Teachers learn about memes, share reactions
May 22, 2018
Memes have been popular and cultural ideas that have been passed from one individual to another. They have been surfacing not only in Stillwater, but all throughout social media as well.
We see memes on Snapchat, Instagram and on television. The majority of modern memes are captioned photos that are intended to be funny, often as a way to publicly ridicule human behavior.
Memes has created a new social culture. Recently, there have been some viral memes that have broken the internet, like the yodeling kid in Walmart meme, Spongebob and Tide Pod memes.
Over the years they have been becoming more popular and interactive with social media users. The app iFunny introduced memes to a younger audience. Internet memes are just the adjusted form of sharing a short message or idea.
“There are a lot of memes that aren’t always used as much, like the girl setting things on fire and the panda one. I try to steer away from the political ones,” English teacher Andrew Smith said.
“I think memes have definitely become a thing that has a form that people know, and people know if you’re using them right or wrong,” Smith added.
Smith explained how students and social communities express memes and why they are being used more commonly. He explained that he encountered it as a linguistic term, however, about five or six years ago, he encountered it in picture form when it became more well known.
“I made a joke about Tide Pods yesterday and apparently it did not go very well. I thought it was funny until yesterday when my students told me that people were eating them for suicide. So I asked my boys about that, I just thought it was funny,” biology teacher Stacy Bartlett said.
Bartlett explained that she knew the Tide Pod meme. Bartlett thought it was funny until she heard that people were using them for reasons of suicide. There are still some rumors about this but there is no specified evidence that this has actually happened yet.
“You have to remember that I teach coding too and computer programming. Those are classes with a whole bunch of nerds. I hear a lot of bad and outdated memes too, like the ‘I Play Pokemon’ meme,” Bartlett explained.
Before memes were mainstream, they were associated with a lot with students who were in computer or tech classes because they are using the internet more than any other student, which gives them the advantage to create and share these ideas, especially the old classic ones.
“I just heard the other day that there’s a lot of people who have aspirations. Like, what they want to be in life is a Youtube star,” biology teacher Stacy Brown said.
Brown says that memes represent people who want to be famous. Although this seems true, most people create the idea by a funny picture or video that happens to be created for views. The process of creating memes is not too difficult. There are all kind of meme generator websites out there, but to gain more control of what someone puts out there, they will be more than likely use graphics software.
Internet memes are phenomenons that probably will not disappear anytime soon. They are a connection between people who share the same interests. It is easy to make a meme, and it is easy to share them. Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest or even blogging platforms like WordPress have a huge community where internet memes became fundamental. People love it if they have something in common. People love to laugh about something together, and that is main the reason for popular memes.
