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Memes were important before they were ubiquitous because they represent a practice of vernacular creativity, a blending of folk practices with contemporary media savvy and skill. The simplicity of memes ensures that it can be learned, copied and changed according to the creator s wishes. (Borzsei, 2013) First, memes may best be understood as pieces of cultural information that pass along from person to person, but gradually scale into a shared social phenomenon. (…) memes shape the mindsets, forms of behaviour, and actions of social groups. (Shifman, 2014)
Project: Never Gonna Give You Up
→ Many of the earliest internet memes in the US context seem to traffic in the random and bizarre: websites with repeating loops (...) where the promise of an interesting news story turns out to be a video of Rick Astley's.
Project: Bert is Evil
→ Ignacio made all the images, in which Bert is photoshopped into existing photographs, showing him in incriminating situations.
Project: All Your Base Belong to Us
→ An awkward translation of "all of your bases are now under our control", the quote originally appeared in the openning dialogue of Zero Wing, a 16-bit shoot em up game released in 1989. Marked by poor grammar, the "All You Base" phrase and the dialogue scene went viral on popular discussion forums.
Project: Little Fatty
→ A private photograph of 16 year old boy from Shanghai, originally posted on the Internet by one of his teachers in 2002, the image soon ended up in numerous Chinese forums, and people started photoshopping his face onto celebrities, especially on movie posters.
Project: LOLCATs
→ Are image macros consisting of humorous photos of cats with superimposed text written in a form of broken English known as lolspeak.
Project: You’re the man now, dog!
→ Max Goldberg’s original website, “yourethemannowdog.com”, which he registered along with “dustindiamond.com” after seeing a trailer for the movie Finding Forrester in which Sean Connery says the line “You’re the man now, dog!”.
Project: FFFFUUUU Rage Guy
→ The first of these stereotypical stock characters created with simple drawing softwares, short comics form.
Project: Forever Alone Guy
→ Is an exploitable rage comic character that is used to express loneliness and disappointmet with life. The face has also been used as an advice animal and inspired the creation of the snow clone template "Forever an X".
Project: Grumpy cat
→ Tardar Sauce, nicknamed Grumpy Cat, was an American Internet celebrity cat. She was known for her permanently "grumpy" facial appearance, which was caused by an underbite and feline dwarfism.
All contexts appropriated form the following sources:
Miltner, Kate M. (2015) “Internet Memes.”
Borzsei, Linda K. (2013) “Makes a Meme Instead. A concise History of Internet Memes.”
Shifman, Limor (2014) “Memes in Digital Culture.” Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data . ISBN 978 -0-262-52543-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)
→ Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up (1987)
→ Bert is Evil (1997)
→ All Your Base Belong to Us (2000)
→ Little Fatty (2002/3)
→ A lolcat employing misspellings (MOAR KINDNES) for humorous effect (2007)
→ You’re the man now, dog! (2007)
→ Rage Guy (2008).
→ Forever Alone Guy (2009)
→ Grumpy cat (2012)