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UNITE: VOL.1 (NO.2) / December 2014 / ISSN: 2335-0628 / UDK: 004.738.5:004.435

University journal of Information Technology and Economics Available online: http://www.unite.edu.rs/ System for submission: http://www.unite.edu.rs/ojs

NEW LANGUAGE MEDIA: INTERNET MEMES MANUSCRIPT Aldin Rastić, Samina Dazdarević, Fahreta Fijuljanin Department of Philology, University of Novi Pazar, Dimitrija Tucovića bb, 36300 Novi Pazar, Serbia, [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]

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Abstract

Article history:

The aim of this research paper is to investigate and explain how the Internet memes work and influence day to day life. The first part will concentrate on defining the Internet memes; we will provide a classification of memes depending on their contents and meaning in the other part of this paper. As these memes belong to a larger phenomenon, so-called Internet humor, we will explore some aspects and factors why these meme have become popular and recognizable all over the world. We believe that understanding them offers a better understanding of the Internet language and new media culture.

Received 01 Sep.2014 Received in revised form 29 Dec 2014

Keywords: Internet meme, rage comics, Internet humor, new media, 9gag

INTRODUCTION In his book A brief history of the future: the origins of the Internet, John Naughton comments: “The Internet is one of the most remarkable things human beings have ever made. In terms of its impact on society, it ranks with print, the railways, the telegraph, the automobile, electric power and television. Some would equate it with print and television, the two earlier technologies which most transformed the communications environment in which people live. Yet it potentially more powerful than both because it harnesses the intellectual leverage which print gave to mankind without being hobbled by the one-to-many nature of broadcast television” (Crystal, 2001, p. 7). On the other hand, there are those who argue whether the Internet has brought more good or bad. New technologies have always been followed by fear and doubt as it was the case with printing which emerged in the fifteenth century. People, especially those involved in religion at that time, thought that the idea of giving books to common people was a deed of devil as this would lead people astray, filth their minds and push them away from religion. Even four centuries later, there is an ongoing debate in terms of censorship, what is to

be seen and read. Governments all over the world try to restrict the flow of information and reduce general awareness of people. However, with the appearance of new mobile and tablet devices, it is almost impossible to ban people from posting on Tweeter, Facebook, Youtube and other social networks. Even though the situation looks very serious and intricate, more and more people use the Internet just for fun since it provides a high variety of video, pictures and audio files. Linguists have come up with a new term for such group, socalled netizens (net+citizen). They spend a lot of free time on the Internet in order to entertain themselves and keep their minds off everyday problems and routines. The latest trend apart from Facebook and Tweeter are the meme sites. Meme (/ˈmiːm/ is an element of a culture or system of behavior passed from one individual to another by imitation or other non-genetic means but also an image, video, piece of text, etc., typically humorous in nature, that is copied and spread rapidly by Internet users, often with slight variations. Memes are usually connected with the latest news, any kind of event either political or showbiz. They are very simple in form but nevertheless deal with serious social problems that people face all over the world. Limor Shifman, communication researcher, in her book Memes in digital culture states:

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Aldin Rastić / University journal of Information Technology and Economics / Vol.1 (No.2) / December 2014 / pp. 38-44 “While memes and digital culture seem like a match made in heaven, several issues need to be resolved before the concept can be integrated meaningfully into academia and industry. First, there is a core problem about the exact meaning of the term- the jury is still out on what is meant by “meme”. Second, many competing terms – such as viral-tend to be used interchangeably with it. And finally, only a handful of studies have actually examined the practices and politics DEFINING MEMES AND THEIR CLASSIFICATION Clinton Richard Dawkins, University of Oxford’s professor, was one of the pioneers who promoted the gene evolution theory. In his book The Selfish Gene he explains that there is something in the nature of humans to embrace or imitate behavior of others, alter it and thus produce cultural evolution. He introduced the term “meme” even though there have been similar terms before with almost the same meaning. The term “meme” was somewhat reborn with the introduction of Internet videos, pictures, jokes and websites. Netizens often talk about so-called “Internet memes”, reproductions of any popular media contents. Such memes are in most cases entertaining, but not always as they tackle underlying problems. Furthermore, they often convey sarcastic and deep political words with a humoristic note attached to it. Another feature of Internet memes is their textual or visual correlation. In other words, one may always use the same chunk of text, apply it to other images and get a completely new idea or use the same image with different texting to bring up a wholly new meaning. This correlation makes Internet memes popular as one can use them in different situations and never lose the relation with the original one. Netizens all over the world produce thousands of memes daily but only the best make it to the top. “Shifman divides memes into nine groups, or nine genres as follows: - Reaction Photoshops / photo processing – digitally altered photographs as comments on events and official news; -

Photo fads – photos and videos (one of the most wellknown examples is “planking”

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Flash mob – a group of strangers gather in a public space and perform a particular act simultaneously. After that they just leave the scene

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Lipsynch – videos in which a person or persons try to match their lip movements to popular songs;

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Misheard lyrics – funny mistranslation of spoken sounds or songs written words;

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Recut trailers – the re-editing or remixing of film footage by the users;

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LOLCats – pictures of cats systematically misspelled captions;

accompanied

involved in the creation and diffusion of Internet memes” (Shifman, 2013, p. 7). In order to fully understand how memes work it is essential to define and classify them into several groups depending on their form and message they convey. In this paper we will give a detailed classification and linguistic background of popular Internet memes from 9gag.com and other popular meme websites. - Stock character macros – so-called “advice-animals” macros, animals with absurd advice phrases as if uttered by a dog, penguin, etc. -

Rage comics – featuring a set of expressive characters, each associated with a typical behavior or emotion.”1

This paper will focus on three groups of Internet memes: reaction photoshops, stock character macros and rage comics, since these memes are both entertaining and immensely popular. REACTION PHOTOSHOPS As we have mentioned before, Internet memes are very simple in form which makes them easy-to-produce using basic image editing tools. Windows Paint, a free built-in drawing program, can be used to create, edit or save images files using different file formats. Netizens intentionally use this undemanding tool to produce an even greater effect with poor drawing skills and funny brush strokes.

Figure 1. Then and now (retrieved from www.9gag.com) These memes are not supposed to be perfect when it comes to coloring, text position and other details. Reaction photoshops are mostly represented through a combination of a single or multiple images and short line of text. Sometimes users add sounds or animations to make it even more complex and interesting or, as there are hundreds of Internet memes, combine them to compare ideas or extend their meaning. Reaction photoshop memes are not new, quite the opposite. The website Bert is Evil, created by Filipino artist Dino Ignacio in 1997, features Bert, a character on the American children’s television program Sesame Street. The website contains

by 1

http://www.folklore.ee/folklore/vol58/b01.pdf

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Aldin Rastić / University journal of Information Technology and Economics / Vol.1 (No.2) / December 2014 / pp. 38-44

various images of this character impersonating many historical figures, linking him to wars and crimes all over the world. Bert’s enactments rapidly became viral and due to the high maintenance costs of this website, Ignacio asked for help as he was not able to pay for it himself. Soon afterwards, many mirror websites appeared and Bert continued to amaze people globally. Here are some of the most famous Bert’s photoshops.

photoshops are popular as this websites takes 225th place on Alexa’s list of most visited websites in the world. Here are some examples of popular reaction photoshops taken from 9gag.com.

Figure 4. Titanic Adidas logo (retrieved from www.9gag.com)

Figure 2. Bert and the KKK (retrieved from www.bertisevil.tv)

Figure 3. Slobo’s bodyguard (retrieved from www.bertisevil.com) Ignacio’s idea lived on and with the introduction of the new Internet Web 2.0 technology in 1999 image sharing and memetics2 suddenly gained weight. Popularity of Internet helped users create numberless variations of reaction photoshops memes. Adobe Photoshop, a raster graphics editor, which was firstly created in 1988 largely assisted Internet memes in terms of quality and creativity as this tool allows use of layers, masks, color models and different file formats. Thus, images easily surpass cultural differences and vagueness as one does not need to read anything to understand the message. On the other hand, memes usually use English since it is widely recognizable and easy to understand. Internet humor is another powerful engine of Internet memes. Often considered as “geek” or “hacker” humor, it provides great tools and attracts user’s attention on daily basis. Instead of reading blogs or news websites, netizens crave for humorous contents such as jokes, funny quotes, images and other formats. 9gag.com is a perfect example of how reaction

2

Memetics /me-met'iks/. The study of memes is still an extremely informal and speculative endeavor…in which memes live and replicate. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/memetics

Figure 5. Dude, Bach off (retrieved from www.9gag.com) Certainly, these memes evoke a dose of laughter and fascination with how users are creative and use puns and word games with images to design witty, either amusing or gloomy messages. Yet, one needs a large background and understanding of global phenomena to fully penetrate into memes of this genre. For example, those who have not seen the movie Titanic probably would not understand the relation between Adidas logo and funnels that Titanic actually had. In other words, the meaning is somewhat limited to a certain group of people who follow memes daily and respond to their contents in an affirmative way. STOCK CHARACTER MACROS (ADVICE ANIMALS) One of the best meme hubs knowyourmeme.com defines this group of memes as a type of image macro series featuring animals of some kind (including humans) that are accompanied by captioned text to represent a character trait or an archetype that fits the role of a “stock character”. Ferenc Somos created the first web application for editing memes on memegenerator.net. It was a very simple little tool which allowed users to apply text on the top or bottom of an image and this way caption it. This format was widely accepted and developed into several variations. Meme hubs such as

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Tumblr, Reddit, 9gag and others fully embraced advice animals as these proved to be fruitful memes. As previously mentioned, many animals appear in this group of memes. Probably the best known among them are “Actual Advice Mallard”, “Insanity Wolf”, “Foul Bachelor Frog”, “Socially Awkward Penguin” and “Confession Bear”. Actual Advice Mallard is an advice animal meme in form of a photograph of a male duck used with captions which serve as a guideline how to solve problems or act in different daily situations. The first know Actual Advice Mallard was released in 2011on Reddit and did not get so much attention. However, just days after its release meme hubs were flooded with this beautiful duck. Here are some notable examples:

Figure 6. How to help your kid (retrieved from www.9gag.com)

Figure 9. How to get to a woman’s heart (retrieved from www.9gag.com) Following the success of other animals, Foul Bachelor Frog appeared. It represents as its name suggests, procrastinating and slothful single men and their behavior. “Judging by search volume alone, Foul Bachelor Frog’s popularity is comparable to that of some of the earliest advice animals. Part of this popularity is because it serves as a vehicle for sharing socially embarrassing behaviors that wouldn’t be shared if it wasn’t for anonymity. Many people may empathize with the behaviors finding it humorous that many others share the same experience.”3 Here are some notable Foul Bachelor Frog memes.

Figure 7. Don’t try to understand women (retrieved from www.9gag.com)

Figure 10. Laziness level Foul Bachelor Frog (retrieved from www.9gag.com)

Insanity Wolf is another interesting meme with references to occasions when people in some way provoke a harsh reaction or do something most people would never dare to. The first known Insanity Wolf meme was posted back in 2009. The meme is related to Courage Wolf meme and tells people to commit any kind of insanity. Here are some notable examples:

Figure 11. Time will tell (retrieved from www.9gag.com)

Figure 8. How to deal with your annoying supervisor (retrieved from www.9gag.com)

Foul Bachelor Frog often depicts disgusting situations, lack of hygiene and self-control. Even though such depictions relate mostly to men, there has been a female version of this meme invented, the so-called Foul Bachelorette Frog. It uses another image of a frog and set of pinkish colors to avoid confusion

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http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/foul-bachelor-frog

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with the male version which uses green colors in the background.

12. How to properly floss your teeth (retrieved from www.9gag.com) No matter how entertaining, Foul Bachelor Frogs tend to be inappropriate in most cases because they reveal most hidden secrets and thoughts which are not discussable with friends or family members in any other way. For these reasons, website developers created NSFW (Not Safe For Work) tag which marks posts containing profanity or any kind of inappropriate content since it helps users avoid opening such files in public areas or in company of colleagues at work. Socially Awkward Penguin image macro appeared in 2009. The original image was taken by nature photographer George F. Mobley and posted to illustrate a fact sheet on Adéli penguins for National Geographic’s Wild Animals site.4 This meme is used for all those situations in which people are not confident enough or do not know how to behave in social circles; they give a gawky answer or do something stupid due to being nervous or socially unimportant. The meme itself is simple; an image of a penguin with blue background shades. Here are some notable Socially Awkward Penguin memes.

Figure 14. Do not hurt them (retrieved from www.9gag.com) There have been produced many derived versions of the Socially Awkward Penguin, for example Socially Awesome Penguin which has the opposite meaning. Socially Awesome Penguin is self-confident and always gets the best. He is not scared to ask questions and be socially involved. The meme uses slightly different coloring, red background instead of blue while users often create a juxtaposition of these memes for the same situation and post them together to show how different people react in different situations. Here is an example of these two meme juxtaposed.

Figure 15. Socially Awkward Awesome Penguin (retrieved from www.9gag.com)

Figure 13. Exiting stores be like… (retrieved from www.9gag.com)

The last macro image we will discuss in this paper is the Confession Bear meme. The original image of a Malayan bear with his paws on a log appeared in 2007. However, the first meme using this image appeared five years later, in 2012. Confession bear uses captions with most bizarre opinions that people often hide and would never confess to anyone. Here are some notable examples.

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http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/socially-awkwardpenguin

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Figure 16. How to get a new computer (retrieved from www.9gag.com)

the latest news and trends. “Most strips focus on some small moment, a true-life anecdote that sent the author spinning into inexplicable fury or burrowing deep into resignation to keep from exploding. The last panel typically features the author, represented by a standard clip-art illustration, either screaming, fuming, throwing up hands in exasperation, or a collapsed-potato face sighing, “O.K.”6 As there is a large variety of rage comics, they all received their names according to the emotion they evoke such as Forever Alone Guy, Cereal Guy, Trollface, etc. These memes were predecessors to Advice Animals and there is a strong link between the two genres. Just like the Advice Animals, Rage Comics are very simple, made of a single or multiple images with a rather short punch line (entertaining comment in a couple of lines). Here are some notable rage comics with the original fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu guy (aka Rage guy), Y U NO Guy, Trollface, Cereal Guy, Okay Guy, Forever Alone Guy and Me Gusta Guy.

17. Sly bear (retrieved from www.9gag.com) We have seen that macro images are in most cases related to animals which provide ground for people to express their inner fears, taboo behaviors, and social awkwardness and thus they serve as a medium for netizens to fight stress, depression and social limitations. RAGE COMICS “If you are unfamiliar with rage comics, think of them as cartoons using an ever-growing set of internet memes. Various faces and other crudely-drawn representations are used to express certain feelings – anger, shock, defeat, surprise, pleasure, success, horror. Initially, a rage comic was based around a certain rage character – the f7u12 guy (or fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu guy). Something would happen, and rage guy would be very upset by it. Nowadays, “rage comic” encompasses any comic made with a series of these drawings, no matter if it includes rage guy or not.”5 Meme hubs have created a new sort of Internet humor which is recognizable and continues to expand almost five years after the first rage comics were published. What astonishes about these memes is that authors do not want to become famous for their memes but just share this idea that there are many others who feel just like him or her. Today, there are hundreds of rage comics posted every day related to

Figure 18. Double aces (retrieved from www.9gag.com)

Figure 19. 9gag, Y U NO take my fat instead? (retrieved from www.9gag.com)

5

Connor, Tom (11 March 2012). "Fuuuuuuuu: The Internet anthropologist's field guide to "rage faces". Condé Nast. Retrieved 10 December 2014

6 Boutin, Paul (May 9, 2012), "Put Your Rage Into a Cartoon and Exit Laughing", The New York Times

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REFERENCES

Figure 20. Troll guy(retrieved from www.9gag.com) We have seen from the examples that memes possess a special kind of humor which require a wider understanding of global events and social interactions. In other words, people who do not spend a lot of time on the Internet are likely not to understand the joke behind rage comics. Nevertheless, rage comics and other memes will continue their expansion and reach even greater numbers of netizens because they are simple in form and available on various meme hubs.

Blackmore S (2000),The meme machine (Popular Science), Oxford University Press, 978-0192862129 Brodie R (2011), Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme, Hay House, 978-1401924690 Crystal D (2006), Language and the Internet, Cambridge University Press, 978-0521868594 Crystal D (2011), Internet Lingustics: A student Guide, Routledge, 978-0415602716 Gusto M (2011), Rage Comics, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 978-1466441712 Naughton J (2000), A brief history of the future: Origins of the Internet, Phoenix, 978-0753810934 Runce C (2014), The Funniest Memes on the Internet: Huge Bumper Collection of the Funniest, Most Hilarious Internet Memes Ever Created, Amazon Digital Services, Inc., ASIN B00LSZWV7Q Shifman L (2013), Memes in digital culture (MIT Press Essential Knowledge), The MIT Press, 978-0262525435 Internet resources: http://www.9gag.com http://www.folklore.ee http://dictionary.reference.com http://knowyourmeme.com https://shaniceespiritu.wordpress.com/2012/09/06/the-best-of-9gag/ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/10/technology/personaltech/ragecomics-turn-everyday-stress-into-laughs.html?pagewanted=2&_r=0 http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/03/the-internetanthropologists-field-guide-to-rage-faces/ http://www.webpronews.com/teaching-the-english-language-withrage-comics-2011-11

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