Of trade shows, conventions, gadgets, products, memes and... oh, I don't know, let's say pandas.
In being thoroughly discouraged by what cuts it as an internet meme these days, I've decided to do a little deconstruction in determining what make a meme into the little slice of temporary pop culture phenomena that it is.
First, let's not deceive ourselves into thinking that ascertaining a meme's popularity is totally predictable. I maintain that a mainstream meme is the result of sheer luck and circumstance of a well-placed tweet or digg by a popular blogger, or a surreptitious mention on a popular podcast. So if one's heart is set on creating the next big meme, where does one begin?
Ingredient One: I Can Mistake Inglish?
Back as far as "All Your Base Are Belong To Us" people have flocked to mildly humorous examples of the English language being misrepresented or completely mismanaged to create a lasting effect that ranges from the silly to the absurd. Of course several years after the "Base" meme ran its course, "I can has cheezburger" kept up the trend, but included what will become our second step. The "Base" meme, due to its early nature, took longer to evolve and, because of it, stuck around longer. Several music and video remixes were made that required a certain level of expertise and allowed for the endurance of "Base".
Ingredient Two: Animalz R Phunny
Whether it's a cat, owl, or prairie dog, the sure sense of a odds-on meme will include an animal of some sort. With popularity going back to the early days of cats making unsuccessful jumps from sofas to tables, people love to see animals in two different scenarios: 1) being cute, 2) wiping out. The animal memes rely heavily on the minor abilities of people to use image editing to add text to photos. The partial, yet relatively minor skills involved in pushing this type of meme forward will spread it far more quickly, but ultimately cause it to flame out quicker.
Ingredient Three: Unmotivationals
The minor Photoshopping skills that people require for the text/animal mashups can also be used to create faux motivational posters. While this has become a meme in itself that would have run its course, the endless content that can be adapted has kept this satirical or parody-inspired practice in vogue. Also, the sheer ridiculous factor of the ever-growing original Motivators will continue to inspire this knockoff meme.
Ingredient Four: People Say/Do the Stupidest Things
"Stupid" people (read: wrong time, wrong place, wrong words for many of them) initiate this style of meme that propagates through video. Let's face it, it only takes the flailing of Star Wars Kid or a beauty pageant candidate exposing her sheer idiocy to capture the imagination of a mashup web generation. Remember "I like turtles!", "I'm not taking my glasses off", or "Leave Britney Alone!" If you don't, you must have been away from the web or ignoring the Fw:fw:fw: in your webmail boxes during the perfect time period. The stupidity inspires mashups, knockoffs, and responses that can keep these memes alive for a few weeks. The ease of use in spreading the word about these clips have made them some of the most popular memes of all. After all, what does it really take to email a youtube link to a friend, post it on twitter or facebook, or blog about it? But even if video dries up, you can always just add text to a picture of a person caught in an embarrassing situation that reads "EPIC FAIL!"
Ingredient Five: The Unexpected
From the early efforts of people being redirected to gross out porn to the more recent efforts that have revived Rick Astley's career through Rickrolling, the ability of someone to perform misdirection in link text or similar disguise has become as much an email meme as it has a web meme. Microblogging is a ripe medium for such an effort as it has become so simple to type "You Have to See This Car Accident" and then have the url redirect to Astley or a dozen other crazy clips. Kind of the laziest practical joke going, the misdirected link to unexpected content will always be around in one form or another.
And so we come to the part of the post where I try to create the ultimate meme. While I will try to incorporate as many of the ingredients as possible, I may not hit all of them. Cats have been done to death so I'm mashing up a picture of a soft-shelled turtle splayed out on the sand with its head half peeking out with the all upper case captions "I NEEDZ VIAGRA" across the top and "CLIC HERE TO HELP" across the bottom. In blazing red upper and lower case mix, diagonal to the top right we have "EPiC SHeLL FaiL" and the entire picture, when clicked, links to the misdirection video clip from an 80s band. While I've missed out on the Motivational parody and the human aspect in the original content, I do believe the goofy humans in the video make up for it. So we have a 1-2-5 meme with a dash of post 4.
Please feel free to send the link to as many friends as you like or mashup your own soft-shelled turtle viagra jokes as you can muster... I feel cheap and dirty.
If you've gotta have a few pillows strewn about your sofa and loveseat, you might as well be able to express your individuality or crazy sense of style through them.
While there are many that resemble pop culture characters and the like, it's the nice touch of shock seen below that I like best. Thanks to culturepopped.blogspot.com.
Apparently when there are over a billion people in a country I guess that, by process of elimination, that increases the total number of screwups. A giant panda at the Beijing zoo has now bitten the THIRD person who's fallen into its cage.
My favorite quote: "The panda is a national treasure, and I love and respect [him], so I didn't fight back," Zhang said. "The panda didn't let go until it chewed up my leg and its mouth was dripping with my blood."
You know what? I don't care if it's the Pope or President gnawing on my leg - I'm picking up the nearest rock or branch and going homerun derby on his skull.
- We admitted we were powerless over blogging—that our opinions had become unmanageable... and then blogged about it.
- Came to believe that a Power greater than the web could restore us to sanity... and then Tweeted it.
- Made a decision to turn our keyboard and our webcams over to the care of Baud as we understood It... and then Facebooked it.
- Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves... and then MySpaced it.
- Admitted to Baud, to ourselves, and to every other human being the exact nature of our wrongs... and then Pinged it.
- Were entirely ready to have Baud remove all the defects of character mapping... and posted a pic of it on Flickr.
- Humbly asked Baud to remove our fail whales... and waited for it to happen.
- Made a list of all persons we had ReTweeted, and became willing to Friendfeed them all... and so did.
- Made direct messages to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would deprive Followers... and so we Dugg their posts.
- Continued to take social network inventory and when we were wrong promptly went to Seesmic and apologized... in 60 seconds.
- Sought through webcam and keyboard to improve our conscious contact with Baud as we understood It, typing only for knowledge of Its knowledge of us and the power to carry that out... to Technorati.
- Having had a virtual awakening as the result of page views, we tried to carry this message to luddite friends, and to practice such messaging in all our affairs... until something better comes along.
Lessig's tete-a-tete with Colbert on the evils of over-protectionist copyright practices.
Make network and satellite-streamed radio your new audio entertainment homes. Even if it costs you a few bucks a month, it's worth it.
Perhaps my favorite game for the Commodore 64 - Impossible Mission. While it may look clunky by today's standards, the "sprite" graphics moved very fluidly for an early 80s game. Relish in the low-bit glory that is IM: "Stay a while. STAY FOREVER!"
lovehatetunes.com, the sister site to lovehatethings, is now a group site which means ANYONE can share their musical love hates.
Feel free to email your mp3 attachments or youtube video links to post@lovehatetunes.posterous.com
Remember that my role on this platform is to moderate, so your post may not show up right away - although I am online several times a day.
If you'd like to include a short explanation of why you love or hate the song, include it in the email. Feel free to comment on other people choices as well.
If you'd like to follow the naming structure I've tried to stick to, feel free, but really, do what ever you want.
Please try to keep it somewhat reasonable. I don't want be moderating submissions of someone's nazi punk discography.
Have fun and share you musical likes and dislikes, especially some obscure tracks that people may not have heard before.
Apparently Loverboy didn't sing a song about Armadillo and Lizard DNA not splicing. I suppose if you just pop on some Barry White, they'll make sweet love and this will be the bastard lovechild... imagine this sneaking into your trailer home!
