Category Archives: Digital

Unimpressed Lizard

Nationality: American/English
Age: 24
Occupation: Marketing
Residence: Boston
Performance Date: 4/20/16
Primary Language: English

 

The unimpressed lizard is a meme that depicts a hand holding a lizard the size of a finger. This lizard’s careless facial expression lead it to become one of the internets most sought after memes in 2014 – starting on the website Reddit. Like most memes, the people gave it a sense of variation by cutting out the head and placing it on human bodies in various contexts (see photos). The informant is an avid Redditor and it is he who showed this piece for the first time. He states that it isn’t connected to any sub-culture beyond those who use memes It is used by many as a way to express their lack of care or coolness towards something.

When it comes to memes there seems to be this gravitation towards almost exagerated expressions or if mild in nature are associated with some absurd context, such as the Unimpressed Lizard. In fact the expression of being unimpressed is a frequent thematic in meme expressions.

The informant states what he finds so appealing is as mentioned, the absurd association of a lizard acting unimpress. It is the human like nature applied to such a small and insignificant creature who is emulating human nature. Furthermore the contexts that people put this lizard in adds greater value he believes.: “What’s better than an unimpressed lizard in crude form? An unimpressed lizard in sponge bob pajamas.” Each scenario the lizard has been put in is more absurd than the next.

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North Eastern/Western Mix Up

Nationality: American/English
Age: 24
Occupation: Marketing
Residence: Boston
Performance Date: 4/20/16
Primary Language: English

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Insight from Informant:

“For those who live on the west coast and aren’t too educated in mid-western and eastern schools, people tend to assume North Western (NW) and North Eastern (NE) are one in the same and are located in Chicago, when in fact only North Western is located in Chicago and North Eastern is located in Boston. This has aggravated attendees of NE for quite some time. So much so that a meme had spawned to share with those who make the mistake of blending the two.

The meme was created by a senior eight or so years ago and started to spread across various forms of NE social media groups. The informant discovered it during his first year of school at NE after being invited to a private school Facebook group.

The informant thinks the meme is cheesy, but the message resonates enough to make it worthwhile. He’s considering altering the design and re-sharing it.

 

My Thoughts:

Having been to NE, i’ve experienced first hand the attitudes towards this matter so I can certainly appreciate it. For those who are unfamiliar with the school don’t know that NE is a great school but it has always been considered a lessor school to NW, at least in terms of the public eye. Which is certainly part of why people get so furious, when they have to correct the person, they have to automatically put themselves in the inferior boat. This meme functions as sort of a catharsis for those who feel the pain.

It terms of the aesthetics of the meme, I am in agreement with the informant in that the choice of face doesn’t lend to the comedic copy. Humor is of course subjective, but I would certainly like to see a new iteration.

“What People Think I Do / What I Really Do” – Public Relations Edition

Nationality: American
Age: 32
Occupation: Public Relations
Residence: 4/05/16
Performance Date: English

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Context (Informant):

Being in PR there’s a lot of misconception about what the job entails. As the meme shows, the different types of people in your life perceive it differently. There are many different iterations of the “What People Think I Do / What I Really Do”, including various PR versions, but this one sums it up the best. A lot of new publicists or those climbing up the ladder within a PR firm post this image on there Twitter or Facebook to poke at those who constantly question or mix up the understanding of the job.

Thoughts (My own):

The “What People Think I Do / What I Really Do” meme started circulating in 2012 when someone posted one about being a science student. Since then it has been adapted for dozens of jobs. A trend with all of them is the friends perception is almost always the most glamorous, followed by the parents. Knowing the informant and what her job entails, at the end of the day it really can be seen from any of these perspectives. But the degree to which one of these perspectives dominates is dependent on your position and level of experience. Nonetheless is humorous and often very telling of a job, which is why I think this meme has the appeal that it does.

 

And his name is John Cena

Nationality: N/A
Age: N/A
Occupation: N/A
Residence: N/A
Performance Date: N/A

Background

John Cena is a well-known WWE wrestler and Hollywood actor. In 2012, a prank call aired on a local radio station (“Z morning Zoo”) where the DJs repeatedly played a sound clip advertising John Cena’s wrestling career to a wife who was fed up with her husband’s obsession with WWE wrestling. Two years later (2014), the channel “RuinCommentsOfficial” uploaded a recording of the prank call to YouTube which gained over 20 million views. Another year after that (2015), the sound clip from the video resurfaced as a popular meme on on Vine, an internet platform where users can post 6 second video clips. Several other websites, such as Reddit and Tumblr, also contributed to this trend. Since then, hundreds of thousands of versions of the John Cena clip have appeared across the internet.

Context

The sound clip from the radio station prank call and a video of John Cena will pop up in the middle of a video which was seemingly about something unrelated to John Cena and WWE wrestling. There is usually no connection between the interrupted video and John Cena. Occasionally, the John Cena audio clip is mixed with a preexisting video meme.

Text

The prank call video that the meme originated from:

A compilation of John Cena vine:

Thoughts

Far more people participated in the spreading of the John Cena meme than actually watch WWE wrestling or are fans of John Cena, so there was a reason people were drawn to this folklore than actually had a personal investment in the subject matter. However, because of the way the meme originated, internet users were able to adapt the collective internet “inside joke” of the John Cena audio clip to fit into any other type of video that may interest them. Therefore, every person who came across the John Cena meme could contribute their own take on the joke and no one needed to even know who John Cena really was to join in on the laughter feel connected to the internet community.

I’m honestly feeling so attacked right now

Nationality: N/A
Age: N/A
Occupation: N/A
Residence: N/A
Performance Date: N/A

Background

Tumblr user chardonnaymami posted a transcript of a conversation about virgin mai tias that included the phrase “I came out to have a good time and I’m honestly feeling so attacked right now.” Over the next several weeks, the phrase was used in thousands of copy posts, molding to fit any number of situations. It reaches a point where people began to parody the phrase often enough that it would be impossible to understand some jokes if you didn’t have the background knowledge to recognize the original phrase.

Context

This meme was spread mostly on the popular blogging website Tumblr. It would mainly be used after some sort of criticism to sarcastically complain about being criticized or challenged.

Text

Original Post

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Examples of the spread of the phrase

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Self-aware meme

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Thoughts

This piece of internet folklore probably caught on so quickly because it addresses a problem that many people face on the internet: trolls and incessant criticism. By enacting this popularly used phrase, users could playfully deal with situations that are normally uncomfortable and hard to deal with. Furthermore, once the meme reached a certain level of popularity, it became almost necessary to post some form of the phrase to establish one’s self as a real part of the community. If you didn’t get the joke, it meant you clearly hadn’t been paying very close attention.