Don’t know what internet meme is? Ever heard an “All your base are belong to us” joke? All your pr0n are belong to the Internets!, All your spams are belong to trash, insert stupid AYBABTU phrase.
Ever visited Something Awful, AlbinoBlackSheep, or The Best Damn Page in the Universe?
If you have answered yes to the above questions, then you have, at one point, been presented with internet meme.
Now, if you travel even further into the Internets, you’ll find that the self-proclaimed leet have come together and have unofficially decided what is tired (played out, overused, overparodied, overdone) internet meme and what isn’t.
Recently, Scarform was accused of being, “the reason people hate the internet,” and an “endless regurgitation of tired ideas and memes but with even less style or panache.”
Let’s harken back to the days of yore, more specifically - the days of AOL. Animated gifs were all the rage, and their subjects varied (in fact, some of the gifs you see today are rooted deeply in AOL history). For example, the gif you saw at the very beginning of this post is very AOL-like. In fact, I would almost take a guess that whoever uses it is in fact either a proclaimed AOL member, or a closet AOL member.
Let’s take a second look at what internet meme is and the fact that tired internet meme is popular content that has been overused (I’m not exactly sure how many sites a meme has to appear on before it’s tired.) Now let’s take the total number of webpages (Google alone indexes 4,285,199,774 currently, and that number is rising and then further broken down to individual sites by 100 unique pages gives us roughly 43 million sites (figures found here)). In 1998, there were between 60 and 160 million people who used the internet, with a suggested total of one billion by 2005. So that’s roughly 2,325 people for 1 webpage. Let’s call that number the “seen it” crowd (or the leet). That leaves 999,999,997,675 people for every 1 page that hasn’t seen what is on that page. These people will be called the “haven’t seen it” crowd. Now if the seen it crowd hasn’t seen what the haven’t seen it crowd has seen, and vice versa, then theoretically no meme could become “tired”. Not all meme is world-known, and not all world-known material is meme.
To consider something as a tired internet meme is to assume that the Internets actually has a thought process and that the fact it is played out comes from some personal opinion of the World Wide Web, which is just ridiculous.
On a side note, the aforementioned leet need to stop this self-righteous self-appointed God-like attitude they have come to adore in conjunction with placing themselves on a non-existent pedestal above the rest of society. Not only does it hinder any growth or progress w/r/t the sharing of information and knowledge, the move forward from ignorance to awareness and the inclusion of everyone in the Internets (regardless of what y’all may think, y’all do not own it, nor will you ever own it) but it just furthers the question of people who are new to the Internets of “Why even bother?”. Because the last time I checked, the world population is 6,667,606,448, which is a lot bigger than the population of the Internets.
Just because you can ban someone in a channel or on a website doesn’t mean you’re better than anybody else. It just means that you have special privs on a webpage. Deflate the egos a bit, re-word your definitions of internet meme, and try not to seem as stupid as you’re making yourself out to be (outside of your small circle of internet friends, that is).