~4RLZ~
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I totally disagree. There is even a page for this entire family of memes on KnowYourMeme, placing this squarely in the context of the lineage.
Clearly this shares a genetic history with images like
or
or
This is exactly the definition of a meme: an element that is being passed around mutated through variation on the central theme. The meme here is capturing the subject’s ridiculous internal monologue. The specific subject changes from image to image.
Argument from ignorance isn’t an argument. I don’t know 99% of what the currently-cool kids are meming, given that I am old but my kids are still too young to use the internet. But I don’t dismiss them for that reason.
Focussing on iconic images alone is a very limited idea of what constitutes a “meme.”
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I mean, I’m pretty sure the image itself is 2+ years old. It has a small following in primmie circles and a larger, mainstream circulation to boot. This has been a meme for a bit.
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Darwinian Memeage?
You, sir, have just launched a thousand PhDs.
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Knowyourmeme is about like Urban Dictionary these days in my opinion, and makes this kind of confusion the norm. And yeah, “ignorance” actually is a valid gauge. intrinsic to the definition.
“an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture”
If ignorance of it is widespread enough, and it has no characteristics that are recognizable, it isn’t a meme. Three people passing around an image of their boss with a caption could be called widespread ignorance, and it wouldn’t be a meme. No, of course there’s no requirement that they recognize the meme-ness of it as it spreads, but spread it must.
“Interior Monologue Captioning” is a thing, I guess, and if you want to call it a meme, whatever. Perhaps the format of the scattering with the colors and fonts, I dunno, i find it sad. I can bend to that, begrudgingly, though. It’s a “thing”, and I will accept that.
Individually, in terms of sub categories? Breaking it down into “peasant meme”, “obama making a funny face while talking on the phone meme”, “cool kid meme”, etc etc ad nauseum… well, that’s just asinine.
Reminds me of a scene from Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court in which the time-traveler-turned-royal-advisor takes Arthur undercover to mingle with the little people. The king tries to blend in by making small talk such as “the onion is but an unwholesome berry when stricken early from the tree…”
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Venetian doge, or some crappy Genoan doge?
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Why would a medieval European peasant be growing potatoes?
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The trouble with this meme is that it requires a preceding plague to wipe out rather a lot of the population.
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#Trump1346!
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Hey, he’s not a Doge. The Doge did what the Doge does… uh, when the Doge does his duty to the Duke, that is.
#extremelydatedmoviereferences
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The Orange Death
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Let’s go serfin’ now
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As they say on the boards: “forced meme is forced”.
FWIW I enjoy weird bits of internet culture but I don’t even consider most popular pictures to have enough going on conceptually to qualify as memetic.
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The only good meme is a dead meme.
so fa la ti doh… me meme
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You don’t have to accept it, you know. If keeping up is too hard you can declare amnesty, all you have to do is say “I’m too old” and you will be left alone.
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