Internet+Meme-No+More+Bitches!

=Internet Meme: No more Bitches!=


 * Group Members:**

__ Eric N. Madan - 997117686 __ __ Syed Saad Qaiser - 997075819 __ __ Hassan Waqar - 996962719 __ __ Syed Mustafa Abbas Mahmood - 9971404914 __


 * About Meme:**

Our meme is called “No More Bitches!” In our meme we aim to play a social satire on the relevant issue surrounding everyone all over the world on Homophobia. Our meme consists of a short comic strip of dogs and human sharing the same emotion of having disgust towards the so called “Bitches” with a comic strip consisting of three different situations providing a humorous and social message.

It is similar to the “O RLY” bird and was inspired mostly by the “Advice Dog” meme, “Human Dog” meme and also by the “Broccoli Dog” meme. Our meme is inspired by the “O RLY” bird meme is a way that this was one of the first meme’s of its time and it was essentially a pictorial meme. It used a picture of an animal (Bird/Owl) coupled with some text and our meme is also using the same technique to captivate its audience. Our meme is similar to the “Advice Dog” meme in a way such as the advice dog meme first started off in an extremely innocent fashion where the cute image of a dog was paired with some text. In general this meme was used in a way to give people advice in the form of a pseudo guru. Our meme is also similar in this respect, only our meme provides a social message rather than advice. We have still used the concept of dogs as we feel it’s a universal thing that attracts people’s attention. Another one of our inspirations is the “Human Dog” meme, this is a series of videos that shows different dogs dressed up as humans, doing acts such as reading a news paper, eating food on a dining table etc. Our inspiration was that if humans portray a human behaviour or actions, the audience won’t be attracted to it since the outline would become too «usual», on the other hand if an animal (character) would be used, such as the one used in «the human dog» meme, would definitely appeal to audience since its «unusual». Therefore in our meme «No more Bitches», we have followed the same idea to disperse a simple message in an attractive way. It is simply a meme of two Dogs who are portraying an emotion of love or attraction towards the same sex. The “Broccoli Dog” meme is the character in the image, which shows an understandable distance of a dog to broccoli. The message, which this meme conveys, is simple: «I don’t want it». This is done in a very appealing manner by using a pictorial representation to outline a human behaviour of rejecting undesirable things. Similarly our meme also relies on a pictorial representation, which conveys a message of social awareness relating to issues of homosexuality. Moreover we have also used the capacity of a dog to deliver the message. Another inspiration to our meme was the use of comics to express ideas; we have used the capacity of a comic because it is effective in adding an emotional expression. This brings into context McLuhan’s concept of “hot and cold media,” by allowing the viewer to take up more than just a passive role and be more interactive while understanding the context of our meme.


 * Message being conveyed through the meme:**

The message, which we are looking to convey in our meme, is that there is a lot of hatred shown towards homosexuality and people with the said sexual orientation, but what the world does not realise is that homosexuality is not a choice. There are many homosexuals out there who wish they could just choose out of their sexual preference if they could, just so that they don’t have to face the pressure of pseudo-puritanical beliefs within society.


 * Theme:**

The meme uses harsh words in parts to reflect a strong retaliation and a message for society that homosexuals should not be forced to justify their actions. This is done is a very humorous and eye catching fashion. It plays on the genre of social satire. This meme deals with a very relevant and growing issue. Moreover, it does not represent any particular race, religion, society, etc. Instead it uses the capacity of an animal (Dog) to convey a message in a brief and humorous manner. Another point to our theme is how humans were wildly accepting the idea that was initially started by dogs. It also relates to the concept or the saying that “All men are dogs”.


 * Appeal of our meme:**

We have used the trick of having slag (harsh) word in our meme, this was done so as to attract the attention of the masses, however, it is done in such a fashion so that no one is insulted in the process and it does not sound or appear vulgar in any way.


 * Why and how, we developed our Meme:**

The main idea behind our meme was related to the issue of sexuality or sexual orientation. Why we decided this theme in particular is because of 3 prime reasons, firstly; every one can relate to it, secondly; it is already very popular. The third reason is on a personal note, since we all are coming from a different cultural background, this issue is one thing which we all observed, that it is dealt differently in this country and this part of the world and by different I mean it is more vocal, positive and debatable.

Initially what our understanding of meme was, “anything which is stupid enough to go viral”. However while actually creating it, we realized that it has a completely different paradox to it. As per our understating of a meme, to initially begin with we had 2 options. It was only after experimenting and examining our ideas that we came up with this final product. We would discuss the rejected ideas in the later part of the presentation. So as per our understanding in order for a video to go viral, it relies more on humor and less on the message in most of the cases for instance “How can she slap”, “Benni Lava” or “Charlie bit my finger.” But on the other hand a picture meme is reliant more on the message, to make it go viral is up to the creator, how he expresses that message or idea.

Our concept was more message oriented therefore we finally decided to have a pictorial representation in order to express our idea.

This particular meme as we would like to call it “ No more bitches” expresses an emotion that gays do not need to justify their choice or actions to the society, to reflect the harshness we have used the word “Bitch” which also gives a comic touch to it at the same time since these words are primarily coming from “male dogs”, it becomes more eye-catching, acceptable and reduces the bitterness towards feminism.

To make it more expressive we have used the comic speech bubbles, since it is only recently that we discovered the effectiveness of this medium hence we decided to put it into practice.


 * Ideas we rejected:**

There was a hand full of ideas that we rejected before coming up with our final product. The first rejected idea was to make a sexually appealing video, consisting of a collection of pictures in a slide show of female supermodels and celebrities in a revealing attire, ending it with the message of “No more bitches” (our original pictorial representation mentioned later). We came up with this idea on the concept of “sex sells”, however we disapproved it since it was offensive to those individuals more over it would be to explicit to become a presentation in our point of view.

The second idea we rejected was to make a video if a dog performing tricks in order to get a reward. We rejected this idea because there are already a countless number of videos on YouTube where dogs are shown performing tricks. When those didn’t become meme, why would this??? Our idea for the third meme consisted of a personal video where two of our female friends were arguing over an issue. The idea behind this meme was to show how women deal with a situation differently then men. We rejected this idea because we didn’t get the approval of those friends that were in the video. Fourth idea was the one we initially used as our meme, which is quite similar to this one. We decided to back out from our original idea since we thought it was too simple to capture viewer’s interest. Another idea which came to us was completely different than our current meme, we decided to show a video of a fight scene where one guy would be having an intense argument with a gang of “buffed boys”, he would then call up for his back up who would run furiously to his aid, later betraying him by just blatantly running away from the scene, giving the message “I got screwed ”. We had to drop this idea, since by this time we had already uploaded our meme for the presentation. Our initial idea was to show a picture of two dogs looking at each other and saying, “no more bitches”. This idea was then rejected because of its simplicity but it sure did become the basis of our final comic, which we are presenting now.


 * Strategies used to propagate the meme:**

Our meme was uploaded first on the website []. The reason for doing so was so that our hits could be accounted for as this website enables us to know the number of views our meme is able to generate. Our next target was [] ; here we were fortunate to get people with good “karma” on read it to vote up our meme which led to an increased popularity of our meme. Once we had a sense of accomplishment over this domain we decided to venture forward into the murky waters of []. This was a great advantage for us as we were caught dead smack in the middle of a flame war and that lead to a lot of hits for our meme. Another advantage that kept us active on 4chan was that we were able to attract the infamous “troll” this helped in getting a lot of attention towards our meme and keeping us alive on 4chan. After our popularity on 4chan we decided to upload our meme on 9gag, this is a popular forum for pictures and was a good resource for propagating our meme. Finally after our endeavors on these websites we decided to hit the social networks. First we shared the link on Twitter got our friends/followers to re-tweet the link to our meme. Then we moved on to Facebook, here our first strategy was to put it up on each of our personal status and after which we decided to spread it like wild fire on all of our friends’ walls. After we had reached our immediate circle our next aim was to promote our meme outside of it. We went to all the popular pages on Facebook promoting our meme like crazy. The feedback we received for our meme we exponential and were very well received. We then decided to hit the domain of LGBTQ forums, here our meme was very well received and it gained a lot of popularity on it some of these forums such as www.topix.com, forums.bellaonline.com, and etc; where there were relevant discussions on gays and lesbians.


 * Issues faced while promoting our meme:**

The primary issue that is faced with any viral medium on the Internet is the issue of privacy. At first our meme was going on fine. But then once we got the ball rolling it began to pick up speed. The meme was on its way to get viral. Now in our meme we used a personal picture of a friend at first he was fine with us putting it up thinking only a limited number of people would actually view our meme. However once he began to see the extent to which our meme was being spread he then decided to back off. Respecting his wishes we decided the best thing to do ethically/morally speaking was to remove our meme from the Internet. This is a very relevant issue in terms of online privacy and viral campaigns. We too had to face this issue we decided to tread on a moral high ground and remove our meme completely from the Internet but a lot of people with the greed of wanting to get popular do not take this option and it ends up becoming a problem for a lot of people. We went on popular Facebook pages like Metallica, YouTube, etc. and began to promote our meme on their statuses. This is because if their status were liked by a large number of people posting it on their status would send a notification of all these people. The problem with this was after posting on several such pages, Facebook blocked us from commenting on any pages like this. In spite of the fact that people loved our meme, Facebook felt like we were delving in false advertising. We then went ahead to see the error in our ways and stopped using this strategy to promote our meme.


 * Why our meme went viral:**

__ There are a couple of reasons to why the meme went viral. Firstly, Our meme “No more bitches” sheds light on today’s issue of sexuality and its acceptability. Gays, Lesbians and all other sexual orientations have started to be accepted and they are being given more and more right with time. People (straight) usually make funny jokes and comments on gay people and we have used the same idea to support them. Rather than making fun of the gays, we have humorously supported them, which is what makes this more appealing to such social cultures and gained popularity between them. Another view to the meme is for people (men) who have had a bad relationship in their life, which most of the people do. Such individuals related to the meme because when a man has a bad break up and if the girl has used him and has been unfair with him, He is most likely to call her a ‘bitch’ or something similar. People were attracted to this idea of ‘being fed up of such girls’ and saying ‘NO!’ to ‘bitches’. These two messages that the picture portrays are such that anyone, anywhere in the world could relate to either one. Last but not the least, the strategies stated above, that we used played a major role in spreading this on the Internet. __


 * View Count Screen-shot:**


 * Screen shot of Facebook block**__