At 3 a.m. last Friday morning, sophomore John McCullough was sitting in his dorm room in front of his laptop browsing the Inter net (as most of us do in the wee hours of the night) when he decid ed he was going to make a home for an internet trend at Longwood University. In just five days, Long wood Memes has 1,346 likes.
Memes – pronounced "meems" – is actually a broad term defined by dictionary.com as "a cultural item that is transmitted by repeti tion in a manner analogous to the biological transmission of genes."
But in internet terms, according to squidoo.com, an internet meme is "an internet phenomenon, or a meme, is an image, video, phrase or simply an idea that spreads from one person to another seem ingly for no logical reason at all."
There are too many different kinds of memes to list here. A few that you may be familiar with are "lol cat, "o rly?" owl, bachelor frog and socially awkward penguin. Essentially, the idea is to put big block words over an image, that usually don't suit that image, that makes it even funnier than if the words stood alone. It's that easy, and McCullough decided to start a Facebook page that included memes with some of Longwood's most relatable little grievances that most students experience on a weekly basis.
When asked why he decided to start making Longwood Memes, McCullough said, "I saw a bunch of other schools that had them, and I thought it was a funny idea. I also noticed that the memes on those websites weren't very good. So I wanted to take the initiative to start Longwood's."
Most of the memes posted on the page are done by McCullough, but students can also make their own at any "make-your-own meme" site, like quickmeme.com or memegenerator.net.
One concern that was raised was if someone posted something of fensive about someone else and if the page started to move in a Col lege ACB direction, would Mc Cullough would start filtering the memes that were posted?
"If I had to, yes," he said. "No one has posted anything very of fensive yet, but if they did I'm pretty sure I would take it down."
McCullough hopes that prospec tive students see the Longwood Memes page and think that Long wood and its students are able to make fun of themselves. "I hope that incoming freshmen will see it and think that we have a good sense of humor, or sort of learn about Longwood."
Longwood Memes is grow ing in popularity by the day, and McCullough doesn't plan to stop anytime soon. "It's just fun, that's all."
