Memes are one of the most popular form of culture nowadays. See how the father of Rickroll, Rick Astley takes over the Internet in just a matter of weeks and keeps his fame 'til today.
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Memes are everywhere. Browse on any social media, and you will see one of the cheesy meme that has been around for ages. In case you don’t know what memes are, it is an item spread within a culture in the form of imitation. You may wonder, people do forget a piece of news in just one or two weeks, including the scandals of the hottest stars in the city. How can Internet memes keep its popularity for months, or even years?
Talking about memes, we can’t miss out on arguably the greatest meme of all time — Rickroll, featuring the pop song “Never Gonna Give you Up” by the English singer Rick Astley. Because of this meme, Rick Astley is back to popularity once again after his retirement from the music scene. Originated from the forum 4chan in May 2007, it all started with a forum thread in its video game section. While the users were all hoping to watch the trailer of the most anticipated video game at that time, instead they caught themselves watching a music video of a young guy singing in a deep voice and dancing awkwardly. Apparently, the forum users found that video interesting, so they decided to share this meme to other people using the same method. This form of benign phishing exploded in number in just a short period of time. Other than the original link bait meme, a mind-blowing amount of extended memes, like the ones incorporating its song lyrics into other pop songs, are created for Rickroll since then. Even in 2021, there are still a numerous amount of new Rickroll memes created each day — Rickroll never dies, it will only multiply.
So, what makes memes like Rickroll so long-lasting? The key lies on the word “participation”, and meme is a part of participatory culture by nature. Participatory culture refers to the concept where the general public does not only act as the consumer in a culture, but they can also act as a contributor. Different from the typical one-way consumer culture, such as published books and newspapers, participatory culture usually have relatively low barriers for engagement. For example, to take part in the Rickroll fever, all you have to do is to share a link to other people. Also, there are other ways to participate (e.g. comment, share creation). Given the low barrier and diverse method of participation, more and more people jumped into this collaborative work to provide new content, prolonging the phenomenon.
Through participation, memes have become a medium of connection for people all around the world, offering laughter and resonance universally. Compared to other forms of participatory culture, like blogs and social media posts, memes are much more flexible. It provides a lot of creative freedom to participants, and its usage is so extensive that it could appear literally anywhere, like in a comment section, in blogs (here) or even in the form of message stickers. That's the reason why memes can possibly take over the world.
Learn more about participatory culture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
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