Alright, so if you haven’t watched the short-lived internet sensation that is ‘Damn Daniel’, then do it.
I only bring up this specifically random piece of internet memege (is that a word?) because it truly highlights this ever growing sense of the sub culture that is the meme world, and the ways in which it’s already been exceeding the collective power of our more traditional cultural institutions.
Five years ago I basically had no idea about any of the trending or viral memes that made their ways across the inter-webs at dizzying speeds. Sure enough, though, I made my way from being an angsty middleschooler into a high schooler, and everything changed with a single click.
I eventually found my way onto Reddit during some dark, cloudy Washington day. And ever since then, I’ve been a little ruined when it comes to life.
But more importantly I’ve become so much more proficient and nuanced in the lingo and ways of internet culture. “Cool story bro” became a go-to retort for every moment in my life, and I knew what ‘Doge’ was without having my mind flit right away to a sort of Venetian Ruler from the Medieval Era. Becoming bilingual in internet and memeage talk began to aid me in my broader understanding of our society, and as a result I felt closer to it. For once, I understood literacy as it pertained to meme’s and the broader internet subculture.
I have to ask everyone this: what has everyone else’s experiences with this sort of literacy been? Do you still struggle to understand the new viral meme that speeds across daily, or would you say that you have a thorough understanding and proficiency in the internet subculture?
While I am not the first one to adopt these trends, I would say I am fairly literate in the language of the internet. However, I am not as active of a participant in it as many people my age. I usually find out about and adopt these words and saying from my friend, who is infectious in the way she speaks.
I just wrote a blog on #MemeHistory and how the under-rated meme has evolved into a very real possibility for teaching lessons that would typically take forever. A simple sentence and photograph can convey so much in so little time.
I think that there is a developing ‘voice’ or ‘style’ that is used in writing on the internet similar to “YouTuber Voice” and memes contribute to a part of it. Since content is so shareable, and a lot of people have access to it, it is easy for a large amount of people to adopt and expand on this style. It gets old fast and needs to be reinvented often. The second link about sarcasm online has a lot of great examples of it, but a lot of them are outdated already, and it’s only a year old!
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/12/the-linguistics-of-youtube-voice/418962/
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://the-toast.net/2015/06/22/a-linguist-explains-how-we-write-sarcasm-on-the-internet/