what do?

While I believe our presentation and proposal went quite well last week, we had much to consider after being proposed the challenge of writing from an American perspective, for a predominantly American audience. This meant reconsidering some of the Australian entertainment blogs and websites we had initially brainstormed in the first week. However after some analysis of these Australian publications, I feel that Vulture is still the best fit given our topic, approach, writing style and target audience. 

The style and general vibe of these Australian entertainment and pop culture publications are more relaxed, informal and conversational. The topics of their articles are quite often obscure and at times trivial which I see as being catered to more niche audiences with a particular sense of humour and really specific knowledge of certain topics (their perspective is somewhat against the conventional and the mainstream). I'm also not a fan of the way many of these articles include swearing, and I feel this would discredit our perspectives and does not align with our 'high' approach to a 'low culture topic'. 

Thus I still feel that Vulture.com is the perfect 'home' our web feature even though we face the challenge of writing for American audiences. Given that the meme genre is universal and that they have spread rapidly throughout the western world, I believe that this would still be achievable. As Caleb said last Thursday, meme audiences hold cultural capital and do not necessarily need to live/ exist in a specific physical environment to be able to appreciate and understand the references. 

For example, the meme 'The Rent is Too Damn High' was adapted from Jimmy McMillan's political party slogan in November 2010 when he ran for the New York state's gubernatorial election. Although I have absolutely no idea what that gubernatorial election is, I still understood the humour from the original video. The idea around most memes is not about whether you understand the source reference, but more so relates to the feeling that stems out of that particular meme. In this case it is about intense frustration about a certain subject - for McMillan it was the rent being too damn high, for me it is the amount of university work being too damn high. That is the reason why internet memes can be transferred so easily from one country/ culture to another - because they are easily adapted to suit people's social experiences.

Obviously this means we might not be able to include references to Sydney Uni memes/ Law School memes/ Citirail memes, but this trend of Facebook University meme pages emerged from the United States (the earliest known account was the International University of Miami in October of last year) so we should be able to find plenty of examples to use to describe our point about how they connect people through specific shared feelings and experiences. Also Jonno and I discussed briefly today about how the Aboriginal Facebook memes page would still be a newsworthy/ relevant example to international audience (Huffington Post from the UK reported the issue) as it could easily have occurred in any other country.

I'm still set on Vulture being the host publication for our feature, and I haven't been able to find anything of a similar quality based in Australia. I'm willing to run with Vulture despite the challenge of writing for an audience that we may not be a part of, but feel free to make any other suggestions/ objections in the comments below.