3: Memes

Now that I think about it, I’ve never actually had to define what a meme was to anyone. Besides my parents (who are the only people I know that don’t have a Facebook account), most people already know what I mean when I mention, or talk about a meme. After reading Davison’s short scholarly article about internet memes, I’ll finally have a definition for anyone that asks me what memes are in the future. 

In "The Language of Internet Memes" by Patrick Davison, an internet meme is defined as a “piece of culture, typically a joke, which gains influence through online transmission” (122). Although I’ve never been really able to define what a meme was prior to today, the main thing that pops into my head when I think of the word “meme” are different recognizable pictures that have funny catchphrases edited on, or captioned with the picture. 

One meme that particularly stands out to me is the one of Julie Andrews when she played Maria Von Trapp in the original Sound of Music movie. The meme is the one of her on top of a hill/on an open green field with her arms outstretched as she smiles and looks like she has no worries in the world. 

Like always, it’s taken me almost two hours just to type this much of the blog post, so it’s no surprise that this particular meme is the one I thought of. I realized halfway through typing this that I didn’t really have to try so hard when choosing a meme to talk about. The right one will just pop up when the time was right. And it did. 

I feel like a lot of us in the class have related to this meme countless times in the past. This especially applies to me because of my horrible habit of procrastinating everything until the very last second. I remember having to do winter/spring break assignments in high school the day they were due because I hadn't touched them in the three to four weeks I was off from school. I've gotten better at managing my time since high school, but I still procrastinate from time to time (more like all the time still). I think about Julie Andrews as Maria Von Trapp whenever I don't do the work I'm supposed to be doing.  

I chose this meme because of how versatile it is. As you can see, this is the same exact meme with a different caption. I connect with it on a strong level, and I'm sure a lot of you do as well. It just shows how a picture without context can be turned into something that suddenly a lot of people can relate to. As a struggling college student slowly drowning in her own tears and massive student debt, I feel like it's getting easier for me to accept things when they don't turn out the way I want them to. And Julie Andrews as Maria Von Trapp just embodies how I feel on the inside whenever that bad thing happens. I want to show that everything's okay on the outside and that I'm pretty good at this thing called life, but on the inside everything's actually gone to sh** and nothing is fine. 

I couldn't really find when this meme started getting used or how it came about, so I will briefly compare it to the Advice Dog that Davison mentions in his article (127). Like the Advice Dog meme, this Sound of Music meme has a center image, with a first line and a second line that contains the punch line of the joke. This image macro theme fits in to the practice of adding different text to a common image. 

If a person has never seen the Sound of Music meme, the first line "Look at all..." sets the person up for anticipating something, and the second line (usually something witty and a little sad, really) delivers the punch line when the reader realizes that Maria Von Trapp doesn't really have anything around her. So when the reader sees "Look at all the money I have" and laughs to him/herself, they realize that they probably don't have money too, and that's the reason they chuckled to him/herself when they saw a meme of Julie Andrews from 1965. We may be laughing at first, but we all know that we're secretly crying on the inside.


- Julianna Duque