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Analysis
I’ve been mostly offline for the last week while traveling. The first time I opened Twitterin a few days, what I saw made me wonder if I’d been away for longer. People were posting what they called “self-drawn memes”—illustrations of famous memes that looked like they were reproduced on Microsoft Paint.
“Y’all using these self drawn photos of memes as actual memes is so demented,” one user said, receiving such memes in the replies.
The self-drawn memes serve as a test for how Extremely Online a person is—if you can recognize the meme, you’ve been online too long. Unfortunately, I recognize the majority of them. There’s Olivia Wilde Nodding, Sabrina Brier’s “Oh!”, Scared Kermit, and Abby Lee Miller laughing, among others.
“Imagine showing these self drawn memes to someone outside of twitter,” another user said, along with four images of self-drawn memes.
The self-drawn memes are reminiscent of early internet culture, when people shared earnest memes that sometimes included an animal photo or a block of text over an image. Most of the memes being circulated on Twitter would be considered “good” drawings. But that’s the point. The fewer details, the more fun it is to guess the original image.
Why it matters
Twitter meme culture took a nosedive earlier this year, when Twitter changed its access to its API, severing many popular accounts in the process who didn’t want to pay for a subscription, including bots that posted photos of a specific animal each day.
The Twitter “for you” feed has also changed what people see on their timelines. So it’s great that something weird has emerged on Twitter during a time when people are not posting in the same way or looking for alternative apps.
