The White Gut Blinking .GIF is a reaction meme that captures feeling slightly insulted or confused. The .GIF has been around online since 2015, but did not gaintractionuntil February 2017, where it was popularized on Twitter.
users of all races in a phenomena that Lauren
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as well. Manuel Arturo Abreu calls this phenomenon “Online Imagined
Black
English”
in
which people use Black slang affectations in their posts online in a manner that is not reflective of their speech offline. This is another example of putting This .GIF is most closely related to the You Get a Car meme, which is based off a famous video of Oprah Winfrey giving away a car to all the members of her studio audience. The .GIF is used to convey extreme glee ot excitement.
on the perceived coolness of marginalized people in online communities as a way of expressing emotion through the proxy of another persona. This is evident in a number of slang terms popularized by Black and queer people that populate the (largely white) Internet and become memes in their own right – phrases like “yaaasss,” “Bye Felicia,” “ayy,” “on fleek” and “wig.” People in positions of privilege co-opt this language and use it without being cognizant of its origin among communities of marginalized and systematically oppressed people. Richard Spencer, a white-nationalist leader who claims to have coined the phrase “alt-right,” uses appropriated Black English on his Twitter account, and pop stars like Katy Perry use phrases like “slay” and “wig” that have their roots in Black gay ball culture, despite a history of blatant homophobia and cultural appropriation in her
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music and artistry. Similarly, Meghan McCain, a former Fox News contributor, has gone on record in opposition of the Black Lives Matter movement, likening them to a hate group, yet her Twitter account is littered with GIFs of black women. Black lives matter to Meghan McCain when they can be used as an accessory to white thoughts.
Memes & Politics: When Good Memes Go Bad Like all natural processes, memes are cyclical forces, whose popularity waxes and wanes like the tides, but often memes reflect our culture’s emotions tied to the events that unfold around them. Like the elections before them, the 2016 presidential election proved a veritable breeding ground for new memes, and memes allowed Internet-savvy users to grapple with the stresses of electing a new world leader in the only way they knew how – by meming them. Memes reflect the cultural anxieties of the people who post them, and anxieties are often never higher than in moments of democratic
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Memes reflect our culture’s emotional response to the events unfolding around them.
The Confused Math Lady meme is used to convey confusion of unintellignce. Here it is being contextualized by Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and First Lady Melania Trump, illustrating the strong versatility of the Math Lady meme.
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election. Memers who were frustrated with the state of politics channeled those feelings into the popular memes of the time. We even memed one of them to the White House. Memes that were popular in the lead up to and aftermath of the 2016 presidential election included Arthur Fist, Spongegar, Dark Kermit, Confused Mr. Krabs and Confused Math Lady, all of which are tethered to the emotions of frustration, confusion, fear and darkness. It’s no coincidence that these memes reached popularity and were canonized in a time when these emotions were rampant among the general public. These memes literally reflect the emotions on display across the country as Americans grappled with electing a new president. Memes also reflected a malaise amongst younger voters to even be involved with politics. Some 11,000 people voted for Harambe as a write-in candidate in 2016 rather than make a decision to vote for either candidate.
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These memes also rode on the coattails of any number of other memes based directly off the candidates themselves, from Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush’s Photoshop Twitter war to Ted Cruz’s confusion with the Zodiac Killer13. One of the more popular memes was the Bernie or Hillary? meme, a narrative meme which featured the two candidates photos and
013 The Ted Cruz Zodiac Killer meme was a mock conspiracy theory that suggested that Cruz was the unidentified “Zodiac Killer,” who killed 37 people in the 1960s and 70s. According to a survey by Public Policy Florida, almost 40 percent of Floridians claimed they were “not sure” if Cruz were really the Zodiac Killer, which a full 10 percent confident that we was.
their stances on an issue, which memers would replace to their glee. Many variations of the meme exist with different issues being compared.
With each
variation, Sanders is given the cool response, while Clinton is given a response that reinforces the stigma that she’s out of touch with her constituents. While many found the meme to be innocently humorous, writers for Buzzfeed, Salon and the Boston Globe argued the meme perpetuated sexist tropes. Salon’s Annie Zaleski writes, “these jabs at Clinton’s imagined preferences reinforce the tired idea that the tastes of non-cis-male cultural consumers…are something to be mocked and disrespected. Whether intentionally sexist or
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not, the meme does reinforce Clinton's prevailing cultural image and could influence those whose primary form of communication is in Internet injokes. Thus, memes can be a potentially powerful tool in an era when likability over qualifications can win you public office. The Internet can be a powerful tool in shaping political ideologies. It allows users to take control of the narrative of public elections, which would have previously been curated by (often biased) news aggregates and by the candidates of these elections The image of Hillary Clinton dabbing on the Ellen Degeneres show in January of 2016 was widely spread online to mock Clinton's frail attempts at connecting with young voters by co-opting popular dance trends of the time, though dabbing had long since moved beyond popularity to become clichĂŠ.
as well. In a post-meme society, we are no longer analyzing how candidates express themselves, but we express ourselves through them. We curate their images as we would like to see them, not as competent political figures making hard decisions that affect our rights, but as people like us who do the things that we do, like dance and dab and make memes. Leaders used to curate their own image of themselves and that was the only one the public would see, but
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now with the power of memes, the public curates their own image of the candidate, which creates the people, so much so that when their candidate wins, they feel that they’ve had a hand in that victory, and it’s a victory for them too. This is evident in the public image of our two most recent presidential candidates. Hillary was famously one of the least charismatic politicians to run for president in recent memory, with frail attempts to reach young voters through what she thought were memes. Her infamous vine in which she says “I’m just chillin’ in Cedar Rapids” did become a meme, not of her own volition but as a means for memers to poke fun at her out of touch character, and her urging young voters to “Pokémon GO to the polls” will live on in infamy. Hillary’s online image took on a life of its own, curated by the people who would be voting for her. Hillary’s fans injected charisma into her as often as they could to overcome her apparent shrillness. Hillary
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Hillary's supporters clung to .GIFs of her moments of humanity – smiling or looking smugly into the camera – in an effort to counteract the connotations of shrillness lobbed at Cinton by her opposition.
strong emotional ties between the candidate and
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seemed at her most human in GIF form, in the tiny moments of softness or humor she displayed that could be infinitely looped and edified as totems of her character. Meanwhile, Hillary’s detractors took the opposite approach and isolated moments that made her seem cold, deranged, and sick. Memes were very instrumental in constructing the image of Donald Trump as a viable political candidate. Trump began his campaign with no clear ideology and a seemingly insatiable thirst Donald Trump became the center of a number of memes that highlighted his narcissism and incompetence. The top image, a screengrab from one of the debates in which Trump appears to be humping the back of a chair was widely spread on Twitter as a remix meme, and the bottom image is an example of Trump's tiny hands meme.
for attention, which provided the perfect catalyst for endless meming, and any ridiculous thing Trump said or did was the potential for a new meme. Trump, smartly, used this to his advantage. Arguably the greatest meme of Trumpian politics was The Wall. Of course there was no way Trump was going to build a 2,000-foot Great Wall of China-esque barrier along the United States’ southern border and then mail the check to Mexico, but any time he was backed into a corner, Trump went back to the meme, and his fanbase ate
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it up. To them, Trump was the ultimate meme, a vehicle for them to vent their frustrations with the detachment of politicians from the trials of middleAmerican life. Trump was an empty slate for them to inscribe their own meaning onto, and his actual policies, views and actions were irrelevant, like old versions of a meme that had become outdated. On January 20, 2017, in a video taken the day of President Trump’s inauguration, Richard Spencer was giving an interview when a man ran in from offscreen and punched Spencer in the face before
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This version of Pepe the Frog, colloquially known as Snug Pepe, is the interpretation of Pepe most often used by alt-right memers to show the ineptitude of "normies." The evolution of Pepe's emotions in his time as a meme – from happy, to sad, to smug – is indicative of the way this once-beloved character of meme culture has been co-opted and re-interpreted by fascists and white nationalists .
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running off into the crowd. Twitter quickly took to the video and memed the crap out of it, layering various songs and sound clips over the punch, including Celine Dion, Miley Cyrus, Kanye West and Smashmouth. As righteous as that punch was though, it couldn’t have come at a worse time. Right before this anonymous hero’s fist collides with Spencer’s face, a reporter asks Spencer what his lapel pin is, to with Richard replies “It’s, uh, Pepe, he’s become kind of a symbol–“ and fist. So Pepe was a symbol of what, being a neonazi? Pepe began as a stoner cartoon frog whose “feels good man” attitude made him a meme staple in the mid-200s, and then around 2104, Pepe resurged in the
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Within hours of the incident, the video footage quickly went viral, especially among the critics and protesters of Trump’s presidency, racking up nearly a million views and spawning many musical remixes.
online conscious and became an ironic meme legend. Remixing images of Pepe became an Internet-wide game, and Pepe became a vehicle for the emotions and ideals of a generation of memers. On Tumblr, he was a symbol for sensitive teenage angst and on Twitter he was a symbol for playful pettiness. On the hyper masculine image boards of 4chan, however, Pepe went to much darker emotional places. Pepe was sad, angry, suicidal, homicidal and most importantly, he was really, really racist.
In the dark corners of the Internet, Pepe memes were edited to be as offensive as possible.
In the dark corners of the Internet, Pepe memes were edited to be as offensive as possible. Pepe became the gatekeeper of the /b/tards14, the tribe of isolated 4chan users on the /b/ image forum who prided themselves on crafting an ultra-inclusive environment of racism, antisemitism and homophobia to keep out uninitiated users,
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014 Listen, we’re not proud of /b/. At its height, /b/ consisted entirely of Internet trolls who acted recklessly with the intention of shocking other users “for the lulz” with content including gore and pornography, but we cannot ignore that many of the Internet’s earliest memes were crafted in /b/. But we would really like to.
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whom they called “normies.” Users worried that normies were making Pepe too popular and overexposed, following tweets from celebrities like Katy Parry and Nicki Minaj that used Pepe’s image, and attempted to offset this normie
Today’s memesavvy racists cloak their base ideologies under the pretense of irony and Internet provocation.
following by churning out more and
more
offensive
Pepes.
These men used Pepe as a proxy for their racist leanings. They shrouded their hate in irony, arguing that Pepe was merely a symbol and that layer of
meaning
between
their
actual feelings and the implied feelings of Pepe allowed them to shirk responsibility. Pepe had become a symbol for ironic nazism, and then actual real life
neo-nazis realized they could hide their sincere white supremacist beliefs under the guise of innocent memes and pass them off to the general public by remixing them with the supposed “ironic” nazi memes. In 2016, the Anti-Defamation League listed Pepe as a hate symbol, and the alt-right celebrated. Normies stopped using Pepe so as not to be grouped in with their white supremacist
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ideologies and they reclaimed Pepe as a symbol of their bigotry. If white supremacists used to hide their identities under white hoods, today’s memesavvy racists cloak their base ideologies under the pretense of irony and Internet provocation.
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A meme is an activity, concept, phrase or piece of online media, which spreads (often through mimicry or re-appropriation for humorous purposes) between users on the Internet at a rapid pace. A meme may be as tangible as an image or the structure of a joke or as abstract as a specific sound. Memes are democratic, they’re widespread, and they’re changing the way we think and communicate globally.