The girl leaned over, head in her hands, Virginia stickers on her face. But as the camera zoomed in on her, she sat up straight, tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and put on a big smile.
Yahoo Sports College Football was all over the scene. They tweeted the video with the caption "oh no I'm about to become a meme."
Could you really blame her? If she's a college football fan, she's surely seen the various other fans that have become memes over the years. Perhaps the best-known example is Michigan alum Chris Baldwin, whose "surrender cobra" when Michigan had trouble with the snap in 2015 has endured. His reaction in the moment, of course, was authentic. But now, Baldwin has little ownership of his own moment in the spotlight. Baldwin's face has appeared in tweets about various sports teams, politics, news, everything. He's emblazoned on t-shirts donned by Michigan State fans. He's thrown out the first pitch at "Michigan vs. Michigan State night" at a minor league baseball game. Now a software developer, Baldwin told ESPN that hundreds of fans have stopped to take pictures of him.
Here's the thing about memes: People love them, because they're created as authentic slices of life. But it certainly wasn't Baldwin's choice to end up plastered all over the internet. And once he was, he lost ownership of how his image was used.
Baldwin's case was fairly tame, as far as memes go, mostly used in sports contexts that are all in good fun. But that's not always the case — take Pepe the Frog, once created as a symbol of frat bro culture. Users on 4chan began using it as a symbol of white supremacy, and something that was once harmless has now been designated as a hate symbol by the Anti-Defamation League.
Memes are, in a way, reappropriating someone’s identity and fitting it to the internet’s whims. On the internet, we tell ourselves, anyone can be anything. Regular people can become famous. But if the cost is losing ownership over our own identity and our own authentic reactions, is it worth it?
"To have (Pepe) evolve into what it is today, it's a nightmare," Pepe's creator, Matt Furie, told the LA Times. "It's kind of my worst nightmare ... to be tangled in forever with a symbol of hate."
There are people now who don't know Pepe as anything other than a hate symbol. Now, Furie is forever associated with a cause he condemns.
Even when memes aren't utilized for hate, they can still have lasting effects on their subjects.
image from from: https://img.huffingtonpost.com/asset/5bae30142200005700dadefe.jpeg?ops=scalefit_630_400_noupscale
Another popular meme, the College Freshman, is based off the image of a generic-looking white boy in a University of New Hampshire sweatshirt, sitting on a picturesque campus and wearing earbuds. It’s the perfect representation of the naïve college freshman we all once were. But the College Freshman isn’t actually a slice of real life. Griffin Kiritsy did a photoshoot for Reader’s Digest that was meant to be as generic and college-y as possible. It was completely staged.
It’s unclear how Kiritsy feels about his place in history; in a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” chat in 2012, Kiritsy responded in a very joking manner, saying that many of the things the meme was used for did actually happen to him, even if the meme was manufactured, and that he planned on being the College Freshman until he died.
But in an interview with canyouactually.com in 2019, Kiritsy said, “Little did I know that the f*cking Picasso of photos was coming to frame me for this shot … and I was there while he took 137,000 photos. Talk about committing social suicide as a first semester freshman. F*ck me.”
It seems that Kiritsy struggled with his newfound status while still in college, but later came to terms with it and found it funny. But his differing responses to the question drive home that once his image was out there, he had no control on where it went or how it was used. Kiritsy's photo was used to poke fun of rich, entitled white boys who are just a little clueless. It's easy to imagine how that went over among people who recognized him on campus.
There are, of courses, political memes designed to rally supporters for a certain cause, whether that be on the left or the right. But many memes are inherently amoral and apolitical. Screenshots of fans at college football games and stock photos from college catalogues don't exist to make any kind of statement. Theoretically, once a meme is on the internet, it's in the public domain; anyone can use it for anything. The same meme can be, and frequently is, used in support of a wide range of causes. In this meme, for instance, the words "Pakistan" and "India" are photoshopped over a video clip, certainly not the creators' intention.
Whether creating a meme on an escalating conflict is actually OK is up for debate, a question whose answer depends entirely on who you ask. But there's no doubt political memes are part of the current internet culture. As Elia Rathore wrote in the New York Times, "Memes aren’t inherently bad or good, but they do speak to a cultural moment."
The scary part is that you never know. Memes can be used for good — a girl caught crocheting on camera at a Kansas football was doing it for charity, and revealed as much when she was interviewed about her newfound fame, a wholesome moment through and through. Pepe is the chief example of the opposite. It's not like Pepe was a hate symbol right away, either — it had existed for years before white nationalist groups got ahold of it.
That's just the age we live in. People make jokes online, including memes, to cope with the confusion of our current moment. But as we're just people, trying to make sense of the world around us, so are the the people that provide the source material of those inside jokes.
To become a meme is to suddenly have the internet at large dictate a part of your identity. Many who have become memes are self-aware, essentially reclaiming their identity by using it themselves or creating a follow-up.
Kaileigh Thomas, an LSU student, went viral in 2018 when she gave a death stare to the camera as her team got destroyed by Alabama.
image from https://blacksportsonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Kaileigh-Thomas-Death-Stare.jpg
But in 2019, when LSU got revenge on the Crimson Tide, Thomas made a gif of herself flashing a huge smile to the camera and posted it to Twitter. The tweet currently has over 19,000 likes and nearly 2,000 retweets.
Now, Thomas isn't Sad LSU Girl, she's Smiling LSU Girl — or even the girl who trolled Alabama. Surely, she'll take that. Kiritsy, too, has joked about his status as College Freshman even amid mixed feelings.
Roxanne Chalifoux, a student and piccolo player at Villanova University, had a similar moment to Thomas in 2015, when she was caught on camera crying when her Wildcats were upset in the Sweet Sixteen of March Madness. Bam — instant fame. Chalifoux appeared on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon and even had a "Piccolo Girl" bobblehead made in her honor.
Chalifoux decided to embrace her newfound fame.
"My advice would be to just take it in stride," she said in an interview with SB Nation. "The attention will pass, so it's okay to enjoy the ride while it lasts! I'm a pretty shy person, but I've tried being open about my experiences. For some reason the video and pictures resonated with people, and I've gotten a lot of amazing support."
One year later, Chalifoux was in attendance as her team made the Final Four and then won the national championship. Meme reclaimed.
The appeal of memes lies in their relatability: Surrender Cobra, or College Freshman, or LSU Death Stare, could've been any of us. But it's also precisely that thought that allows us to project ourselves onto these people and use their images the way we think of them.
Does that make memes bad? Not really; after all, they are so often the lens through which we view the world. Maybe their popularity in itself is an ironic commentary on the lack of privacy in the digital age. But as the Virginia fan in the first clip showed, the ubiquitous practice of sharing memes isn't without its consequences. The memes are self-aware now. We know when it might happen.
The camera pans in on us. We realize we're doing something the internet would consider memeworthy.
Then, we tuck our hair behind our ear and smile, like an inside joke only the camera knows.
"That could've been me," we think when we see the internet's new favorite thing. Then we flash the same smile and share it anyway.