These are some of my favorite memes because of their simplicity but also because there can be so many different versions of them. During the beginning of quarantine, my friends and I created a baking Instagram account where we post our horrible and unprofessional baking and cooking creations as well as a meme or a few with every post.

The memes I chose are also included in the account. I think that I enjoy the one about school because it feels so relatable to me, and I’m sure much of the college student population would agree. “The dissemination of memes [...] is based on intentional agents with decision-making powers: Social norms, perceptions, and preferences are crucial in memetic selection processes. This conceptualization of people as active agents is highly appropriate for understanding how memes travel on the digital highway, particularly when examining cases in which the initial meaning of a meme is dramatically altered in the course of its diffusion,” (Shifman, 366). It is fitting then, that I would choose to participate in this meme/cooking account hybrid, and it becomes a method of dissemination. It is successful in this sense because those who view the meme can relate to it.

The second meme is one of my favorites because of its stupidity, and also because of my own stupidity. I feel that I often interpret what others are communicating incorrectly, even though it may not be to this extent. I think it also communicates what can be lost in terms of pronunciation or lack of emotional cues or tone through text.

In the reading by Limor Shifman, the “Leave Brittney Alone” meme is referenced. “In relation to the communication functions defined by Jakobson (1960), of the six described above, the ones that seem most prominent in the video are the referential (Crocker provides us with facts about Britney’s life), the conative (viewers are indulged to change their behavior), and above all the emotive, as this video is all about the addresser and his emotional state,” (Shifman, 369).

I think that a lot of how you perceive a meme has to do with how you are functioning at that time — it has to do with the mental stability of the viewer and the creator. I think this concept can be applied to both of the memes that I chose. The first meme feels more obvious in that mental stability is questionable as the meme includes someone who is crying. The second applies in a different way because it is funny to those that may have difficulty communicating, which in my case, I feel can partly be attributed to mental stability and even sleep deprivation.

There is a huge aspect of meme culture that creates community. Individuals enjoy specific kinds of memes more than others. My friends and I enjoy similar memes, hence the baking meme account. We have been able to create a sort of community through this part of internet culture.

Shifman created a method used to analyze memes. The dimensions include content, form, and stance. I feel that the stance of the meme is the most important and at times difficult to name. Stance is the “Information about the communicative positioning of the addresser in relation to the text/message, the context, and other potential speakers,” (Shifman, 369).

For the first meme, the content includes text that reads, “me thinking about my dream job” and “me studying for my dream job.” This shows that there is a sort of contrast existing in the meme, one that those who are studying for their dream job will relate to. The form of the meme includes two side by side pictures of a child smiling and then crying over a piece of paper and a crayon. The stance of the meme is the idea that a dream job is much nicer thought about than actually worked toward.

The content of the second meme is a sort of commentary on communication and what may be lost in translation. The form of the meme is a picture of two people talking with speech bubbles by a car. The stance of the meme is the ridiculousness of english and how the language can so easily be interpreted incorrectly. There are plenty of variations of this meme.