hi i’m bethan. i’ve had internet since about 1991 and it was very formative of who I am. I love memes and meme culture and the way it intermeshes with pop culture. I currently run a few facebook groups that are meme-adjacent, the biggest one being a really cool community of about 800 people. I am an aspiring youtuber working on a show that will focus on deep dives, meme lore and internet history. I’m currently working on my first episode discussing the history of cuteness in horror video games and how it’s turned from a fun juxtaposition in games for adults to making games specifically designed to be marketed to kids (merch, kids youtubers etc)
I am a rich and famous meme lord and I make dumb oc. I also run a small meme insta @bethanmemeface. I like to farm memes from tumblr, facebook, twitter, instagram, and a couple meme discords I’m in
here’s the most recent OC I made about my giant baby (i’m currently re obsessed with the sue Sylvester toxic environment meme)
Hey everyone,
I'm Sam, and I will be starting my Ph.D. in Philosophy at the University of Arizona this fall. I'm a bit unusual here in that my theoretical work has little to do with memes, but I nonetheless enjoy memes to a large degree. One thing that separates me from a lot of people here is that I generally don't keep with the ebb and flow of memes on Facebook. Rather, I create and consume them mainly on Twitter and YouTube, where there are structural and algorithmic incentives to be short and pithy.
Welcome, Tim! It goes without saying that this is an important and interesting topic, and I would be delighted to discuss how it connects up with your present degree and the politics specific to the regions you're studying. Also, TikTok's algorithm is amazing and impressive. I recommend looking at it to anyone currently studying memes!
Hello Bethan! I love the sound of this so much, and can't wait to see what you make! Please post about it in the Creativity subforum! I'm interested in making some videos for YouTube as well, but there's so much involved in making video content that I have no familiarity with.
It's really cool to hear about how many different sources you have for your memes. That's the way to do it!
Hi Sam, welcome! It's good to have you here. What's your PhD topic? I also study philosophy and would love to chat more about it. Also, I always mean to use Twitter and YouTube more but it hasn't clicked for me the same way that Facebook, Discord, or TikTok have. It would be great to hear about them some more from a subculturally aware perspective.
My name is Mateus! I live in Sydney, Australia, and I'm particularly interested in how platforms and technology both create and are created by cultures. I studied creative writing, and I also write sci fi with a similar scope. I used to repair photocopiers (and briefly ran a meme page about it until I realised I can't post pictures of the proprietary guts of laser printers on the internet). Now I'm in general tech support for a media company.
I've been around the TPM and LLM communities for years and my favourite memes are ones that connect very disparate ideas in deceptively simple ways. I tell myself this this is 'Deleuzian' but have never enough of him to actually know if this is the case.
Other hobbies include making instrumental electronic prog metal, puddle reflection photography, videogames and martial arts!
The /tpmg/ facebook group got me into analysing memes and meme trends, and I remained curious about that. I have done various things relating to memes – see all of them here – but the most famous/relevant one is probably my blog post chronicling the 2021 rage comic meme wave. I am into philosophy, and “philosophy memes” really are their own scene, although it used to be much better. I still check memes mainly on Facebook right now.
Welcome, Mateus. It's just so good to have you here. I think all of your creative interests are a good fit to post in the Creativity subforum; we also had a thread about hyperlocal memes, and @Lunchbox also likes making hyper-specific memes!
Welcome, Thiago! Please share the articles you wrote in the Research subforum. They're really good stuff, meticulously researched and presented. We're currently trying out a "one thread per article" approach which lets each thread act like a reading group. It will be fun to discuss your articles there.
Hi everyone, I’m Tom. I run Cambridge Department of Memes on facebook, but have been in the tpmg community for years. I’m not as academic about memes, but am always hunting for new meme trends as part of my admin duties. I mostly use fb, but discord has become my preferred meme stream lately. Excited to discuss memes with y’all.
It will be exciting to have intellectually-minded memepage admins discuss memes together in a forum setting, especially its "phenomenology" (i.e. how it feels to meme).
my background is in philosophy. mostly topics in mind, epistemology; overlap with cognitive science & evolutionary psychology; recent interest in philosophy of art.
my present thesis is on the ontology & [social] epistemology of memes. i began with the question of how it is that, sometimes, one can learn something from a meme. if anybody is interested, i would be delighted to share the current work with you & to receive your feedback.
the social media vantage point is limited mainly to facebook meme groups, but i've diversified my portfolio within this niche.
Welcome, Jay. Good to have you here. I share many of your philosophical interests, and there's several cognitive scientists in our community as well (I'm struck by how many cogsci people there are from TPM community. I'm not sure why, but it's cool), like @laura. It would be fantastic to have you share your current research and exchange feedback. It's one of the intended uses of the forum!
Hello all! I'm Jyohomson. I was a Physics Philosophy double major, now pursuing a PhD in Religious Studies. I currently work as a content manager for a company that makes mobile games. I'm Nepali but I will be in the US starting September.
I don't have an academic interest in internet memes as pertaining to my field of study. I instead find them as a pleasant reminder that academics are also human. I also like text based puns and other textual tomfoolery, which is why you'll find me spamming the described memes [TEXT ONLY] group quite a bit.
My meme related hobbies are translating popular English memes into their Nepali variants. I host a small community of really funny people on twitter that I constantly share these with. They seem to be particularly obsessed with weird interpretations of Hinduism in the online meme community, and I am too.
My favorite place to find memes is on Facebook. Unfortunately a lot of pages here seem to be run by edgy 15 year olds (cough Nietzsche Internet Defense Force cough), they sometimes have good content. Oh, and I absolutely love shaman boys.
As the last meme saved into my device, I have a Nepali variant of the YES meme (OC).
Welcome, Jyohomson! Your described memes are so consistently good and I find the combination of your academic interests fascinating (I've actually been reading about the Vienna Circle's interest in physics recently and wondering what studying philosophy in the 21st Century would be for a physicist; many of the Circle's physicist participants didn't consider themselves to be philosophers, though for all intents and purposes they were doing philosophy).
I love the story about you translating English memes into Nepali. That's actually fantastic, and I would love to talk to you about it in the Research or General subforum about it. We need an International Meme Studies, and creating translations of memes would certainly be considered a viable research methodology.
I'm Elias. In 2015 I wrote my undergraduate thesis, "Postmodern Analytic Memetics". I studied philosophy and mathematics, which shows in the text. I should caveat that I no longer really agree with the argument I was making in that paper which is a very sort of optimistic Hegelian take. My current interests are largely in ancient philosophy and history and political philosophy. I'm much more of a meme-pessimist now.
I also used to run a number of Facebook meme pages, most notably Dialecticz Still Wilin (RIP) and groups like Dialectical Dialecticsposting for Big Others and Negated Absolutes (since renamed as Dialectical Bananaposting for Big Bananas and Negated Bananas). I still prefer Facebook groups to other platforms.
My main hobby outside of books is making music, which has it's share of memes.
Welcome, Elias! Good to have you here. I enjoyed your thesis when you first released it in 2015, as well as your memepages and groups. I think we are all a bit less naive than we were 6-7 years ago when it comes to memes. Pessimist or no, you're quite right to have pointed out in your thesis that we need a standardised and coherent way to cite memes. We should revive the initiative and develop a standard!
Hi everyone! Just gave a quick glance around this thread and the forum and it already looks so great
I am a visual artist from Mallorca (Spain). I'm now also working as a web designer and I teach painting lessons to old women at a social center.
My interests and artistic practices are really diverse and I haven't figured out if that's a blessing or a curse. I'd say my main focus has been digital culture and technology, but for the last few years I've been also working about tourism (coming from a place like Mallorca and having lived until recently in Barcelona, two places very affected by tourism), aiming to read the local perception of this economic model mainly through Mark Fisher's work.
About memes, I've been intermittently developing a series of artworks for some years now, they're sort of meme-collages based in internet meme aesthetics dealing with media and meme theory. I've barely posted any of it (posting anxiety maybe?), so not really memes if we define them through circulation. From this background, I'm now preparing a creative contribution to the second Critical Meme Reader published by the Institute of Network Cultures. I'll share when I'm further in the process.
My memes come from facebook and twitter, though I feel the content from fb has been gradually getting worse for me, maybe all the pages I liked have died and I haven't bothered looking for new ones. TPM is the most interesting place to me.
Last meme in my phone depicts an elden ring encounter a friend of mine just played the other day so I sent it to him
I am a lawyer and PhD student, I have a personal and professional interest in both memes as a medium/conceptual understanding (we are pretty close to getting it universally), and how they may be regulated automatically or through law in the future and currently.
Are you working on any projects relevant to meme studies?
I wish. Maybe later, I think applying law really boringly to it is fun.
Do you have a hobby or interest with a related memeculture?
Nah, but have been following intensely along from the sidelines for many years, but the less free time I get for this, the more boomer I become (was one already probably).
What’s your favourite platform to observe memes on at the moment?
The dark hellscapes as always, and nowadays very much /r/NonCredibleDefense/ and associated stuff.
Favourite from this week (but the rate they move is insane):
Hi, I'm Jacob, I was fairly active on several facebook meme groups as an effortposter, and some of my own art has memetic elements within it. I am mainly interested in memes as a kind of uniquely subconscious art form.
The last meme I have saved is one I made in a facebook groupchat:
I don't actually have any experience related to meme studies other than really enjoying lurking in the TPM group on Facebook. I'll probably mostly be a lurker here, as well.
I think Facebook and Discord are probably my favorite platforms to observe memes at the moment. The former because a lot of OC (surprisingly considering how few of my peers use it) gets generated there and tiny group subcultures generate shit tons of in-joke memes, and that's really fun and interesting to see; the latter because I'm in enough active Discords that the sheer volume of memes I see in a day makes it an easy memestream platform.
