Normally I wouldn’t want to write about something so storied and played out but it was in the news, and at some point we all have to write our Citizen Kane essay.
Doge has lived a thousand lives. I’m not going to summarize the history and variations because that would take up half the entry. It has storied origins from a japanese pet blogger and homestar runner. It starts on tumblr with Doge 1.0 and we (the tumblr kids) run with it. We show it to the adults and bring it to Twitter, Reddit and 4chan. It takes off like crazy.
Like Bode, Doge is popular because it's a picture of an animal. There are of course other factors but that will always always always appeal to people. Though we say cats are the kings of the internet, dog people are chomping at the bit to participate and throw their weight behind their champion, any internet dog. It does not take a genius to understand what is going on in a Doge meme. Like Wikipedia says, it's a shiba Inu with broken english internal monologue superimposed on top of it. Once you get that, you’re in. The more online you are, the more you understand the future and newer versions of Doge.
The easier a meme is to understand the easier it is for it to be co-opted. We pretend the doge is impossible to understand and that we’ve fooled the adults. The adults who then get it think they’re in on the joke and getting one over on their less online coworkers. It spreads to advertising, then politics. Doge’s power of course is unstoppable and is now crypto currency. Everyone involved thinks they’re part of this grand inside joke.
But if everyone is in on the inside joke, no one is excluded from it. There is no “inside” anymore. A meme is at its best before anyone makes money from it. Before the Buzzfeed explainer is written. Doge’s continued success is a constant battle to keep the joke internal. The more people that find it, the more we have to change it. The longer it lives, the more lives it has. We change what Doge means and where it shows up to keep it alive.
We have an affection for Doge. That dog is nice to look at and reminds us of a bygone era. The pre-trump internet. We love to talk about when a meme is ruined but this one, at the beginning felt good to share. It felt harmless to let it spread. We let everyone have some. It was fine in the press, it was funny when politicans posted it. Now we have to live with the consequences, which on the internet, always seem to be crypto currency. We change Doge and keep it around because we just don't know how to quit that silly little dog.
Doge is now one of our stock characters. It can effortlessly be added to any existing meme and we understand who is. All memes with Doge in them are not necessarily doge memes, but it makes everything it’s in better, which speaks to its power as a meme. If memes were sitcoms Doge is the grand dame of theater who walks in to thunderous applause. She walks in and the whole show stops. She breaks character to wink at the audience. She’s past her prime but we love to see her glammed up and on tv again.
Excellent doge review, hoping for a pepe feature sometime in the future