Facebombing: The Birth of a Meme
Posted by Don_Caldwell on Monday, Oct 11, 2010
A recent meme that crossed over into the world of old media was the “Cigar Guy” from the Mark Pain photograph of Tiger Woods at the 2010 Ryder Cup. It starred a ginger wig and fake mustache wearing investment analyst standing in the gallery with a cigar dangling from his open mouth. The meme was born when a “facebomb” image was posted to Reddit, and received enough votes to make it to the front page.
A “facebomb” image usually consists of an unedited photograph at the top, a cropped view of one isolated individual directly below, and an uncropped view at the bottom with the individuals face copied over everyone else’s. These images have been resonating fairly well on Reddit lately with posts titled “am I doing this right”.
There has been a fairly steady progression towards this type of meme. One of the first to use this four panel format was the Brazilian born Tenso: an image that uses a similar zoomed in view, but with the word “Tenso” imposed over the isolated subject. Combine this with the classic Face swapping technique, and you have a “facebomb”.
Internet communities love this kind of participatory culture. They aren’t very difficult to create with today’s photo editing software, and are very easy to share, but what purpose do they serve?
Some memes fill the same niche as in-jokes; they are signals of belonging to a group.
An inside joke works to build community, sometimes but not always at the expense of outsiders. Part of the power of an inside joke is that its audience knows that there are those who do not understand the joke.
However, Cigar Guy was appreciated by a much wider audience than the Reddit community in which it was born. Does this mean we are moving away from the exclusivity of in-jokes on the Internet?
As online communities become more important, it is clear that we will continue to see new types of participatory memes. What isn’t clear is whether we are moving towards more exclusion, or less.
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