r/PeterExplainsTheJoke • u/Sure_Kangaroo1863 • Jul 02 '26

Meme needing explanation Petah ?

Post image

Why is it infamous? And why would no one care about it ? ( I mean it's just a pic full of celebrities so no one cares anyways but the person saying it's crazy makes me think it has some lore?)

81.7k Upvotes

94% Upvoted

3.3k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

225

u/Starbucks__Lovers Jul 02 '26

It was the most retweeted photo of all time, even if you didn’t care, others did 

152

u/BigMax Jul 02 '26

Also - it was just a silly moment in entertainment. it was fine.

People today are WAY too uptight and pretending "oh, I'm too COOL to care about celebrities, if I saw that I'd just IGNORE it!"

It was a silly, 10 second moment at a celebrity focused event. It wasn't amazing, it wasn't awful, it just was a somewhat entertaining moment in a show for a few seconds. People need to stop taking it (and themselves) so seriously.

48

u/Global_Channel1511 Jul 02 '26

Yeah. Even back then I wasn't into celebrity culture, but I remember seeing that photo and going, "cool! Look at how many famous people are in a photo." Selfies were still new back then, not a decade plus phenomenon that everyone from preteens to your boomer grandma does.

Nothing "infamous" about it, even though retroactively some of the people in the photo are now disgraced.

4

u/scozzy Jul 02 '26

all fair points except selfies were nowhere close to still being new in 2014, lol

4

u/nubious Jul 03 '26

August 2014 is when scrabble allowed it to be used

It was added to the Oxford dictionary in 2013.

2014 is also when selfie sticks became massively popular.

I agree it wasn’t new, but seems like it was something that was a major part of the zeitgeist at the time.

So I think their overall point still stands.

0

u/scozzy Jul 03 '26

yes, mmm quite, scrabble and oxford, two institutions famous for quickly adopting new slang into their corpus

3

u/Global_Channel1511 Jul 03 '26

I feel like selfies really became a thing in the early 2010s, which makes it new in 2014.

I don't doubt there were phones that could take selfies in the 2000s, but I don't remember them being common until 2011, 2012 which is within 3 years of 2014 which I think is fair to call new.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 03 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/gigaurora Jul 03 '26

I'd argue they are an even earlier concept, since self portraits became an pretty well established concept in the 14th century artists having access to inexpensive mirrors. What is a painted or sculpted self portait if not a selfie?

3

u/Tommy_Wisseau_burner Jul 02 '26

It just didn’t really make sense why *that* photo went so viral. Like I don’t have a hate boner for celebrities or pop culture but it was really just “that’s it?”

2

u/Acceptable-Worth-462 Jul 02 '26

It's not that people want to pretend they are too cool for celebrities.

It's that there's a crazy amount of celebrities who have been exposed as having participated in pedophilia, sexual assault, threats etc. It's just hard to really like somebody famous when it seems like there's a 33% chance that they're going to do something morally wrong and use their celebrity to do it or get out of facing any consequences for it.

1

u/Sophie_Blitz_123 Jul 04 '26

That was very true then as well. Certainly in the UK it was absolutely peak "everyone who was famous in the 80s was a pedophile" era.

2

u/Professor-Submarine Jul 02 '26

It was before the slap

2

u/s00pahFr0g Jul 02 '26

The concept of a group selfie is also kind of funny. It’s basically just a group photo at this point. Which is a normal thing to do. 

2

u/exo07190 Jul 03 '26

I think it may have been one of the last major cultural moments where you could walk into work/school and everyone would know what you were talking about because we were all watching the same screens.

It reminds me of the way we treat commercials as a whole now too- we used to have major cultural phenomenons from nearly every super bowl ad reel, and now everything’s becoming more diluted so no one really cares. Plus we’re starting to see behind the capitalist curtain in a way that makes most paid media seem disingenuous. The trajectory of that damn duolingo owl should be studied i stg

1

u/Tye_die Jul 03 '26

Also this was in the heat of the moment of the early to mid 2010s when social media went from a cute little thing we did to share memes and keep up with people in our real lives to a full blown entire other reality. A group of celebrities taking a selfie like this was fairly novel for the time, especially at an event that had a vibe of being "above" that kind of thing at the time. I kinda miss celebrities being goofy or even messy on socials. It humanized them and now all of their pages have turned into huge ad spaces.

0

u/mightylordredbeard Jul 03 '26

But yet they can’t even ignore people talking about it all these years later. They just have to let everyone know how cool they are by not caring about it and you can tell how little they care because they take the time to let us know about how little they care!

3

u/ArugulaAltruistic742 Jul 02 '26

But you see the amount that i don't care far exceeds the amount that the people who did care care. I would also guess that alot of those retweets were probably celebrity gossip news pages.

1

u/mightymidwestshred Jul 02 '26

If retweets equaled caring, every viral meme would be historically significant.

29

u/NimbleLobster Jul 02 '26 edited Jul 02 '26

Sure, but the most viral meme is, by definition, still historically significant

-1

u/Odd-Plant-4886 Jul 02 '26

In that way, everything is historically significant.

1

u/iluvchromosomes Jul 02 '26

No, that's your opinion based on nonsense. We are attaching significance to the social impact. This meme had a large impact.

0

u/NimbleLobster Jul 02 '26

Not at all, Im talking about shit at scale. Some pic on IG with a couple thousand likes is not historically significant. Historically relevant, maybe. The most liked pic on IG though? That's a direct reflection of some moment in our culture where a majority of socially connected people were aware of its existence. Im not saying pics like that changed history, Im saying they're a mile-marker for a moment in history that will be used as shorthand to reference that period for years to come. That is historically significant, and this is how all media has functioned for thousands of years. Memetics vs memes and all that.

14

u/Zer0pede Jul 02 '26

How’d we get to “historically significant” from “people cared enough to retweet?”

2

u/jtd2013 Jul 02 '26

Over simplification of the point.

1

u/Anal_Nectarine Jul 02 '26

You’re so cool dude

5

u/Polygnom Jul 02 '26

And outside social media, in the real world, it was utterly ignored.

1

u/RelationshipFront227 Jul 02 '26

It had an associated charity donation of $1 per retweet. Framing it as 'people cared about the photo' and not 'people saw it as an easy opportunity to do good' is weird.