Recently, colleges across Michigan have been creating Internet “memes.”
So what’s a meme? They’re clever or funny statements written to portray certain aspects of a society, or, in this case, life on college campuses (like the example above). They bring people together to reflect on things in life that are noticed but never spoken.
There’s a meme for anything…even the feeling of embarrassment in a drug stores after hours.
Schools such as Western University, Central Michigan University, and Albion College have joined the fray, creating Facebook pages dedicated to the building of memes. Albion’s meme page has generated 635 members in less than a week.
Memes have always been always popular, but it was necessary to dig through entertainment sites like Tumblr and Reddit to see them. Almost overnight, the meme culture spilled over into Facebook, giving a wider audience access to these college specific gems.
The most important part of a meme is the photo. They come from everywhere. From candid pictures of celebrities, from movies, from animals, from drawings, from someone’s baby picture—everywhere. And those backgrounds tell the stories of the cleverly written statements.
Take Paranoid Parrot for example. The background shows a parrot in the background who always seems to think of the worst possible senerio for situations. The written dialogue might say:
CAMPUS SAFETY VAN IN FAST FOOD DRIVE-THRU
THEY FOLLOWED ME HERE
Once the name of the meme is decided (Paranoid Parrot, Scumbag Steve, Bachelor Frog, Socially Awkward Penguin, etc.) then the commentary can follow. The humor sources from the theme.
Power to the ingenuity behind the latest college trend.
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