Imperial Memes: a post mortem

Late on a Tuesday night, a monster was born. One that would increase exponentially with size; prove that Imperial students, for all their academic brilliance, follow the same behavioural patterns in a crowd as anyone else; and leave many of us sleep-deprived during our 9 o’clock lectures the following day.

The phenomenon fizzled out as soon as it exploded onto our screens: most of the activity was within the first 24 hours; another 24 hours later and the group’s activity had mostly ceased. I know a few people have looked upon it and wondered how something like this hasn’t happened before: there are a huge number of jokes to be made from the relatively mundane gripes about everything from Imperial’s email system to the shortcomings of various campus eateries. Nothing remotely insightful, but things that people can relate to. Indeed, upon the afternoon/evening when everyone was done with lectures, serendipitously on a Wednesday when everyone is free after 12, the “memes” came thick and fast, rapidly expending any joke that is vaguely Imperial-related or funny. I put the salient word in quotation marks because technically these templates with text aren’t a meme – a meme is only formed if it becomes popular and spreads. You can’t just “create” one.

By Thursday, the Facebook page was dominated by increasingly wordy pictures, reposts and somewhat nonsensical contributions – signs that the low-hanging fruit such as the sex ratio or Imperial’s workload have long since been eaten. It takes insight, effort, or considerable luck that you’ve stumbled upon an observation nobody else has in order to be funny. Once all the easy jokes have been made, you quickly find yourself scraping the barrel since there’s no new input material. Jokes are not a renewable resource. On a positive note, among the convoluted additions there were several genuinely witty ones that were borne from an earnest attempt to be original. A lot of people simply don’t care enough to spend a good hour thinking up something clever, so they fart out the first thing that comes to mind so they can be part of this fad. Fair enough, it’s not something to be taken seriously, and if this annoys you then you need to chill out: being unfunny is asymptomatic of any remotely pathological behaviour.

Two weeks on from the page's inception, and activity has slowed to a trickle

Two weeks on from the page’s inception, and activity has slowed to a trickle. You still get the odd Slowpoke who completely neglects that someone else might have actually taken the mickey out of Huxley building’s labyrinthine layout already, but now most of the posts seem to be made by those who make a genuine effort to make a new joke, since it’s no longer a bandwagon to jump upon as quickly as possible any more – which encouraged people to slam on their keyboards and crack out a “meme” as quickly as possible.

One of the real “memes” in the Imperial Memes page turned out to be making jokes about the eastern Asians at Imperial, which progressively ventured into the realms of outright racism. In theory, there is no problem with making a joke about a stereotype as long as it ends with that. However, issues can arise with the very existence of a mild “racist” joke that might well be quite clever and innocuous within the right context: there is the danger that without any sort of criticism or way of keeping things in check then increasingly more offensive comments become acceptable. I suspect this is how time after time you see once-hilarious comedians fall from grace: their material slowly adopts a tinge of blue, slowly enough for their audiences to get used to it, until one day someone who’s never watched any of their shows complains to Ofcom and highlights what’s now become Klansman-level racism. There’s no danger of this slippery slope if you’re taking a stab at faulty College facilities – despite my sincerest hope that the new Library doors can feel it every time they’re cursed at, their marginalisation will never be a problem. Even the inter-departmental snobbery that as a physicist I dabble in is fine: there is nowhere for “engineering is just applied physics” to develop into anything more sinister than light-hearted banter. You don’t need to resort to racial stereotypes to be humorous; and considering their potential for corruption it scarcely seems worth it for a hundred or so likes on Facebook.

Imperial Memes were good, harmless fun for about a day: there were definitely a lot of laughs to be had, before “ME RIVE IN RIBRARY” set the standard for humour and jokes being recycled. Like most things on the internet, the whole thing mercifully burnt out just as quickly as it came to life.