Originally published at: The man who became a meme | Boing Boing
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I think each younger age group is getting more and more comfortable with the meme idea…this one is pretty funny in that all the participants take memes for granted and seem pretty happy it happened, like a band who had a 1-hit wonder song or a novelty hit.
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Gee, where have I been? This is the first time I’ve seen this image.
Great story, though. I’m glad all the participants are cool with it.
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Better that people seek fame and notoriety as memes than shooters. The drive for attention does seem to be a pretty basic human motivator.
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agree, I think the internet is making everyone rethink their notions of privacy and fame, which I think can be healthy. like, I wonder how this will impact the common fear of public speaking, when potentially anything you say to an audience of even 0 (i.e. just a camera) can be considered public speaking to a potentially massive audience. and the idea of having a stage persona or public persona, which used to only apply to people who pursued public audience through accepted outlets (performance, journalism, politics…) now applies to every single person. interestingly, hip hop (and rock/punk, but let’s be real, the mass adoption is hip hop) has made these ideas – for lack of a better term – an artform, your jazzy self IS a public persona, with a name, a look, an image. the hip (hop) kids being ahead of the curve ( here, curve=internet) is a classic case of art imitating life, and art being the vanguard. Of course, expressed through a fine art lens, Warhol and his factory scene were another example. and those scenes overlapped. that they sprang from a massive, media savvy, multicultural city where people were forced to explore being in public all the time --like it or not-- is not only not a coincidence, I’d argue these tactics are just a function of humanity that the internet is making the general global population to “evolve,” as it were.
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To save folks some time, this is the meme being referenced.
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I don’t know if I agree that the tendency in hip-hop or in the Factory scene to craft an artistic persona is quite the same. punk had the same impulse, but the real and the persona are so mixed up, it’s hard to disentangle them.
I think the problem for me might be that the persona you’re advocating for often gets wrapped up in obfuscation of the self… I do think that “selling” oneself has became a major part of the crafting of an artistic persona, so maybe that’s part of my own discomfort with it…
I’ll have to think about it some more…
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eh, I don’t think “selling yourself” is exactly the same. the attitude in hip hop and punk is “this is who I am, deal with it,” you aren’t asking for anything, just being you as performance art, I guess. but yeah hip hoppers are a lot more tied up with status symbols as part of their identity, unfortunately. I’ll grant you that.
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I agree with you, and I think that the whole “persona” online is more about that than about what punks and hip-hop kids were/are doing…
Not always, tho. It’s an element of some hip-hop culture, but not all… Same with punk, really.
ETA: I’ll also say that there is this dialectical process that happens with artistic, counter-cultural movements and with outsider culture, that it rises up, gets sanitized and corporatized, and resold as “rebellious” culture (think of like the Hot topicification of punk and postpunk culture). The embrace of “persona” seems like an outcropping of that… it’s like taking the image of what the dadaists, etc were trying to do (live life in an artistic manner), but commercialized. I’d argue that the saving grace of that, is that people never do what they’re meant to do and often manage to bring their own sense of authenticity to it. So… 
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My son became a meme on his campus when his car was crushed in a crazy weather accident during finals week. I was a little concerned but he was completely fine with it. it still circulates around the campus.
I don’t think that is a meme where the audience is ever laughing at him. The captions in context with that look are usually a universal acknowledgment of stress. Which is funny because of his purposeful expression.
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I’m more fascinated by the “current” picture of the guy. As A Old, I can’t be bothered to keep up on the latest fashion/style trends, but is looking like you stepped out of a time machine from 1982 a thing with the yutes today?
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Thats was actually quite nice.
Just some kids having a harmless joke.
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The vegan version of the meme is top notch.
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