Photo illustration by D. Brown
Dominic Brown
Lantern Staff
The internet subculture of memes has blown up in 2016, and its popularity continues to blow up in early 2017. The term “meme” was originally coined by Richard Dawkins as “an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture.” Nowadays memes take the form of funny or obscene internet jokes.
Internet culture is an interesting phenomenon. Not many people follow this boom as closely as others.
“I mean, I think they’re funny, but I’m not super up to date on a lot of the things on the Internet,” sophomore Katherine Smalley said. “Like I just learned about the pineapple pen thing the other day”
The Internet operates on a totally different set of rules What is off limits and taboo for many is the norm for the Internet. Some of the “culture spots” and birthplaces of Internet culture come from the predecessors of modern social media.
Before millionaire Mark created Facebook or Tom added us all on Myspace, and even before we experienced weird bug fights on YouTube for the first time, there were the image boards. Here, people posted content they thought was funny or interesting based upon interest. One of the earliest boards was 4chan.org. Founded in 2003, it is the American counterpart to the Japanese board Futaba. It’s here that so many Internet trends were born. Most notably, the first hyper popular meme was Dancing Baby, which appeared on the Internet around 1996.
However, it is important to know that memes are not limited to being images on the Internet. Memes are any bit of viral content. This means images, viral videos and expressions also count as memes, some examples are the Harlem Shake, saying “My name Jeff” or even Rick Rolling someone.
“They should always be dank,” freshman Danni Rains said when asked about what her favorite kind of meme is.
There are different levels of memes. Tasty memes are commonly referring to new memes that are just now becoming popular. Dank memes are classic memes that are past their prime however remain incredibly significant. Spicy memes transcend Dank memes. These are either forgotten and resurfaced memes or memes so hot they earn the title of spicy. With the Internet forever growing, there’s no telling what the next big meme will be, but rest assured that it’s going to be spicy.
