Memes within the Network

After the discussion of meme’s during the lecture within week 9 I began to think and recall of my favorite memes that have been spread throughout the internet within the last few years. The memes that were discussed such as the star wars kid and Yuma Yuma guy in the lecture were out dated and years old so in this post I wanted to discuss several new memes and how they became an internet sensation

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Firstly I want to address the one of the most popular memes of 2013-2014, the Doge meme. This meme has its own page on Facebook and was widely used in forums across the Internet; the meme contains a picture of the Japanese dog Shiba Inu with captions in poor English such as ‘ many wow’ and ‘such dog’.  Though the Doge meme only became a sensation during mid 2013 it originated from kinder garden teacher Atsuko Sato’s blog in which photos of her doge with an irregular facial expression were posted on 23rd of February 2010 and later was spread throughout websites such as Reddit and Tumblr.

Image The second meme I want to address is the widely popular Troll face, this meme would be the most common on the Internet today and is arguably the most popular. This meme is simply a drawn picture of a long grinning face that may contain captions such as ‘u mad?’ and ‘problem’ and is largely linked to the internet term ‘trolled’ meaning to bait somebody in order to make them angry or uncomfortable. As the Internet is a place where everyone remains anonymous, trolling is a common practice within forums and games in order to make others mad while remaining anonymous and therefore the popularity of this meme increased. The origin of this cartoon face appeared on website deviant art on the 28th of September 2008 and was drawn by artist Carlos Ramirez using the program MS paint in order to respond to a forum thread on website 4chan about the nature of trolling on the internet and games. The Troll face spread throughout image board 4chan were it was posted and was symbolically attached to the term trolling and is used today within forums and on online games in order to bait other users into pointless anger.

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Finally I want to address my favorite meme that I find is used in the most enjoyable and unusual context, Sanic the Hedgehog. This meme contains a poorly sketched drawing of Sega game character Sonic the Hedgehog and is usually captioned with ‘gotta go fast’ referring to the animation series theme song for Sonic, I feel that this meme represents the humor and pointlessness of todays memes. This meme first appeared on the Internet on March 31st 2010 as a YouTube video in which uploader Onyxheart produced a video titled ‘how 2 draw Sanic Hedgehog’, this video contained footage of the user in program MS paint drawing the poorly sketched video game character to a distorted song which is used in the Sonic videogame. The trend of drawing Sanic spread through websites such as Newgrounds and Funnyjunk until where it is now commonly seen on Youtube. Although it is not the most popular humorous meme on the Internet I find it the most pointless and enjoyable.

 

Meme’s today are a larger part of the Internet and is also a remarkable use of the internet as one picture of message can be spread among millions of users to become a sensation. This confirms that the internet is the most useful way the we can transfer information to one another where its for communication or pointless fun like memes.

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