I'm Alistair, at the moment I'm a consultant in Melbourne. Most of my previous research has been physics related, but in my undergraduate I spent a fair bit of time examining linguistic trends on 4chan. I'm not currently working on any meme related projects, but have recently been expanding my range of meme consumption. Most of my hobbies and interests have some form of related meme culture, including math/physics, linguistics, games, movies, and meme studies.
I do most of my meme consumption on facebook and instagram (though I've been uninstalling/reinstalling insta quite a bit recently). I've been debating getting TikTok because I've heard that the algorithm is really good at curating content for you, but at the same time I've been enjoying the distance I've managed to put between myself and social media recently.
Last meme I saved to my device was actually when insta DMs were down, so I was screenshotting them to send after everything came back.
Welcome, Yoshi! And yes, the community is gonna need a lot of developers working together to build all the stuff that we can use to research with, so this would be perfect!
Hi, Alistair. Welcome! It seems like there's multiple physics researchers in the community. It's very cool. I'd love to discuss physics memecultures and your thoughts on linguistic trends in memecultures in the Research subforum!
Also LMAO the screenshot to send later is just too cute and pure
Hello! I'm Nivedita, 22, from India and no I'm not a pajeet. I've been online since 2010 and I run a few hyper local meme pages. One of the notable ones is South Bombay memes for class riddled teens which I've run since 2018. I like the genre of hyperlocal memes because it is an interesting experiment to observe what otherwise "normie" meme consumers resonate with and what they don't interact/engage with. I have since understood that I can make the same joke again and again with different templates and people have been reacting to them since 2018. I try to innovate with templates rather than the made with mematic tier of memes. I would not say I am as well versed with meme theory like some people here but I am happy to be invited to be here and I hope to contribute to discussions!
I think hyperlocal memes are really interesting and valuable to study at every level right now. Well-documented case studies by an insider from the memeculture will be invaluable as primary research material. It's amazing to hear about how long you've been running your memepages. Merely outlining their history would be valuable research in and of itself.
Also, I love thinking about and discussing meme crafting techniques and cannot get enough of it. I don't think we really had the right place to discuss that until this forum. /tpmg/ and the memetic-engineering channel on the TPM server were good, but the functionality was too lacking. I can't wait to get into memeing together in the Creativity subforum. I think that researchers knowing how to meme will make a world of difference in ways we can't even really predict at the moment!
I'm Tim (he/him). I used to work in politics but now I'm trying to finish my undergraduate degree. Right now I'm studying land use changes in Yunnan China and dam construction geography in Laos. I am interested in memes as political speech, education agitation, information, disinformation, misinformation, and so on. I enjoy making described memes remixing other meme formats.
Right now I have a couple articles for the meme wiki that I'm working on about intellectual property. I also try to engage in the meme research group. I would also be interested in starting/joining a meme posting or distribution collective.
I usually look at memes on tik tok. I used to like Facebook but the algorithm is strangling itself these days!
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.
