The time a stranger at a bus stop critiqued my meme interpretation

I was waiting for the 4 bus in Portland last week and showed this guy a meme about 'distracted boyfriend' but with a twist. He said I was reading it wrong because the original format was about attention, not irony. Now I see his point but part of me thinks memes evolve however people want. Which side do you lean on - strict format meanings or do memes just mean whatever the poster wants?

3 comments

3 Comments

eric72320d ago

You kind of made me reconsider my whole stance on this. I used to be pretty strict about meme formats having set meanings, but seeing how the dude at the bus stop was technically right yet the joke still landed shows it's more flexible than I thought. Now I lean toward letting people use memes however they want, because the whole point is sharing something funny that connects with others.

gracewebb21d ago

Oh man, this reminds me of something that happened to my friend Sarah in Seattle. She posted a meme that was supposed to be about cats but she used it to make a point about her annoying landlord, and some guy in the comments totally lectured her on how the format was originally about "priorities" and she was using it wrong. She got all defensive at first but then she realized he had a point about the original intention, BUT honestly the way she used it still got her point across and people liked it. Memes are like inside jokes that evolve the MORE people use them, so I think anyone can put their own twist on it as long as the core idea still kinda works.

hunt.quinn21d ago

Yeah the "core idea still kinda works" thing is really key... I feel like people get way too caught up in whether you're using a meme "correctly" but memes aren't like math formulas. They're more like jokes that get retold and changed by everyone who hears them. Like the whole "distracted boyfriend" meme started as a specific thing about checking out other people but now people use it for everything from food preferences to political opinions and it still works because the basic idea of "looking at something else instead of what you're supposed to focus on" is what matters. Your friend Sarah probably took the cat meme's structure and applied it to her landlord situation which is totally fair game. The original creator of a meme doesn't get to decide how it evolves or what it means to other people... that's kind of the whole point of internet culture. If everyone followed the "original intention" strictly we'd still be using lolcats and rickrolls exclusively.