Good Guy Greg, Overly Attached Girlfriend, U Mad?, these are all memes which much of the English-speaking population on the Internet would have come across in their browsing of the Interwebs. During our group meeting, I thought of exploring the idea of looking at memes that originate from other societies and cultures outside of the English-speaking world.
Being a regular reader of chinasmack, a website which translates posts that are trending on popular Chinese forums and news websites such as Tianya and QQ into English, one meme which I recall being popular in the Chinese websphere is that of the 'floating Chinese government officials'.
Origins of the floating Chinese government officials Source: Chinasmack
The origins of the meme stem from when the Huili county government website posted a poorly photoshopped photo of three government officials who appeared to be busy inspecting a newly paved road (and also happened to be floating above it, what sorcery is this?!).
Not long after, Chinese Internet web users caught on to the failed PR attempt and posted it on forums which were met with reactions of disgust, anger and amusement, leading web users to making their own improvements to the image as seen below.
Chinese Government officials parodied Source: Chinasmack
What struck me was that even in a repressive society such as China where the media, including the Internet (see Great Firewall of China) is tightly controlled, memes like this that poke fun at the government manage to slip past the censors.
This example also highlights the universality of memes, from memes of floating Chinese government officials (same thing happened in the Philippines) to memes about Mitt Romney, societies as opposite and different as China and America can find a commonality in memes. Memes unite the world!
1 comments:
I do briefly remember while this was floating around. Hilarious though, I can't believe the officials thought this could pass off as legitimate!
Specifically with visual memes, I think it is easy to translate to different cultures as there are no language barriers to prevent misunderstandings. Like when we looked up Russian memes and parts of it were written in Russian - it would be a) difficult for us to understand and comprehend b) was probably an obscure reference to their culture.
I feel as if any meme were to cross cultural borders it would most definitely have to be visually striking ones. The concept behind this particular one is simple - the fact that it is poorly photoshopped (something that could have occurred in the eastern or western world).
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