Because of Woke
I’ve been thinking a lot about the ideal form of the Internet and what it should be used for. What I would make illegal and what we need to keep around. Of course, we would keep the informational stuff and the connection. At the very least we need Wikipedia and Google Maps. I love Twitter and what it can produce when it’s working at its best. To me, “at its best” is a creative writing exercise or a parlor game. Building little jokes and playing around with sentence structure. That’s what the platform is for. We used to only have 140 characters, the best we could offer is a little joke. That’s always the best thing achievable. To try for anything else is foolish.
Shailene Secret Life
With Memorial Day Weekend behind us, it is officially summer. For many that means a return to youth and a nostalgic remembrance of summers past. For those of us born in the perfect year (1997), this nostalgia is about ABC Family originals. Last summer was all about Pretty Little Liars and this summer is all about Secret Life of The American Teenager. Both shows have a second life among those who remember the good old days but Secret Life’s is mostly ironic. Pretty Little Liars is an endlessly watchable teen mystery soap and Secret Life is cringey religious propaganda. However, nothing compares to the feeling of stopping to get a grande chocolate chip frappuccino on the way home from basketball camp and sucking it down while watching a whole block of ABC Family Original programming in the basement. Before we had the better fantasy of a sweet summer romance in The Summer I Turned Pretty, we were solving mysteries in the fantasy land of the pre-2008 financial crisis Main Line Pennsylvania and experiencing the hardships of teenage pregnancy in suburban Los Angeles.
Corn Plating
Challengers Mania has still taken hold but we’re running out of things to talk about. Now would be the perfect time to transpose our interests onto actual tennis, considering the French Open is happening as we speak. Instead, the Fans Who Post have taken to “Corn Plating”. Corn Plating comes from a tweet about Encanto, in which it is noted that the character is holding a plate of corn. I like this meme because it feels like something we added to our vocabulary because we needed it. As it was happening, it felt like a fable. We were instantly able to recognize the tweet as part of a larger pattern of behavior we didn’t have a name for. We needed to have that moment that was so extreme and simplistic, to name the phenomenon. It is not necessarily chic or elegant but we’re building a new language based on our shared history so we take what we can get.
Trump Tweets
I don’t understand what we’re doing here. It seems we’re just pasting our symbols together in the hopes they make something meaningful, but in their repetition, they lose all meaning. What does one fake deleted trump tweet mean when it has Lana Del Rey lyrics versus when it has Broken Social Scene lyrics? Some jokes are just funny the first time and the repetition isn’t helpful. We can try and create a meme out of sheer force but meaning and fun are lost when “our version” is a simple act of personalization and repetition.
Our Blessed/Their Barbarous
I like when a meme whittles down an idea that we talk about a lot. We no longer have to spend days discussing local pride or debating who does it better. We can simply whip out the meme and the conversation is over. Of course, the fun is seeing where we can apply the meme and how local our local pride can become. It is also helpful for context. I understand more about the Midwest now that there is a compare and contrast chart for various cities I always thought of as generally the same.
TikTok
What are we doing this summer? I'm hearing faint whispers of Euro summer but that's so 2023. I've also heard New England summer which I am a fan of but we've done it before. We have to have better ideas than Italy and Massachusetts as desirable summer locations, or idealistic landscapes to emulate in your current location. I think we're still ruminating on what to do and we won't find it until mid-July. Well look back on this time as if it was so obvious we won’t believe we didn't see it
Four Seasons Orlando Baby
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That's a wrap on Orlando Four Seasons Baby! The baby got to go to the hotel. The parents are leaning really hard toward the fancy baby aspect of the meme because that’s the aspect easiest to capitalize on. They can’t make the baby seem more aware or smarter than she is. Her wise beyond her years moment made her viral but it was unplanned luck. She got the spon and the Good Morning America interview and now we’re done. She either needs a new gimmick or to go back to her side of the internet. If she starts solving complex math problems or speaking in full sentences, we can revisit.
Aura
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The thing that makes teenage boys so inexplicable is that they are willing to pull from any source to create their lingo and culture. This is part of the reason they are so hard to market to. Nothing interests them, except everything. Now the coolest boys in school are talking about Auras and ways to maintain and increase your aura. What was once a new age belief used to sell overpriced polaroids to people at bars is now the phrase du jour of the coolest and most mysterious demographic.
UK General Election
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This meme combines my favorite things: A fun pop song, popular understanding of political events, and British Parliamentary Politics. The point of the information superhighway is to gain insight into other people’s lives. Other English-speaking countries always complain about how American-centric the internet is, especially when it comes to our elections. Now the British have their chance to absorb us all in their election cycle. They are at a disadvantage because, as an American, their system makes no sense to me. However, ignorance is no excuse and I will try to understand everything I can by July 4th, as long as the memes keep coming. If you have any insights into British elections please DM me!
The Spark
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Vintage Viral Video Alert! Nothing screams Obama Era Internet like a Viral Video with absolutely zero meme potential. When was the last time a video was really popular and all anyone took away from it was “Cool.”. No remixes, no reaction clips, No stand-out figures. We all watch the video, enjoy it, and walk away. It could be that we’ve finally learned etiquette and how to treat children on the internet, or it could just be that they're Irish and they haven’t learned how to do virality over there in the same way.
St. Louis mentioned 😭