CHRONICLE 16-17 ISSUE 08

Campus chronicle.durhamcollege.ca January 24 - 30, 2017 The Chronicle 13
Long live the internet meme
Dan Koehler
The Chronicle
In a quiet park on Niagara Drive,
just down the road from Durham
College, a lively crowd gathers. A
sense of excitement and whispers
of laughter flow throughout the
group. A man can be seen sporting
a homemade gorilla t-shirt.
The heart-wrenching How To
Save A Life, by alternative band
The Fray, flows out of speakers
as one man directs the crowd in
a sing-along. Candles burn, and
bananas pile up on the park bench,
while the group chants a familiar
name.
“Harambe,” the crowd unanimously
cheers over and over again.
“Harambe.”
The 50 person strong Oshawa
candlelight vigil of for the lowland
gorilla killed at the Cincinnati Zoo
had started. Similar to the 2,000
strong event held earlier in the
month at Ryerson University in
Toronto, according to Vice.
Harambe became an Internet
sensation when he was shot at the
Cincinnati Zoo on May 28th after
a young boy fell into the gorilla’s
enclosure. The boy was dragged
over 15 feet before zoo officials
intervened and killed the gorilla
with a single gunshot.
After an initial uproar from the
public and activists, due to the
meaningless of the killing, the story
quickly fell out of the mainstream
light. But the Internet doesn’t forget
so quickly.
Over the last decade, the Internet
has been producing an increasing
number of memes, through platforms
such as Vine, Snapchat, and
viral videos.
Memes are defined by Google as
“a humorous image, video, piece of
text, etc. that is copied (often with
slight variations) and spread rapidly
by Internet users.”
In 2015 a similar situation to
Harambe occurred; an African
lion, Cecil, who was the mascot
of Hwange National Park in
Metabeleland North, Zimbabwe,
was killed by an American dentist,
Walter Palmer, during a canned
hunt.
According to Google, a canned
hunt is ‘a trophy hunt in which an
animal is kept in a confined area,
such as in a fenced-in area, increasing
the likelihood of the hunter obtaining
the kill.’
Memes quickly spawned all over
the web, and an investigation was
opened into the killing.
According to an article by National
Geographic, Palmer was
never charged because he was
able to show proper paper work
to the Zimbabwean authorities.
Cecil’s death set the course for the
Harambe trend to take off.
the website Reddit.com, sometimes
known a the front page of the
internet, has a thread dedicated to
memes, and this is where many
of them, including Harambe and
Cecil memes, begin. They have a
list of rules that memes have to follow
and offer links to other websites
that users can use to create their
own memes.
The Harambe story received so
much attention that the Cincinnati
The death of Harambe in May, 2016 quickly spawned a firestorm of memes and many student-organized vigils.
Zoo had to disable all of their social
media accounts.
Since then the Harambe trend
has stayed steady. Internet ‘trolls’
have been busy mocking the incident
through memes and songs,
using phrases like “dicks out for
Harambe,” a phrase used in similar
fashion as “get your lighters
in the air” at a concert, just not as
literal, while others see the gorilla
as ‘god-like’.
Even sports teams have fallen
into the Harambe craze. According
to RT.com, the Trenton Golden
Hawks, an Ontario Junior Hockey
League team, sported jerseys honouring
Harambe during a warmup
before a game recently.
But why have we become so infatuated
with these trends?
One idea is these trends let us
share our ideas about a topic to the
whole world without going deeply
into it.
Stephen Forbes, a Durham College
professor for the School of
Business, IT, and Management,
has been going on the Internet for
most of his life. He says memes ignore
borders and let us connect past
cultural and physical boundaries.
“Memes are simply highly relatable
ideas that have high potential
to spread through cultures
very quickly, precisely because of
their ‘any man’ way of expression,”
Forbes says. “The web has closed
the distance between people in
terms of sharing information, and
ideas.”
As much as memes can be passed
off as a waste of time, Forbes says
they play an important role when it
comes to discussions about society.
“They (memes) are the publicly
generated one liners everyone loves
the Daily Show for, often adding
They (memes) are the publicly
generated one-liners everyone
loves The Daily Show for.
a brevity and charm to hot topics
without going too deep,” he says.
“They are in fact, albeit often hard
to see, a valuable piece of the overall
discussions taking place across
society.”
Kristina Crawford, a Durham
College student in the Practical
Nursing program, thinks Internet
trends have become popular due to
people seeking a sense of belonging.
“Everyone wants to be a part of
one thing, so everyone just kind
of goes with it,” Crawford says.
“It’s really different right, so no
one brings a different view to it, so
everyone just follows one another.”
Keir Broadfoot, Durham College
fabrication studio specialist,
says memes are news and events
that take a twist on the absurd, but
can also touch on important topics.
He’s a lover of Reddit.com, and
goes on all the time. Reddit even
has subthreads covering specific
meme topics.
“For the most part, it (memes)
can bring to light stories of interest,”
he says.
Although memes can be a positive
thing, they can sometimes
mock or ridicule serious topics or
people.
Throughout the United States
presidential election both candidates,
Democrat Hillary Clinton
and Republican Donald Trump,
had their photos turned into
memes. The memes usually show
an unflattering picture and have a
word or phrase mocking the candidate
or their idea.
“There are memes and vines that
can be mocking in nature where
they fish for a photo of somebody
that’s not very flattering,” Broadfoot
says. “Then they become an
Internet sensation but not in a positive
aspect.”
Memes have even started to
crossover from the internet to the
real world. Memes like the Harlem
Shake, which started in February
2013 and involved a group dancing
to the song Harlem Shake, have
started taking place in workplaces.
Even the Norwegian military
and the US army both did their
own Harlem Shake videos. More
Photograph by Dan Koehler
recently, the Mannequin Challenge
has been sweeping across campuses
around the world. St. Lawrence
College in Kingston Ontario, recently
had their students in the
Advertising and Marketing Communications
program do their own
version of the challenge.
For now it seems Internet trends
aren’t going anywhere. The conclusion
of the US presidential election
brought forth a whole new
area of memes focusing on Vice
President Joe Biden and President
Barack Obama, and theoretical
conversations between them and
President Elect Donald Trump.
Harambe memes continue to flood
Facebook pages.
Media organizations have started
utilizing these tools. Buzzfeed has
a news page dedicated to memes.
They offer lists of top memes to
their readers as well.
Websites such as MemeGen,
LiveMeme, MakeAMeme, and
WeKnowMemes, exist for the sole
purpose of allowing people to make
memes.
Although the Durham College
vigil for Harambe has come and
gone, the joke lives on. As a student
at the vigil who didn’t want to be
named says, “Its a great end, to a
great legacy.”
Meme created by Twitter user @notacroc
An example of a meme centring around the relationship
between Joe Biden and Barack Obama.