“What kills a meme is often the rate of growth – the faster something grows, the quicker it tends to die. When something blows up, brands jump on it, and that usually kills it. Memes that last – like Sopranos or Spongebob formats – came from a time before brands were using them for clout. They stayed more “of the people.” Nine times out of ten, what kills a meme is brands getting involved. It becomes uncool. Memes are about sharing jokes, and brand involvement kind of ruins that” –Catty Berragan
2.
“You might remember formats and figures like Grumpy Cat, Pepe the Frog, Evil Kermit or moments like Harambe. But today, some argue memes have become too pervasive, too self-aware – losing their edge. Hence calls for a ‘meme reset’ and nostalgia for earlier, simpler formats” –Sophia French
3.
“I think the moment where I realised something was happening around memetic media was during the 2013 Gezi protests in Turkey, where I saw a lot of people using memes to bypass certain state censorship laws online. That interested me because I thought, a lot of people are getting arrested on Twitter for saying things about the government, but I’m seeing memes that say much worse things and no one’s getting punished for it. So what’s happening? Is this a new kind of language? Does it allow us to kind of speak truth to power? A few theorists and researchers were describing them as democratic tools – bottom-up, grassroots technologies. Memes came from the people. But around 2018, I started seeing brand deals incorporating this early mode of memes. That’s when I realised they’re not really bottom-up technologies anymore – this is becoming a language used by everyone: top-down actors and individuals” –İdil Galip
