Article by leandro andrade

Good Friends With A Guy Named Obscurity Memes: The Communication of the Modern Day

Leandro Andrade

Search Facebook

Introduction...

Leandro Andrade Just now

It was a cold November day before the big game, the New England Patriots vs. the Seattle Sea hawks.

Richard Sherman was out on the field with his team, preparing for the game when they were Interrupted

by Tom Brady asking “who are you guys?” Brady pointed at the scoreboard and then looked back at the team and mockingly said “come see me after this win.” Regardless of the cocky trash talk, the Patriots lost, but still, Sherman visited them after the game. He said that Tom seemed upset and he went up to him and asked if he was mad. Within a week, the slogan skyrocketed in popularity. “You mad bro?” was the talk of the town.

Like

Comment

Share

300 likes

Write a comment...

Leandro Andrade Just now

If you browse the internet often, chances are you’re familiar with memes. They’ve been around as long as the internet has, evolving over the years, spreading like wildfire from forum to forum, website to website. Internet memes are visual humor applied to a format. Memes often take a serious subject and make it humorous and are a large part of people’s communication online. Memes can often convey a specific emotion or reaction. The term meme was coined by Richard Dawkins in 1976 in an attempt to explain the spread of culture in his book The Selfish Gene.

2

Interviewees Rage Comics were one of the earliest forms of memes; they were a series of poorly illustrated images that were used to tell an absurd story that usually has a humorous punch line. These started some of the most popular memes of all time, such as the troll face with the caption “you mad bro?” But the biggest trolls of all could be found on 4chan. You’ll never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.

No, it’s not the Mos Eisley Spaceport, it’s much, much worse. Blatant disregard for social boundaries and personal privacy are no stranger in threads on the popular forum website. The anonymous members of the threads seem to work as a hivemind, once an idea has taken hold, hundreds of nameless people spring out of the woodwork to contribute to the mass trolling. It’s as if millions of voices cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.

Leandro Andrade Lucas Andarade Dylan Van Der Line Adam Colman Chris Ray “Gun” Maldonado Anthony Fantano

4chan users would often bait people with enticing headlines, but throw the reader for a loop when the link redirected them to an image of a duck with wheels. This was known as “Duckrolling.” Rick Astley topped the charts with his hit single “Never Gonna Give You Up” in 1987, but the one hit wonder’s career got a second wind in 2007 when a user posted the trailer for the highly anticipated video game, Grand Theft Auto IV, but many were surprised to find the youtube video in question was in fact just Astley’s romantic ballad. This became a viral trend of bait and switch jokes where people share links to current events that would just redirect to the pop hit.

3 Type a message...

GIF

Home

Moments

Notifications

Messages

Dylan Van Der Line

“Humor is an ambassador of peace”

But the boards also had a lighter side. Funny pictures of cats with the iconic bold white impact font captions circulated the website and became the most well known form of memes.

These would parody the curiosity of cats, with captions often featuring poor grammar and idiosyncrasies such as spelling human as “hooman.” There was also an odd theme of world domination and laziness. These “lolcats” flooded the forum website every Saturday for an event known as Caturday.

Advice animals were basically the second wind for these top text, bottom text memes that started with a variant of lolcats called Advice dog, which usually parodies “dog logic” like barking at doorbells and chasing mailmen. This eventually spread to other funny pictures of animals that became templates for future memes. For example: Confession Bear, Win/Fail Penguin, and the actual advice duck. Users would often discuss personal problems in a comedic way. Over time, more of these meme templates were created, expanding beyond animals, with memes such as Good Guy Greg and Scumbag Steve.

4

Search Twitter

Tweet

On an overbooked United flight from Chicago O’hare to Louisville, there were 4 standby United Airlines employees that needed to get to Louisville on Monday for work. They offered passengers up to $800 to passengers to give up their seats for the employees to be able to fly. A manager then used a computer to randomly select 4 passengers to be removed from the flight. After the first two passengers had exited, the computer selected a man who claimed to be a doctor and that he had patients to attend to the next day and refused to give up his seat. United called 3 security officers to forcefully remove the man from the plane. The Chicago police officers violently grabbed the man and slammed his head against the armrest before dragging his unconscious body off of the plane.

Several minutes later, he ran back onto the plane with a bloody nose, repeating “I need to go home.” A medical crew removed him from the plane, and after 2 hours of “tidying up” the plane was finally able to take off. Before the news even got their hands on the event, the Twitter memes were already coming out of the woodwork.

On May 28, 2016, The Cincinnati zoo security had mistakenly shot the 17-year-old Western lowland gorilla known as Harambe with live ammunition rather than tranquilizers after a three year old child fell into the enclosure. He died instantly. Much contention was held over whether or not his death was justified, but the 4chan meme community got their hands on the news and quickly started using it for evil. The meme started as a satire of the Black Lives Matter movement, mocking their recent efforts against police brutality by using Harambe as the poster child for the ironic protest of police brutality. Not long later, twitter returned the meme to an innocent defense of an innocent gorilla. They started a fake movement for people to expose their male reproductive organs in solidarity for the gorilla. The hashtag #Dicksoutforharambe was trending in less than 24 hours. Even One of the most popular variants of the meme was Harambe face photoshopped onto Babe Ruth in the sandlot with his quote “Heroes get remembered, but legends never die.”

After two months, the meme naturally decreased in popularity, eventually dying. Two months was a good lifespan for a meme, and the community was finally ready to move on. Unfortunately, legends never die. There were people who were still just finding it in August and making low quality attempts to resurrect the meme. Although this seriously annoyed meme creators who had already had their fair share of Harambe memes, it was gaining popularity with people who had never heard of Harambe and had never experienced memes before. These people who misuse and misunderstand memes are called Normies. Normie memes include top text, bottom text (being used in the modern day) Family Guy screencaps and Minion memes.

5

F

rom the outside, the Facebook meme community might not seem to be too organized, but in reality many of the meme pages shareA similar admins who are good friends and are in groups together. In February of 2016, NY magazine published an article, dubbing the community “Weird Facebook.” The name didn’t stick, but the impact of the article did.

The admin of the meme page Anphetamame II, Dylan Van Der Line, explains the shift in meme subject matter. “I found that as memes got older, they took a nosedive in sense, and logic, basic humor level, it went from things that all can appreciate to things that are borderline offensive.” All eyes were now on the downright strange pages sharing obscure images with absurd captions. The the term Zucking originates from Mark Zuckerberg’s shady actions towards other tech companies such as foursquare. In May of 2016, the meme page utopian raspberry posted a picture of Mark dancing at a party, with the caption ‘ZUCC.’

T

he page Difficulty II then made a series of images describing a scenario where Zuckerberg removes posts from Facebook for no reason, starting with a picture of a goose on fire. Soon, other meme pages started spreading the picture of the flaming goose, and sure enough, Facebook started removing the posts. The term Zucc then referred to being blocked from posting on Facebook or having content removed.

In 2016, Facebook started randomly unpublishing popular meme pages that did not post anything that broke the terms of service or community guidelines.

This is what is known as in the meme community as the Zuccmergency. Admins rushed to create backup pages and emergency backup backup pages. “It’s ridiculous, there have been so many times where I’ve logged onto my Facebook account and see that one of our posts has been removed for breaking the ‘laws of Facebook.’”

Instagram chris_ray_gun

chris_ray_gun “The unoffical language of the internet appears to be gargantuan sarcasm and unrelenting irony�

1

+ 8

Adam Me Pepe the frog is an image depicting an anthropomorphic frog from the web comic Boy’s Club. The image gained popularity on forum website 4chan in 2008, usually associated with green texts, short form humorous anecdotes accompanied with an image to help convey the reaction or emotion being felt. The most popular variants being Pepe uttering the phrases “feels good man” and “feels bad man.”

Soon, people started photoshopping Pepe into various different scenarios and putting his face on other animated characters. This led to a satirical cult called Kekism, where people would worship Pepe, collecting, saving, and selling “rare pepes” that had been shared less than 1,000 times. (kek is an alternative for lol popularized by the Korean World of Warcraft community.) 4chan’s politics board AKA Politically Incorrect or /pol/ adopted the image for use in political discussions.

Around the time of the 2016 presidential election, they were using Pepe as a symbol for the ironic support of Donald Trump and eventually what became known as the alt-right. Variants of the meme were then created for the explicit purpose of offending people. One such of these offensive Pepes was alongside political figures like Trump, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Alex Jones on the movie poster for The Expendables, edited to read The Deplorables. Donald Trump Jr. posted this meme on his Instagram, saying that he was honored to be alongside such figures. Hillary Clinton’s official campaign website published an article stating that it was a white supremacist symbol, not much time passed before the Anti-Defamation League officially categorized Pepe the frog as a hate symbol. The admin of the New York University meme page, Adam Coleman said about the incident: Adam It depends on what meme it is and what the purpose of the meme is. Memes in their nature are supposed to be provocative. The more controversial a meme is, the more popular and used it becomes. When the Anti-Defamation League declared the green frog meme known as “Pepe” a hate symbol, usage of that infamous frog blew up. If the meme is literally something out of a snuff film whose sole purpose is to cross the line, then it can be considered inappropriate under the circumstances of its viewing.

Think of memes like modern art.

Send a chat 9

Works Cited Coleman, Adam. Personal Interview. 18 February. 2017.

Hongo, Hudson. “The Rise of Weird Facebook: How the

World’s Biggest Social Network Became Cool Again (and

Why It Matters)” Select/all 25 February. 2016. http:// nymag.com/selectall/2016/02/weird-facebook-became cool-again.html Line, Van Der, Dylan. Personal Interview. 18 February. 2017.

“PEPE is a HATE SYMBOL? - #NotAllPepes.” YouTube,

uploaded by Chris Ray Gun, 2 October. 20 16.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJRdGSJiZ_g.

10

Leandro Andrade is a seventeen year old aspiring graphic designer from California. He attends Los Altos High School and studies Digital Media at Freestyle Academy. He an avid gamer and a film & music enthusiast. He enjoys long walks on the beach. His favorite flavor of ice cream is cookie dough. And his favorite kitchen utensil is the whisk .

11

12