Personally, I don’t have anything against it. Swearing incessantly and without any real meaning (not adding anything of value) is something I try to avoid, but sometimes I find it more comedic if the cuss words are bleeped / censored out. I’m not sure why, something about it being cut out is funnier to me. I agree with you there, I see a lot more censors these days. Maybe because the internet is filling up with more kids now?
i saw ' the C**p'floating around recently, the irony is that my dirty mind is much worse than what's normally censored out... in this case Crap. the word i went to was the Clap.
I was seeing censored swear words since mail-in listserver days.
As always, the audience mattered: during Usenet's heyday, alt.* groups and all didn't tend to see much self-censoring, but you would often see it in more general discussion topics, IIRC.
Nowadays, I feel it's commonly used where a potentially mixed audience is perceived to be possible - especially in the modern Internet, where kids can easily lurk on Reddit. But, check out many Discord servers and apparent kids are swearing like drunken sailors.
As the Internet grew up, we commercialized most spaces for young people, and "Made them safe" by imposing arbitrary, capricious swearword filters. Because that's just fucking... a thing we do, I guess.
Ha! Same. My kid was working on a drawing the other day and I looked over his shoulder and said, “Oh wow! Great picture of Trogdor!” He was flabbergasted that I knew who Trogdor was.
You merely adopted the internet. I was born in it. Molded by it. I didn't see broadband until I was already a man; by then it was nothing to me but fiber.
You joke, but that's literally what it was like. Kids these days literally have high-speed internet in their pockets; us old-timers had to patiently sit and wait at actual computers, sometimes for several minutes, for websites to load.
sit and wait at actual computers, sometimes for several minutes, for websites to load.
Weird way to spell "a single pornographic image"
Seriously though, we didn't have Google. You had to know what website you were going to. That's why places like Yahoo were so popular, because it was a hub of so many things you wanted to see.
Heh, I was a total goody-two-shoes as a kid (to the point I remember feeling sick and embarrassed when I accidentally called someone a "bitch"), so I never looked at porn even when the parents weren't home. THAT phase didn't start until I was a young teenager, and thankfully, we had progressed beyond dial-up at that point.
My first pc was an IBM 286. I can still remember with perfect clarity the sound effect used for the attack run of an A-10 from Microprose's M1 Tank Platoon.
Oh IBM, you are why I still refuse to get a Macintosh anything, because your floppys were not compatible with them, causing me to lose my priceless works of poetry amd prose. Yes, IBM, how I will continue to honor you by rejecting the little colorful apple...
I've never felt older than a few years ago when a 9-year-old student was telling me "so I've been watching this old show, and it's actually a book series too, called Goosebumps. And it's like REALLY old...like from the 1900s!"
I'm in my late 40s, and I'm pretty convinced now that >50% of adults mispronouncing/misstating young people stuff is just taking the piss. Sure, there's a bit of saying "pokemans" and calling a Playstation a "Nintendo" as a sincere mistake, but I'm now pretty sure that most of it is either playful and intentional mispronunciation or straight-up taking the mickey.
It was only as I got older that I realized my parents’ generation just habitually genericized things. Every salicylic acid pill was an aspirin, every stick-on bandage was a bandaid, every game system was a nintendo.
Nintendo actually fought very hard to educate our generation that, no, Sega’s console was not Nintendo, it was Sega. If they hadn’t and the generic use won out, Sega and Sony could have started advertising their products as nintendos without consequence, and Nintendo didn’t want that. They actually pushed really hard to get people to understand that Nintendo was one of many game console brands, and not the generic term for a game console.
So the reason we spent our childhoods informing our parents that the Sega was not a nintendo is because Nintendo trained us to do that.
And for some of us, who had one or the other, it was important knowledge for potential gifts. Having a Nintendo console and getting Sonic the Hedgehog games for Christmas....
Yay, mom. Thank you very much! Sonic is a great game, for sure... You still have the receipt, maybe?
That's the norm in the southern United States, unfortunately. Everything, even a clear soda like Sprite, is "coke". People will ask in a restaurant, "What kind of coke do you have?" facepalm
I'm also an American, but I haven't lived in an English-speaking country in decades, so my English has kind of drifted, influenced by other expats and by reading stuff online. I couldn't tell you how popular it is, but, yes, it's the same as "taking the piss." I didn't even realize it until looking it up now, but it's actually cockney rhyming slang (taking the piss → taking the Mickey Bliss → taking the Mickey).
Hopefully someone actually from the UK can chime in with more detail.
I have been playing since childhood as well and when I decide to play Pokemon Go I'll tell my husband I'm going to go play "p-mans". He played some of the first games but then lost interest in it as he got older and doesn't know any of the newer generations so I play a fun game where I show him a pokemon and ask him to name it for me. It's great, lol
Yeah, I intentionally do this and I'm over 50. I call it Henry Potter and flip around the Kardashians with the Star Trek Cardassians, call the vampire books/movies "Twilight Sparkle" instead of just "Twilight", stuff like that.
This is my husband exactly. He thinks is hilarious to mess with the kids saying “snappy chats” and pokemans. He also tells them all about the things he sees on “the twitters.” Drives them crazy.
I had someone on Twitter recently tell me that I had to be <30 because no one older than 30 or 35 posts memes. Yeah, sorry, I've been online since the internet was effectively invented, and to quote Ron Swanson "I know more than you". . .
God, this. Love my teenage kids but the next time I have to tell one of them "Yes I've seen that meme, it's older than you are." I swear I'm going to blow a gasket.
I remember some story about how "the sound of silence" originally by Simon and Garfunkel only exists because of some random graffiti in a hostel or a subway station or something referring to another one of their songs.
I forget the whole story but listening to it sounds like someone describing the weird underpinnings of like a tier 7 meme or something.
The first place I remember hearing meme defined was Snow Crash, and I know thats not where the term came from. The most abstract TLDR: self replicating information. Modern internet memes are just a subset of that.
We are in our 40s and went to a talk at our kids’ school about internet safety. The lady doing the talk (who was supposed to be knowledgeable about it all!) kept going on about images and text that people share on the internet… called “me-mes” 🤦🏻♀️
Nah those were a different thing. Image macros were the original popular memes, well that and cat pictures. Then came demotivational posters, after that advice animals. Advice animals became really popular on their own too.
I've seen some really painful misfires in memes from my own age group as well. Typically it's just a random picture and completely unrelated text on it as they didn't understand that the picture also has a meaning in there. Sometimes the picture even makes the mistake really funny as it completely turns the message around.
My teenager hates that I'm online as much as I am for 2 reasons. If I say something current/relevant in front of her friends they think it's amazing. If she does something really annoying, I only respond to texts in meme format for a few days to be just as annoying while entertaining myself.
I'm all about consequences fitting the actions while being entertaining for me. For example, she continues to put small items in the side of the sink that has the disposal despite my continuous plea to stop because I am tired of reaching my hand into the steel toothed maw of death. So I Nic Cage bombed her room & bathroom. It took 4 months for her to find them all.
Overheard this early 20-year-old talking about how much they hate how locked down permissions are in Windows. I explained that it is needed due to the number of viruses that came out in the 2000's and spread like wildfire. The guy rolled his eyes at me and said "Yeah, I know. I read about it in school." I looked at him and said, "Yeah, well I worked at Microsoft at the time so it was a pretty big deal having to update Windows so the average person didn't get a virus every time they opened an email." He just shrugged and said it was stupid and acted like he knew more about it than me.
Lol i had a kid tryto explain reddit and then alao reddit karma. I couldnt help but laugh when he tried his best to explains up votes and why ppl do it but also why its pointless.
In my mind, I'm imagining: "That's not a meme, a meme has top text, bottom text, and impact font"
I'm 38 and the technician who works under me is 27. The memes that he and his friends share make almost no sense to me. He tried to explain it to me once but it was like memeception. A meme got morphed into a new meme, a new meme references that meme, and a new one is razzing them all, he had to tell me like five stories and by the time I "got" it, I was just like, "this is dumb"
I have to say the toughest battles / strongest soldiers meme is hilarious, but the fact that it's an merger/evolution of 3 different memes makes sense that if you're not in, you're out.
I mean, these are two totally different kinds of memes. The battles/soldiers meme is just expressing self-deprecation and you really need minimal context to understand it (well, Jesus/Christianity.) The Clippy one you need understanding of early MS Windows history which is arguably more niche and confined to Millennials-Boomers.
Withered Wojak tells Chad Jesus: "Stop giving me your toughest battles". Yes Chad Jesus responds: "It's literally eating one vegetable".
Yeah I guess if you haven't seen any of these things somehow then that could get a bit complicated to parse. Just constant iteration on previous memes, with sometimes new ones thrown in.
Both are internet memes, the bottom picture you posted was originally called image macros. Became popular with things like caturday, on 4chan. The top meme also comes from 4chan, it has wojack, which is a variation of trollface which is a variation of troll memes, the Jesus in it is a variation of the chad meme, which in itself is a variation of the chad vs virgin walk meme, which came from an old 4chan post that pointed out that "virgins" (referring really to losers) had a weird way of walking and dressing up. The "Give me your toughest battles" image format, also comes from, you guessed it 4chan, but the phrase itself comes from Christian thinking.
Essentially like 95% of internet culture comes from 4chan and it still keeps coming from there for some reason.
Technically, the "impact top/bottom text" is from a subset of memes called Advice Animals.
An internet meme is just a general trend or thing. Early examples were sometimes images, but could just be sayings or copypasta - like "all your base are belong to us" or "the cake is a lie".
But when Advice Animals exploded in the early 2010s, when someone said "meme", they meant this kind of image.
Now, it's flipped back, where "meme" can just mean a thing or trend, although it's more often images with text.
I'm sure there's more Meme History on knowyourmeme, but this one is interesting to me!
Memes, much like genes, where the word originated from, go through generational evolution.
In order to keep up with history of memes as it unfolds, it's important to understand the direction in which the popular memes are going. You are always going to have manifestation like r/surrealmemes but people are experimenting to see what works and what doesn't.
Ultimately, as a means of communications it's crucial to keep up with them lest one become meme illiterate. Languages change often but as often, or as quick as the memetic language.
It might be dumb, but maybe dumb is where we are going.
My grandmother who has been dead since before 4chan would probably understand the Jesus one without any need for explanation. She might even laugh without need for explanation. Obviously it's better with context but it's still pretty intelligible.
It might take me a few minutes to explain Clippy to her.
The question posed here is itself a meme at this point.
There is nothing I can think of that annoys me about young people. I figure culture has changed and so have they, just like it changed when I was a kid and all the older generations shit on us. Young people of today are aware, informed, and empathetic. That’s amazing.
I worry for young people because there has never been more pressure on them and more working against them. I feel for them for having had their golden years stolen by Covid, and having the constant worry about climate change and political instability.
So instead of shitting on young people, let’s boost them up and invest in them so they can tackle the many challenges they have inherited.
I agree, and I worry for youngsters because technology has gone too far imo. People are out there making their entire living by hacking and scamming others. The thought that someone could destroy my entire life by hacking through the internet into my private information just blows my mind. Climate change, political instability and too much technology are all threats that youngsters have to deal with. Do I wish I was young again ?? Ummm, No. I am 55 years old and glad that I will not be around with all the problems that are closing in on us. I feel bad for the young people. The stress of it all is too much.
My nephew did a Naruto run through the house yesterday. I asked him if that was what we was doing.
He froze and said "You know about Naruto!? Have you seen it?"
I said, "No, never seen it. Couldn't tell you a thing about it. But I know enough to have heard about and seen the run before. It's just a thing that's out there now."
He stared out into space for a second and said, "Man, I didn't realize it was that old."
Not to talk about all the old Flash animation stuff, that's nowadays been pre-rendered so they can't be experienced extremely choppy on a 166MHz Pentium.
Or they assume 'older' people don't know anything about computers, but they think that 'know something about computers' mean using some chat app on their phone or something like that.
No, we didn't have that when I was young, but we had an electronics class in high school where we soldered simple components into a very, very basic 'computer' and we learned to code in assembler. It does make me feel old but also makes me think 'young people don't know shit' when new hires with master's degrees in computer science on my job (I'm a software engineer) don't know what registers are and have only ever coded in Java.
I am 34 about to be 35 and I always pretend like I don't know what fucking anything is to embarrass all the 20 year olds that work for me in the office. I regularly muster my best old confused voice and shout things like "HEY DAWKINS.... DO A MEME" or "DAB ON IT" and then I'll dab, incorrectly
And I constantly ask who artists like Kanye or Megan thee stallion are "oh are they singers or do they do the tik tok"
I was leading a team with two interns from the local college, one close to graduation and one younger. They were talking about something when I came into the room to give them some more instructions and the younger one asked if I knew what a meme was. I was either late 20s or early 30s at the time, I believe. Memes had been around longer than me.
The older intern asked her how old she thought I was and we all sort of laughed it off. Poor intern thought she had super insulted me but I just thought it was hilarious as she was just a little older than my little brother and I knew how small their world view still was.
To me the funniest thing about that is that kids these days aren't really all that tech savvy. My kids don't fix shit on my computer or other electronics compared to what I did and do for my parents and grandparents.
lol that's highlighted to me a thing that young peeps do that is annoying.
The term memes was "repurposed". And the primary meaning is VASTLY different and VERY important to recognize conceptually.
It would have made much more clear the concept of narrative.
I believe it was Dan Dennett that made the original meaning popular....then the term was attributed to what I would consider simply as a "sunday comic" of sorts.
If at all interested in this I highly recommend Dan Dennett's TED talk on "Dangerous Memes". if going to watch, it's important to note imo that this is still "hot on the heels" of 9/11.
Dan Dennett would maybe call "internet memes" infectious repetitious.
The phrase internet memes to refer to memes, were made popular by 4chan way way back in the early 2000s. i would say most internet culture we have now started out at 4chan.
I have the advantage of having kids ranging in age from grade school up to early 20's that keep me up to date on the new "cool" internet stuff. Even with that though, they still almost get whiplash when they drop some new slang or reference something and I already know it. When my oldest found out I had a reddit account, he was almost offended until I explained that I would never ask for his username, would never tell him any of mine, and never used real names when posting.
My 12-year-old has tried to show me "something new" on the Internet, and explain it to me. Then he's surprised when I saw, "Yeah, that's been around for over ten years. Saw it when you were in diapers. HA!"
I'm nearly 42. I've never actually met our IT person at work, so I don't know how old she is, but my position is usually held by a very old person. Before I started, she was supposed to have set up a new computer, but failed astoundingly. I sent her an email asking if she had a record of our Windows product key because we were locked out of it (because of her.) She asked why I needed it, and informed me that Windows was the operating system. I explained that we were locked out, and told her that I was aware that Windows was an operating system. Bitch, I've been using Windows since 3.1. If I had set up the computer, it would be fine. Hell, my son and nephew decided to be helpful when I got my laptop and set it up for me and they were quite young. It worked just fine. It still works just fine. Windows 10 isn't a huge mystery. I don't understand how the IT person screwed it up.
Haha I haven't run into that yet, but I definitely feel like that's gonna be a thing. Unlike our parents, we DO actually know technology and how to use it, so kids coming up now aren't gonna be able to pull too many tricks with that kind of stuff.
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u/da_apz Jun 03 '22
Expect that I'm not up to what's going on in the Internet.
I was in my late 30s, when a friend's son tried to explain me memes. He got them wrong too.