Soapbox: University meme pages are trash. Don’t @ me.
By Adam Hilario | Nov 24 2018
The problem arises due to the fact that in the contemporary meme-based social economy, the market for university centric memes has become inundated with Facebook and Instagram meme accounts based in a sizeable portion of universities globally, causing the value per meme to depreciate. As a result, pages are forced to produce substandard memes in order to stay relevant, an act which has colloquially described as “s**t-posting.”Traditionally, art, and I use the term “art” loosely, operates in a laissez-faire system, from which new pages can emerge naturally, with the consent of the consumer through follows and likes, without interference from established bodies. This further compounds the issue and is aided by the low barrier of entry into the meme-economy. The means of production and distribution can be carried out by anybody. This is advocating for an oligarchy on memes, in which production is restricted to the most popular pages from each university, but only to point out that it becomes increasingly difficult to find quality content from the increasing “normie memes” that are prevalent amongst these communities.Thus, in an effort to stand out in a flooded economy, rather than taking the risk of diversifying their assets by developing some semblance of a nuanced critique, pages will bank on memes that were successful in the past until the proverbial cow has been milked dry, yet still expect milk. This results in lazy and uninspired memes of a begrudged administrator laser eyes, or a common dogma touted by the student class put in alternating case above a warped image of Spongebob Squarepants at the risk of creating disillusionment among their audience and showcasing an aptitude for photoshop over an understanding of the student. Alternatively, pages will often genericise their assets to reach a broader, and therefore more profitable, audience to the point where they no longer serve the original students they were created for, alienating their audience and relegating their own page to redundancy.When legitimate creativity lacks, pages take the nationalistic approach of targeting the “out group” (i.e. another university’s student body) instead of providing a legitimate satirical critique of the issues plaguing the student body in an effort to rile up their base. This is inherently problematic because it implies that a demographic of peoples that attend a university are somehow inferior, assuming their intellectual prowess, or lack thereof, prevents them from attending the original poster’s university rather than taking into account potential socio-economic factors that contribute to a student’s reason for not attending.There is no solution to the impending crisis when this meme bubble eventually bursts other than to perhaps slow down.