The form has certainly changed throughout the years - with a central message remaining constant. "Those have existed pretty much since we started keeping records of these things.” This imagery appears extensively in the earliest cave paintings, archaic art, and a glut of medieval-aged texts with, uh, creative illustrations. The other iteration of the earliest meme that was developing simultaneously: oversized phallic symbols, Jenkins said. The messages have had influence on a global scale, are universally relatable, have been infinitely adapted, and even have modern (super-annoying) analogues. I think I should tell you, finding the first meme is just an incredibly complicated task." Yes, thanks for the heads up.īut there are two ancient instances in particular that fit my M.E.M.E. "All those joke archetypes could definitely be considered memes," Jenkins said. The Shepard Fairey OBEY logo (circa '89), the Lord of the Rings-inspired " Frodo Lives" graffiti (circa 1970), and the Church of the SubGenius (circa '59) are all prime examples other transferable doodles like " Kilroy was here" and the " stussy S" spread through textbooks, walls, and basically every other surface you could mark as a counterculture statement and a precious in-joke. "It's not like the first internet meme would be the first meme, ever, by any means." "There are certainly examples of what we would call 'memes,' before the internet existed," he said. In the beginning, the Dancing Baby wasn't just a product of the internet - it was the internet.īut there were memes before the internet, as we already know from Shifman and seconded by Henry Jenkins, provost professor at the University of Southern California, and noted scholar of media (and memes). The Dancing Baby became shorthand for the new wave of the web, a go-to reference to show the premise of an internet phenomenon. Its evolution is clearly exhibited in the McBeal-in-her-jammies GIF. Its effect is definite: It became a worldwide phenomenon, to the delight of moms with brand-new email accounts and the bane of those subsequent email chains. While I trust Thompson wholly with all-things pop culture, let's put it through our rubric, just to be sure. In my mind it certainly fits the criteria." "I'm teaching a class on the Age of the Internet, and I actually almost considered calling it 'Dancing with the Baby.' It’s the first image I show to my class," said Robert Thompson, trustee professor of television, radio & film at Syracuse University, "I think that’s probably a good call as the first meme. This browser does not support the video tag. T and his aggressive ball eating beat by a matter of months. " Mr T Ate My Balls" launched the same year too.
#XZIBIT MEME CREATOR FULL#
The " Bert is Evil" parody website was created by designer Dino Ignacio in 1997, a full three years prior. For me, and a lot of my generation, this was our first exposure."ĭespite revolutionizing the format - and helping to introduce memes to a mainstream audience - "All Your Base" can't be considered one of the first, true memes on the Internet. "Seeing those things on Tumblr, that classic white lettering on top of funny pictures. "I think when I was first became aware of memes as a concept, even if I didn't even really know they were called 'memes,'" said 25-year-old Tebele, aka FuckJerry, who has literally turned memeing into a viable media empire. It's generally considered to be the world's first "image macro" meme - that "white block letters on an image" look is the precursor to what we generally think of as modern memege. One very popular contender could be "All Your Base Are Belong to Us." Born around the year 2000, the meme - mocking a shoddy English translation of a 1989 Japanese Sega Genesis game, Zero Wing - ripped through message boards, ended up on cheese-tastic local news segments, and helped ignite the spicy meme inferno we live in today. It would be profoundly convenient to settle that text-based emoticons, like :-), were the first web-based memes (they were "invented" in 1983), but alas: As influential as they were, memes they are not, at least by our rubric's logic.
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