Shane Jackson
Staff writer
I’d love to call this my Gandalf the White moment, that I am the mysterious wizard of the forest who remains largely silent but for the occasional captioned pictures of cats, penguins or Ronan O’Gara that I fling at students on Facebook like so many overused Internet frisbees. Yes, I made the majority of the memes you’ve recently been crying/laughing at and I’m terribly sorry/you’re welcome. Trust me when I tell you that it was only, as Internet people say, ‘for the lols’.
Some of you may already be searching for my details so as to hunt me down, blaming my death on a gross misinterpretation of the rules of ‘Assassin’. Please, let me explain myself first. Attention should be directed at one Stephen Denham, who tapped into a trend with a page devoted entirely to Trinity-based memery. It is he for whom you should be sculpting solid gold replicas of, not I. We simply spent an afternoon relentlessly captioning funny pictures in lieu of studying, whereby we vented everything that ever irked us about College life; every nonsensical administrative policy, unnecessarily locked gate and baffling urinal grate, it was all squarely directed at this little page, a thing many have since welcomingly become acquainted with. Our encouragement of contributions to the page certainly made a section of the web wipe a tear from their collectively oversized, lensless glasses, cringing (often with good reason) at the poor utilisation of some of these beloved in-jokes. To those, I merely say that such is the Internet, and such was the momentum of college meme pages globally that it was all an inevitability. Besides, I need only show the lensless ones an image of Bon Iver holding his two Grammys to remind us all of the real source of the indie apocalypse that makes many, myself included, tear through our skinny jeans like a frustrated, immodest hipster Hulk, but I digress. (Note to self: Idea for meme – hipster Hulk).
Before last week, many students were either unaware as to what a meme was, or tended to view them passively. Suddenly, students everywhere embraced the power of social media to provide people with the right context, making the audience for memes that little bit broader, but still limiting their understanding to a specific demographic so as to maintain a sense of community. As other Irish colleges followed suit, many exhausted stereotypes were brought to light. Naturally, UCD memes claim us to be hilarious because of the whole ‘We’re secretly British’ thing. Surprisingly, there is in fact a notable trickle-down pattern with many of these seemingly benign insults. Whereas Trinity students tend to focus on UCD students’ propensity towards finger painting, jibes focusing on academia have been seldom returned our way. UCD students tend to make fun of DCU/DIT students and their ‘stupidity’, whose memes then focus on GMIT, WIT and other smaller institutions around the country. The mentality of the CAO points race seems to ring true, as memes have made it obvious that this hierarchy of educational institutions is something many believe to exist, and believe that saying otherwise condemns oneself to the horror of being wrong on the internet and therefore not funny. Memes clearly have an informative side, something that became further apparent to me when a friend tagged the Senior Lecturer in something I posted concerning Christmas exams. I subsequently took a moment to comprehend the possibility that the Senior Lecturer was not just a mythical, faceless, unseen Oz-like deity, but was in fact a mythical, faceless, unseen Oz-like deity with Facebook, who was now considering this hotly debated topic, even for a terribly brief instant, through an unlikely medium that a student created, conveying a message other students agreed with, no less.
Truly, it’s all about timing. It has been suggested to me that in the absence of a joke candidate or particularly cutthroat campaigning in this year’s SU elections, students basically made their own entertainment via curious facets of college that already existed, and we provided the forum for doing so. This adheres to my belief that the best comedy isn’t just humorous, but is a portrayal of that which is just impossibly true. While most are exaggerations, memes nonetheless foster a collective sense of being ‘in’ on the joke because on some level, people actually believe them to represent reality; not so much provoking laughter as a “Yeah, why is that?’’ response. If I have failed to convince you otherwise, oh well. I always take solace in a phrase that has captioned contributions far more ridiculous than my own – ‘haters gonna hate’.
