Seriously, meme culture is ever evolving and is the primary way us youths in South Africa communicate things online. Look at how poor Pepe the Frog was co-opted. The way you can add your opinion or your politic to a viral cultural symbol is a cool way of subverting things. But what you’re saying about reworking and remixing is actually a really cool part about memes. TM: Honestly, I just want to go around shouting that The Pots meme is anti-black. In a sense doe, I like how people, like, rework and remix memes to be more aligned with, like, their own thoughts n opinions. TM: Lmao, I feel triggered, because I have no bae. YA: Yeah, n people used the image outta its original meaning to voice alotta other things. Laughing at other people is so much easier to do when all you need to do is click “Publish”. So, like The Pots meme: Are we laughing at the fact the person couldn’t make the pots and didn’t communicate this fact (their dodgy work ethic) or are we laughing at their accent or use of English? I think The Pots went viral because of a very sinister, classist motive.
TM: Yeah, like, I think a lot of mainstream humour revolves around punching down at people and, like, specifically making fun of people? So it makes sense how this would translate on to the internet - one of the most unsafe spaces if you’re an “other”. YA: Even times when we’re laughing at The Pots (which has been reworked into ‘Where is your bae?’) … what are we laughing at? I’m 100% sure some people laugh at the so-called improper English use there. TM: Like, memes can be violent AF and this humour element that’s so NB to memes almost seems like a cloak for darker stuff? Like, more often I see memes poking “fun” at women’s clothes and plain malicious shit about differently abled/disabled folks. But what u n I find funny (memes about doggos in precarious situations or about laughing at your trauma as a way of coping and scary spongebob) is not what everyone finds funny. There’s always an undercurrent of humour doe. Lmao, even your selfie could be used as a meme if it went viral. So think of the phrase “That escalated very quickly’’, or even the white blinking man GIF. I think, though, we’ve come to understand a meme as any image that either goes viral or even any image that is attached to a funny caption on social media.
In, like, the context of the internet, it’s any image, GIF, video or phrase that people use. Tiger Maremela: A meme is any viral cultural idea or symbol that people share between each other.
Black Twitter aka black people who use Twitter have made it popular 2 me … but what exactly is a meme? Youlendree Appasamy: So, bbz - memes are these things we seem to use a lot online.