Our collective uncertainties and anxieties encapsulated neatly into those leading text-bottom text macro image WFH memes reassured us that we were not in this alone.
Origin story
Very first things initially: what is a meme? The Oxford Student’s Dictionary defines memes as “an image, a video, a piece of text, etc., that is passed extremely rapidly from one Internet user to another, often with slight changes that make it funny”.
There are some conclusive beginnings of this phenomenon, which psychologist and memeticist Susan Blackmore attributes to the poster boy of atheism, Richard Dawkins in her book, Meme Machine
Child of the Web
The form and name might have come from in Duchamp’s studio and at Dawkins’ desk, however the meme is genuinely the kid of the Web. Around the year 2000, when most xennials were still battling with their papas to get that dial-up connection, odd message boards had actually begun spawning funny short format content that would end up being the precursor of memes.