For the most part, memes are meant to be humorous but can sometimes have hidden message underneath that demonstrate a more serious or political issue. You can also make your own meme with only a few clicks. You then have the power to make it either a pure comedic stance or you could use it for things with more of a purpose like a politic standpoint. It is all up to the creator the way they want to display the information. The division between producer and audience is starting to break apart. Everyone has an opportunity to participate in the creation process so the playing fields have leveled out. The traditional top-down corporate branding and control is diminishing.

To close things out.. I made my own meme…

So it was a welcome relief to find myself back in the classroom last week, despite not having a lecture, because once again I had people around me who were studying what I am and enjoy talking about it. Our tutor has to struggle every week as we tend to monopolise conversation. It’s always on topic, of course, but it would seriously surprise me if the other classrooms were quite so active as our own. Just having Rehana in the room (http://unwritingrehana.wordpress.com/) is enough to give the rest of us courage to open our mouths. She has a talent of starting us all up and getting us talking, and not just a brief overview of the topic at hand. Before we know it, we’re sharing stories of our childhood to back up arguments were putting forward over Carl Jung’s theories.

This got me thinking (again) and something struck me as the most important for my creativity out of all of the factors in my life. Just let me outline it all briefly before I nail it to the wall.

It’s amazing what our brains can do with a little encouragement. My art has improved tenfold and I’m contemplating framing and hanging a few pieces. My mind has matured in a way that I could never have predicted. And this is all down to those people who have seen a little and want to see more, heard a little and want to know more.

I find myself wishing to improve and, strangely for me, wanting to put in the effort to improve. I actually enjoy the learning experience, not only the spoils of my hard work. Don’t get me wrong, I’m flaunting my favourite art pieces no end, but I’m dying to master another aspect of my art, one that I haven’t overcome just yet. I think this little mountain-sized bump in the road will be my creative project.

I’m slowly getting to my point, I promise.

There’s also the amazing discovery of the desire for random research. Finding something that piques my interest, not just in the standard sense, but in the creative and psychological sense. I went out and bought The Hunger Games and read it. Twice. I look forward to classroom discussions/debates every Wednesday afternoon, because I have people who actually want to know what I think and why. I read through the class readings twice, if I can, and then do a little more research JUST to understand what it is that I’m reading. Sometimes it’s not as easy as ‘oh, is that so? Ok, I get that.’ You need to look deeper, beyond the minor snippet that we’ve been given.

Still getting there, hold on.

But I think the best, out of all of this, is the support network. Like I said before, there are my classmates. Noticeably Rehana and Matt, both of whom are such interesting people that I could listen to them for days. My other classmates who all contribute in their own way. My patient work mates who will (mostly) ask me how Uni is going and are rewarded with a mini lecture on whatever have taken over my mind in that particular time (most of whom are left bemused as to how they ended up listening to whatever I’m energetically babbling about in the first place). My friends, whenever I get a chance to see them. My family, just as rare an occurrence who go into raptures over the work I’ve done and constantly tell my how proud my artist great-grandmother would have been. And there’s my partner, who deflects my bad moods when understanding of a subject evades me, punctuates my study time with ‘I wanna be a Jedi!’, makes sure I eat, sleep, focus, takes the computer off of me and insists I take a break and just generally is there for me.

The discovery, which isn’t much of one, admittedly, is that my creativity would have flopped had I not had such a beautiful support network. Without the encouragement and the eagerness of those around me to see what I can do, I doubt I would have this drive to better myself. So, through this delightful internet machine, I would like to pass this message onto my loved ones, tell them that I’ve gotten so far because of them and declare that there is more still to come, if you keep the faith in me going:

References:

Success Kid [Image]. (n.d). Retreived on April 22, 2012 from http://chanceskateboards.ca/successKid.jpg

The other day I came to a realization. There is a massive amount of internet memes.

Don’t ask me why this phenomenon decided to hit me only a few days ago because I have absolutely no clue. Maybe it’s because I thought they were annoying and ridiculous at first. Maybe it was the fact that my Facebook newsfeed got trampled with memes. Or maybe it’s because I find most of them to be absolutely hilarious and mildly awesome.

At any rate, I decided to look up some information about what they are, how they got started and how they started trending. First, you should know how to pronounce it (MEEM). And in the simplest sense, they are photos edited with funny captions that appeals to the traits of the character in the photo. Second, memes have actually been around for a while. Memes first became popular posts to reblog on Tumblr and are now coming to larger social media sites like Facebook. And due to the fact that it’s easy to generate a meme, they can easily go viral – especially using university memes.

Another interesting observation I made while searching about memes was that several advertisers have caught on to the meme phenomenon and have used them to advertise their products. Talk about quick, easy and cheap advertising – and some memes use spelling errors, which means less editing for them (this could be a Success Kid meme!).

Other popular internet memes  include LOLcats, Philosoraptor and Y U No Guy

This week’s directive: “Social”

Inspired by the picture captioning exercise Becky had us do last class, I decided to make Kleenex memes.  These are all popular memes seen on social networking sites like Facebook, Tumblr, Reddit, and 4chan.  I created these memes on Meme Generator (link:
http://memegenerator.net/
), adding the captions.  Memes are a big part of social networking, and are also just social in nature.  Any college kid that uses the internet (which is, obviously, all of us) will recognize these memes.  That’s what I really like about this post – among people my age in America, this is a kind of universally understood phenomenon.  I’ve seen so many of these memes with so many different captions, I was excited to try my hand at Kleenex memes.

By far the worst offender here is Virgin Media’s new campaign by 18 Feet & Rising (sorry BBH, someone in the comments corrected me!), using the ‘Success Kid’ photo:

(Image courtesy of Gene Hunt)

Oh and here’s O2 using the very same image on their Facebook page:

Not. Cool.

Another recent offender – Ritz Crackers:

(Apologies for my craptastic smartphone photography – that says
“The wheels on the bus go NOM NOM NOM”)

So how does this happen?

It goes like this. Mr Person works in the creative department of an ad agency, and is a big internet geek. He knows about and likes memes, and rarely sees anything in mainstream culture that reflects them well (articles about planking in the Telegraph six months after it died do not count). So when he’s creating concepts for whatever brand he happens to be working on, he thinks “Wouldn’t it be cool if they used X meme? It fits here” and puts it in his idea.

But what he forgets is this: when someone walks past that ad, they don’t see the cool creative person who came up with it. They see a big, hairy Virgin Media logo and a sales message. And those things together just don’t work.

Plus, with the amount of time it takes to make an ad, it’s been months since that meme was relevant, resulting in even more of a late-to-the-party vibe.

Memes come from of a mindset of having fun and creating things for the sake of it. Ads come from a mindset of needing a vehicle for a sales message. And when the latter uses the former, it pollutes that innocent fun with self-interest, taking something that had group ownership and using it for their own ends.

And what happens when your client says “OK, the Success Kid ad was a huge hit, we want to make him a brand spokesperson”? You can’t, because Success Kid is no longer a toddler but a school-age child, and you only ever had one photo of him. You didn’t even do a shoot that you can take leftover images from.

This sort of thing is fucking lazy, and a big risk. Piggybacking on existing social currency means the idea didn’t originate with the brand/their agency and therefore isn’t controllable or ownable. This is how we ended up with two competing businesses using the exact same image. Where’s the branding? Slapping a logo onto something you found on the internet doesn’t make it yours, especially when it’s been around for years and has its own preconceptions.

Preconceptions like the fact that memes are made to be mixed and re-mixed. Which means thousands of versions of Success Kid  already exist, many of them with captions that Virgin Media probably wouldn’t want associated with their brand:

And brilliantly, that happens even when you stick the meme on a billboard:

Serves them right, to be honest.

]]> http://savingupforkorea.wordpress.com/2012/04/03/k-talk-tuesdays-daebak-fighting-and-other-korean-expressions-part-1/ Mon, 02 Apr 2012 14:00:53 +0000 jasminebiala http://savingupforkorea.wordpress.com/2012/04/03/k-talk-tuesdays-daebak-fighting-and-other-korean-expressions-part-1/ 안녕 하세요~! I hope you guys haven’t missed me too much!

This week I’m going to be making you sound just that little bit more authentically Korean with some common expressions and idioms used by Native Speakers! If you’re a K-drama buff (like myself) you may have heard a couple of these words before! You may already know some words such as Annyeong Haseyo – 안녕 하세요 (Hello) , and Kamsahamnida – 감사함니다 (Thank you) – But here are a couple more words to add to your Korean vocab.

DAEBAK – 대박 – Jackpot!

This expression is often used when something awesome has happened or if something impresses you. It’s like a parallel word for the English expressions “Awesome!”, “Cool!” or “Hell yeah!”. Basically, Daebak is a word of exclamation!

So how do you use it?:

“I got a high distinction for my assignment! DAEBAK!” (In all honesty, I only scraped by with a low pass)
“The Wonder Girls just won a Nickelodeon Kids Choice Award! DAEBAK!” (They didn’t really, but I wish they did)

FIGHTING! – 화이팅~!

A battle cry! You all know this one! It’s so overused and every single drama (that I’ve ever watched) has incorporated it in some way. Basically, other than the fact that it’s a sort of battle cry, it’s a term used to encourage someone and to get them to do the best they can. It’s often (or always) accompanied with a little fist pump like this :3

Fighting~!

You go, success kid! :’) Anyway, here’s how you’d use it:

“We’re going to win this football match tonight! FIGHTING!”
“I know you can get through this! FIGHTING!”

I should also point out that Koreans pronounce this word as “hwaiting” as it is spelled that way phonetically in hangeul (화이팅!)

OMO – 오모 / AIGOO – 아이구 – Oh My Goodness!

OMO! Omo and Aigoo both basically have the same meaning as the English expression “Oh My Gosh!” Once again, I’m sure the drama buffs already use “omo” a lot. Although the words have the same meaning, they sort of have different connotations (I think). I’m not entirely sure but I think Aigoo is more interchangeable than Omo. Aigoo changes meaning depending on the context, for example, you’d use Aigoo if you spilt boiling water on yourself, or if you’re exasperated, or sympathising with somebody. Omo has more of a positive connotation to it. It’s pretty much like saying OMG.

“Aigoo, that’s no good! You poor thing.”
“OMO! Lee Sin and Gyu Won just kissed!! Omo, Omo, Omo!!! 

SNSD’s Jessica – “Aigoo! Stress!!”

JEONGMAL – 정말/ JINJJA – 진짜 – Really??

Like Aigoo and Omo, Jeongmal and Jinjja both mean the same thing: “Really”. It can be used as a statement or a question depending on how you say the word. If you were to ask the question “Really?” you’d raise the end of the word, otherwise you’d just say it straight. Basically, these words can be used as sentences all on their own. Besides that, here are some examples of how you’d use it in sentences taken from my little bible: “Korean For Dummies”.

“Jinjja gyosunimkkeseo sukjega eopdago hasyeoseoyo!”
“진짜 교수님께서 숰제가 엎다고 핫여서요!”
” Really, the professor said there was no homework!”

“Jeongmal oneuldo yageunieyo?”
“정말 오늘도 야근이에요?”
“Really? I’m working overtime today?”

Another way to say “really” is the word cham 참  but it is closer to the english word “sure”.
(Btw, I’m not sure if the hangul for those last two sentences are right, so please correct me if I’m wrong.)

Omo! Jinjja, Bom?

Anyway, have fun using these words guys! I’ve almost resurfaced from under all my assignments (Aigoo! Stress!) and I’ll be updating the blog often again. Give me about two weeks.

I’ll give you guys more words to use next week! Fighting!

안녕!