Memes: or How I learned to Stop S***posting and Love the Cancer

Memes, you know em, I know em, your minions loving grandmother knows em. Memes are a common source of entertainment in society, and we can see memes naturally grow through acts of embarrassment, artistry, pictures, pets, and more. They also could be forced and well....they aren't really good, until they become ironic memes making fun of those forced memes, and there are a couple...

When it comes to a lot of memes though, do you know that your lolcats, green text stories, motivational posters, arthur pics, and so so many more probably spawned from a site you never checked before? Boards such as somethingawful or 4chan really are the spawn pits for a lot of the older memes that generated the internet.

This? 4chan Caturdays

WHOA WHOA WHOA 4CHAN!? THAT PLACE, WITH ALL THE TROLLS WHO POST NOTHING BUT NAZI STUFF? Look okay yes, 4chan is different but we aren't all bad people, and a lot of great boards which really don't connect with the /pol/ board there do thrive, just like a lot of subreddits don't interact with theredpill... A lot of memes we know are rather lighthearted (or at the most juvenile) and don't amount to a lot of controversy. I myself am a chronic memer (and my SO truly truly hates me for it), but I am not a hateful person. I would argue as of late, memes have gotten a bad rap due to recent trends, but as long as you block the right people, and stay on the safe parts of the net (and they are obviously safe parts), you should be fine not seein...oh..oh yeah that one.

Dammit

The Pepe meme was created on the Robot 9000 board (/r9k) on 4chan, and it was a rather lighthearted meme, it was just a collection of stupid frog pictures which artists changed and made the meme of "rare pepe" or the collection of pepe memes (they were all rare pepes). Just like all great memes, it spread and other boards championed it.

It was a good time collecting those Pepes(I still have my folder of them in case I decided to post on 4chan every now and then for "keks"(oh god and that is another thing that got co-opted)). 

Just like all good things (PATTERN IN THE LAST 2 POSTS), they can turn bad very very fast. Memes get old, once the community catches on, corporate takes over, and makes them over-used and excuse my language shitty. Once the mainstream audience catches on, well it sucks to us, it was OUR joke, OUR meme, and we don't like seeing these things used against us....and one way to "save" a meme is to make it unusable for the mainstream....hence where we are today with Pepe. 

In all accounts, it worked, Pepe has been saved for us on the /b/oard for continued collection, it just has that negative connotation of being a white supremacist icon. Wait what.

Memes!..and how I feel

The folks over at the politically incorrect board /pol/ decided to champion pepe and its many uses as a blank slate for "artistry" as a symbol of hate. Those who have not seen the media, or used any web 2.0 application may have been saved from seeing this at all, but I can take a wild stab that if you are reading this article, you probably saw this iteration of Pepe at least once. What /pol/ did was take the meme away from the general audience and use it for this one thing. And pepe for all intents and purposes IS NOT A SYMBOL OF HATE. The ADL cements this as

 "However, because so many Pepe the Frog memes are not bigoted in nature, it is important to examine use of the meme only in context. The mere fact of posting a Pepe meme does not mean that someone is racist or white supremacist. However, if the meme itself is racist or anti-Semitic in nature, or if it appears in a context containing bigoted or offensive language or symbols, then it may have been used for hateful purposes."


The people of /pol/ with the good graces of specific medias promoting the image as hateful or supportive (and politicians from both sides of the aisle depending on its usage...looking at you Hillary and Trump). Did something that you would not expect from a board that thrives in the anonymous freedom hate speech, gain followers. Memes such as Pepe, or specific acts that gain notable attention bring eyes to these pages. What originally was a rather small page, now has even more viewers as some outlets misrepresent exactly what board Pepe originated from. Sometimes these boards may be doing something in the act of good (/b/ has used resources to catch killers and animal abusers for instance)...or media articles misrepresent(the whole collective is a hacker known as 4chan) or accurately state specific boards(that is rare) them for bad, thus attracting more users or lurkers  (This article being an example of media with 4chan at least). This is just one example, the names of r/redpill and others have been spread as well and just as good news is great, bad news is also great for business.

So...Pepe, good or bad? well it depends on where how you use it. In today's society, I probably won't post Pepe memes on facebook or else I'll get the wrath of being called a racist, but that is how memes can be taken and changed to whatever we feel like (yes even the cat memes....). We as users of the web, and produsers of web 2.0 must know when to embrace or ignore specific changes to content and how to react when we see it from other users who may not be "in the loop" of it's cultural designation (but even then, the internet IS the internet and people mostly do what they want due to the freedom of it). A tolerable and loving community is great with nothing but "good memes" but there always will be something dark in each and every one, it just depends on how we as the community interact with those who use it for darker purposes, and how we really should not give them the attention they crave, it will only make us worse for wear in the end. Drama is always enticing, but sometimes it isn't worth it.

Sources:

Anti Defamation League. (2017). Pepe The Frog. Retrieved from Anti Defamation League: https://www.adl.org/education/references/hate-symbols/pepe-the-frog