Why know your meme

New memers need [ Know Your Meme ] as [a] resource to know what rage comics were, how lol-speak and image macros came to be. Kim loves wholesome memes, which have taken over Tumblr and bloomed in a huge subreddit in the last few years. Most good things on the internet are hard to evaluate on their own terms: is this only good because everything else is so bad?

Can it be good if it needs the bad things to make sense? The elephant in the room during every conversation about meme culture in is, of course, the election — when the grossest monsters of 4chan and Reddit came out from under the bed and baffled the public — and Gamergate , the harassment campaign that preceded it.

Major platforms have spent the last several years trying to figure out how to battle neo-Nazi political action, which is something that sounds surreal no matter how many times you write it down. Associate editor Matt Schimkowitz remembers hunting down the origins of a recent meme that shows a car veering off an exit ramp on three wheels, a seemingly innocuous image that blew up quickly because you can caption it with basically anything.

Turns out, it started on a white nationalist website as an anti-immigration joke. But meme culture is uniquely scary in some contexts. He compares memes to postmodernist art, a movement with the underlying mission to critique society and politics. We hate doing it, but we have to do it. Kim readily admits that Know Your Meme can facilitate the amorality of meme culture, and the spread of ideas that he might not personally want to see flourish.

Where, a decade ago, you would have had to comb 4chan yourself to find some seedy new meme and probably would not have bothered , now, you can find it in a clean, searchable database and understand it within minutes — and perpetuate it, too, if you want.

Schimkowitz, who eventually wants to devote his career to combating racism and sexism on the internet and helping the public understand the real-world consequences of letting these environments stew, defends the approach of the site. Reactions to memes are a big part of what makes them popular or controversial. So ignoring them would be disingenuous. Okay, sure. Is that enough?

Does laying out the history of a meme in a linear timeline actually help people understand why a meme happened? The theme Kim comes back to over and over is the objectivity of journalism, but even the most pedantically disciplined journalists have to make choices about the facts they select and the context in which they present them — sticky questions to contend with in a media environment where traffic drives coverage, and the moral or cultural impact of everything from execution to framing to promotion often comes second.

In excavating the online alt-right last year, for example, the media often fell into a trap of making the vicious fringe look cool, edgy, weird, and alluring. Spectacular things have happened here! People live here. Kids are taking care of each other and putting hexes on the president. I mean, almost any Vine compilation makes me cry. In trying to be a largely impartial reflection of meme culture, Know Your Meme has avoided accountability for as long as the rest of the internet has: until now.

Kim says that the staff also plans to do more blogging and reporting with opinion and analysis that can give readers more in-depth context on memes. Memes are terrible; they facilitate the spread of information torn from its source and relieved of its obligation to even seem credible. Know Your Meme is a crucial living document that we absolutely need, and the story it tells us about the internet is endlessly self-conflicting. Luckily, they know it.

Correction: A previous version of this article stated that Jamie Wilkinson built the Know Your Meme database in a single weekend, but this was incorrect. We regret the error. Cookie banner We use cookies and other tracking technologies to improve your browsing experience on our site, show personalized content and targeted ads, analyze site traffic, and understand where our audiences come from.

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Matt Schimkowitz, Adam Downer. Apple Here are the best Apple Watch deals right now. Verge Deals The best early Black Friday deals you can get right now. I mean they won't listen.

No matter how much you try to get your point across, they will not actually read it. At least not rationally. They pick what they want to read and use it against you. I've been on there. Watcher : I don't think you get my point, Know Your Meme. I'm saying you need to be constructive in criticism.

Weeaboo: le u mad? Know Your Meme is a website that is best known for the research and archiving of internet memes. On the side, Know Your Meme has a image gallery that users can upload examples of memes and softcore porn into. Some guy : I went to Know Your Meme yesterday. Some other guy: Oh, did you look at memes or something? Some guy: No, just fapped to softcore porn.