During last night’s Presidential debate, Mitt Romney made a statement regarding “binders full of women.” Here’s the obligatory fact check on that (SPOILER ALERT: he’s lying), and the obligatory image gallery of funny pictures with words on them generated by Tumblr users.
UPDATE: I want to clarify the message of this post. What I’m talking about here is not a call for the end of anybody’s good time. I’m simply making mention of an observed cultural shift – a changing trend. The first murmurs of this trend were touched on by some just following ROFLcon, but now Google Insights data corroborates those hunches.
Update 2: Reactions and further qualifications have been posted here.
Looking at the chart below and thinking about what it means makes me tired. In red, we have people Googling “Anonymous” mostly in response to stories about the loose “hacktivist” collective. And in blue, we have people Googling “meme” mostly looking for information about Internet Memes. You know the kinds, usually taking the form of Advice Animals, Rage Comics, LOLcats, all of the stuff that became popular in concert with the rise of Anonymous. Together, it’s all part of what a lot of us came to call “Internet culture,” meme culture, the ROFLsphere, etc.
1. A Google Insights comparison of relative search interest in the terms “meme” (blue) and “anonymous (red).
Well, if there’s one thing that can be ascertained from this chart, it’s that as of February, “memes” have reached a ceiling. At the very least the phase of exponential growth that lasted from 2008 until about last January is over. And if there’s a second thing to be learned, it’s that Anonymous (or at least what we knew as the lulz-driven Anonymous) is effectively dead.
“High emotions, inside jokes, and cultish reverence for one interest above all: When you’re inside a fandom, it’s as if you’ve found your long lost people. But to outsiders, fan enthusiasm and rage can be truly insufferable.”
Earlier today, the Daily Dot posted an article about the 10 worst fandoms as picked by Reddit. The short answer is “all of them,” with dishonorable mentions going to Juggalos, youth cannabis culture, Anime fans, and a handful of other interests that won’t get you upvotes strike Reddit as annoying, including memes and anti-fans. Because Reddit, Reddit is above all that nonsense. “If I ever hear anyone say ‘le’ or ‘me gusta’ in real life, I am going to run them down with my car, then post it to Reddit for karma,” Lauren Rae Orsini quoted Redditor Chakote as saying. Also, people who spend time bitching about the people they hate, that’s just obnoxious! As dinoswithjetpacks notes, his attention likely split between this comment and a meme he’s making for r/athiesm, “What annoys me the most is the anti-fanbases. People glorifying the fact that they DON’T like something that’s popular.” That is very funny irony, you two!
I have this bad habit of ignoring the fact that I’m hungry when I’m working. I wait until the hunger grows to anger before I finally find something edible and wolf it down like a pissed off… wolf.
My girlfriend hates that. “Did you even taste it?” she aks me.
But I know that I’m not alone. To prove it, I’ve created eatingangrily.tumblr.com and uploaded a bunch of stolen images from various places around the web. And if you feel so inclined, you can submit your own photos of yourself eating something angrily. It’ll be fun. After it goes up you can send a link to your friends and say, “look at me! My picture was featured on eating angrily dot tumblr dot com and now I’m an internet celebrity and/or meme! That makes me sort of famous!”
Before you know it, some larger website will give it a new name like “Angreating” and then, under it’s new name, the craze will sweep the nation. “Angreating” will become “the new Shamrocking” before morphing into a dangerously competitive version of its former self. People will start eating things normally thought inedible, like drywall and bricks, all while scowling and grimacing harder and harder until someone finally dies of a simultaneous aneurism and burnt esophagus.
And we’ll all laugh about it, then get pissed off again and demolish some falafels. Oh! It’ll be a hoot!
Before I forget, here are those photos of people eating angrily.
Josh Fonner has been interviewed several times about coping with becoming a “fat goth” meme. Slacktory’s Nick Douglas asked him to write an open letter to Heidi Crowter, the girl whose face is on the “I can count to potato” meme. He also wrote to her mother:
“You talked about how distraught the knowledge of this meme made your daughter, and if I’m being 100% honest here, the person to blame for that is you.”
Yesterday, The Sun ran an oh-so-current trend piece entitled “Wacky Cat Pics Are Web Hit.”
This got me thinking about what other bleeding-edge internet trends The Sun might cover next.
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