Though he has yet to return to the subject in earnest since 1976’s The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins remains a specter over discussions of internet memes. Why do some memes last longer than others? Are they just funnier? Better? And if so, what makes a meme better? The answer lies not in traditional memetics, but in the study of jokes. Crying Jordan lasted years did Damn Daniel even last two weeks? Salt Bae took over social media in January 2017, but was quickly overshadowed by gifs of Drew Scanlon (“white guy blinking”) and rapper Conceited (“black guy duck face”), which lasted throughout the spring. Nor can it alone account for the varied lifespans amongst concurrent memes. But if overexposure is partially to blame for their demise, it certainly doesn’t tell the whole story. While internet memes categorically remain alive and well, individual memes do seem to die off faster than in Poole’s “good ol’ days.” They just don’t last like they used to: Compare the lifespans of say, Bad Luck Brian to Arthur’s clenched fist or confused Mr. Today, many of the internet’s favorite memes come from fringe or ostracized communities-often from black communities, for whom oddball humor has long been an art form. Contrary to what Poole and Baio implied, weird humor and memes are hardly the exclusive domain of Redditors or the mostly white tech bros who populated ROFLCon. Increased mobility and access across platforms and communities has brought to the surface some of the funniest and weirdest content the web has ever known. But is that really why memes die?Īnd in 2017, it’s clear that the doomsday crew vastly underestimated internet users’ creativity. Our overextended attention leads to an obvious explanation for meme death: We are so overstimulated that what brings us joy cannot even hold our focus for long. Our devices are “engineered to chip away at concentration” in what’s called the “attention economy,” writes Bianca Bosker in The Atlantic, and apps such as Twitter keep us anxious for the next big thing in news, pop culture, or memes. “Everybody knows” a generation raised on feeds and apps must have focus issues, and that assessment isn’t totally false. Even as a concept such as “average attention span” is not incredibly useful to psychologists who study attention (different tasks require different attention strategies), there’s a general assumption that this number is shrinking. While tracing the origin of any individual meme requires a separate trip down the rabbit hole, it makes sense to assume that memes die because people get tired of them. The recent “Disloyal Man Walking With His Girlfriend and Looking Amazed at Another Seductive Girl,” the title of the stock image shot by photographer Antonio Guillem, just made the rounds a few months ago.Īt a glance-even from a digital native-meme death seems like a much less mysterious phenomenon than meme birth. There was no bet involved.The constancy of this narrative may be observed in any number of internet memes in recent memory, from the incredibly short-lived ( Damn Daniel, Dat Boi, Salt Bae, queer Babadook) to the ones seemingly too perfect to ever perish like Harambe the gorilla and Crying Jordan. Also, one point of clarification for those listening to the ReelBlend podcast. If you’d like to see my “hold on to your butts” tattoo journey including Jackson and Sofia Boutella’s reactions to the finished product years later, check out the video below. I don’t think I ever told Zemeckis that, but that’s his line.”Īs though I didn’t already have enough respect for Robert Zemeckis now you’re telling me that the director of Back to the Future is also the source of inspiration for my favorite line of dialogue of all time? I’ll bet you can guess what I’ll be bringing up to Zemeckis if I’m ever lucky enough to cross paths with him for an interview again. And we sat down in the dailies, and as the lights were going down, Bob Zemeckis said, 'Hold onto your butts.' I happened to be working on the script at that time, and I was like, ‘Oh, I love that.’ I went back and I typed it into the script immediately, and then Sam Jackson said it. So we’d very quickly gone out to shoot a new ending for the movie, but there was little time before the movie came out, so we were in the dailies of the reshoots, and there was gonna be no opportunity to redo the reshoots. I was finishing Death Becomes Her when I was writing Jurassic Park, and we had an ending that was really disastrous at first from one of these horrible test screenings where they almost kill you. “One is a very simple line, it’s only four words, but I like the way it came to be in the movie in that people liked it.
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