Thursday, March 1, 2012

Penn State Memes

Memes have been a hot topic of conversation recently. They are dramatizations of the truth for a comical effect. They are persuasive in a way that they use famous characters or quotes and twist them in a way to relate to a certain topic, like student life at Penn State.

For example,

This meme uses an image from the movie Mean Girls where the gym teacher says, "Do not have sex or you will get pregnant and die." The creator of this meme put his own spin on it and came up with a similar quote for the situations that could arise on State Patty's Day. The comparison to the movie makes it more persuasive because most young adults can recall the famous movie and then relate it to PSU, while laughing out loud.




This meme uses the famous quote from Dos Equis commericals: "I don't always drink beer, but when I do I drink Dos Equis" but instead alters it to make fun of how students fall on the tiles near the Forum building. In a way, this meme can make students feel better about their accidents because they can laugh about it and realize that others have tripped in the same area as well. Once again, the famous Dos Equis man and the comical effect of the quote causes the rhetoric of the meme to be successful.

My question is are these memes good for a schools reputation? They are meant to poke fun at unique characteristics of social and university life and maybe meant to laugh at the faults of the school and students. However, it can be possible that memes can have the power for outsiders to judge the school on its bad traits. Memes are usually made about the negative aspects of a school, not positive and in my opinion can cause future problems.


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2 comments:

  1. Matt BrandonMarch 4, 2012 at 2:28 PM

    I think these memes are meant to be a type of wide-spread inside joke for students that attend Penn State. In my opinion, people that would judge a school's reputation based on a meme probably should not be attending college in the first place. The meme imitating the "Most Interesting Man In The World" is a harmless jab at a unique trait at Penn State. The one about State Patty's Day highlights a more serious problem that the school and the town are having to deal with. Most likely it is making fun of how the administration want's the "holiday" to go away and how they are trying to scare the students into not drinking on "State Patty's Day."

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  2. BenjaminMarch 4, 2012 at 8:08 PM

    To be honest, I kind of forgot what movie that first meme was referring to. I thought it was from Superbad. Anyways my bad. That makes sense now. In many ways memes are you used to emphasize rhetoric in our daily lives, but for the most part they are just exaggerations of things that can appeal to be funny. I do not think there is any harm in memes from the stand point of our school's reputation. Maybe if there were to be given to other schools to poke fun at? Moreover, many are other schools are doings memes too. I feel if it stays the way it is now, I feel there will be no effects of it later.

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