Time for a lousy topic. Memes.
The subtitled pictures have been around for a very long time, but in the last few years they’ve emerged from the caves of 4chan to the mainstream media. Some people still remember cats and ‘cheezburgers’, but the main source of meme intake appears to be 9gag. In a relatively short amount of time, kids on messageboards geeking out and complaining about everything became trendsetters for something… peculiar.
The main thing a meme is, is transitory. It’s here one moment and gone another, sometimes even using current events as background for the purposed of sharing a pun or subjective criticism. But even if it happens to be entertaining or funny, it is only so the first time you see it, very rarely a little longer. Afterwards you simply ignore it as it offers no new information, no new joke, no new emotions. Just a reaction ‘I’ve seen that one already’. And so they disappear, sometimes getting dug up a few years later just to bring scorn to whoever dug it. However, since people in general are not very creative (sure there are some brighter crayons around) and thus the same memes or concepts of memes get perpetuated ad nauseam.
So a meme is something you enjoy for a mere moment, later it simply becomes obsolete thrash that the Internet is full of anyways. It comes in many shapes and sizes, and yet it is annoyingly repetitive in its nature and its content. They rarely offer new ideas, new points of view, they only have so many words to use. Quite frankly, it is more interesting to read ancient blog posts or listen to old videos of TEDtalks or at fora(.tv) than attempt to enjoy captioned pictures, one of a dozen maybe creating some kind of reaction, if you’re lucky.
Moreover, it might actually be more interesting to old (false) advertising than keep checking for new content.
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