And countless of them, like those that can be found on the specialized website Know your meme, where articles, interviews or newsletters are posted and a large community of fans gathers, as if it were a brainy magazine about an artistic discipline , literature or cinema. The meme is serious.
An institution as respectable as the National Library of Spain (BNE) also takes memes very seriously and collects some of them as part of its documentation strategy for the Spanish web. “Citizens do not usually understand memes as a social manifestation,” says Mar Pérez Morillo, director of the BNE’s Division of Digital Processes and Services, “because only with the passage of time do we become aware of the value of certain documents and popular manifestations. ”. In this context, memes would be something similar to the ephemera that the Library also collects, minor documents that include candy wrappers.
Romanticism dance cards, paipáis, stickers, communion reminders… “They reflect culture and society of our country at a given time. The information that is published on the internet is very ephemeral and we cannot assess today what will be of interest in the future”, says Pérez Morillo. Thus, part of what they collect on the web may seem insubstantial today, “but in the future it will be a reflection of what worried us, how we reacted to social and political events. They are a perfect sample of our society and how it deals with reality,” she adds.
The ‘memesphere’ takes advantage of everything. The ‘harmed bear’ of the Three Kings Parade in Cadiz instantly became a meme and soon after a lucrative business when his image began to be marketed on mugs, posters, t-shirts or socks.
The ‘memesphere’ takes advantage of everything. The ‘harmed bear’ of the Three Kings Parade in Cadiz instantly became a meme and soon after a lucrative business when his image began to be marketed on mugs, posters, t-shirts or socks.
author memes
Memes have traditionally been (if their short history allows us to use this term) an example of collective creation: just like popular couplets, legends, jokes or proverbs, it is not usually known who has created them, nor is there registry of who is modifying them in successive incarnations.
Different applications make it possible for anyone to produce their own meme using a library of public images as a base. However, the concept of authorship is also reaching this discipline, as can be seen in the SoyMeme festival, in which different activities are held for the group consumption of these artifacts that we usually deal with alone. “I think it is very important to put a name and a face to these memeros who are producing the images that we consume all the time,” says Gómez Alemán, “it is a way to vindicate them professionally.”
Within contemporary memes there are various trends that arise from those networks that function as meme factories, such as Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, or forums such as Forocoches or 4Chan. For example, shitposting is called the classic emergency memes, made on popular backgrounds, without much quality and, generally, anonymously. But over time other typologies have appeared, some of an intimate, militant, reflexive or customary nature.
The memer Culomala (translation from the English baddass, which translates as a mixture of impressive and badass), a participant in the SoyMeme festival, creates materials of this type. “I use them as an intimate diary, but going from the personal to the universal, using quite dark backgrounds taken, for example, from video games,” explains the author, who identifies herself as Alejandra but prefers not to give her last name, “many people She has felt identified with my memes.” Among the topics she deals with are self-care, mental health, the field of emotions, almost as a form of personal activism.
