Memes - what's their meme-ing?

Before I actually come up with something proper and interesting to analyze here I'll just stick to pondering about seemingly meaningless things I encounter in my life. So, bear with me for a bit more.

So, anyway. It's meme time.

...or do they?

By this point I'd assume majority of people are familiar with memes, but in case you aren't - let me quickly enlighten you: memes are ideas or things (pictures, videos, quotes etc,) that have gone viral online for reason or another. Majority of modern memes are pictures captioned with funny texts that people recognize as a reference to a popular source, as the Lord of the Rings meme above. However, memes can also have deeper and more philosophical meanings - a good breakdown of more philosophical memes can be found here. Memes come in different formats but what makes them special is that they spread like a virus online.

As a Tumblr user another notable trend of memes nowadays is reactions through text, images or gifs that people start using in certain contexts. So far year 2016 has seen the rise of many popular reaction memes like the History of Japan and Caveman Spongebob:

New reaction memes are born all the time and sometimes it's hard to pinpoint where exactly did the craze start this time. Since I'm not an active Reddit user (where memes apparently are hatched the fastest) I usually get introduced to memes as they appear on my Tumblr dashboard, all the way until I realize I've been seeing the same thing repeatedly so many times it must be something more than a single post.

Last week I witnessed the rise of yet another reaction that caught my attention and prompted me to stop and think about memes in the first place: gif featuring a woman entering the runway very enthusiastically.

Without any context for the gif I first passed it as a single reaction someone had created, but after seeing the same reaction multiple times posted by different people within ten minutes I concluded - so, this must be the new hip reaction meme for now. A brief research told me that the gif features Da'Vonne Rogers entering the brand new season of Big Brother U.S. where she starred already one year earlier. However, an unofficial meme database KnowYourMeme.com didn't have an entry on it so it made me wonder if it actually is considered as a meme, and where does the line of being a meme even go. Without KnowYourMeme's entry (which aren't necessarily 100% accurate anyway) I don't know when and where the use of this gif kicked off. All I know is that it has been on my dashboard for over a week now in posts that have nothing in common except the reaction. It's being used in contexts where a situation should be over but something unexpected appears, which the gif represents very animatedly.

So is it then a meme? Lets think about the definition of a meme again: an idea, behavior, style etc, that has gone viral online.

Well, has it? From my point of view it has. From a simple Tumblr search it also seems it has (when you search for "Da'Vonne" 5/10 first search results are already the gif in different contexts).

Going viral also includes the underlying implication of causing emotions, even negative, in people so has this gif done it?

Seems like it has.

It can still be debated if the gif has really gone viral when you look on a world wide scale, but who said that memes can't also be personal? If I feel that something has become a meme for me or my closest group of friends isn't it then as valid as a meme as any other? I'd say this is a question that still remains and that we can all ponder in our own minds.

Because memes are just as meme-ingful as we make them to be.

#memes #personal #mediadiary #pondering