But if overexposure is partially to blame for their demise, it certainly doesn’t tell the whole story. While internet memes categorically remain alive and well, individual memes do seem to die off faster than in Poole’s “good ol’ days.” They just don’t last like they used to: Compare the lifespans of say, Bad Luck Brian to Arthur’s clenched fist or confused Mr. Today, many of the internet’s favorite memes come from fringe or ostracized communities-often from black communities, for whom oddball humor has long been an art form. Contrary to what Poole and Baio implied, weird humor and memes are hardly the exclusive domain of Redditors or the mostly white tech bros who populated ROFLCon. Increased mobility and access across platforms and communities has brought to the surface some of the funniest and weirdest content the web has ever known. But is that really why memes die?Īnd in 2017, it’s clear that the doomsday crew vastly underestimated internet users’ creativity. Our overextended attention leads to an obvious explanation for meme death: We are so overstimulated that what brings us joy cannot even hold our focus for long. Our devices are “engineered to chip away at concentration” in what’s called the “attention economy,” writes Bianca Bosker in The Atlantic, and apps such as Twitter keep us anxious for the next big thing in news, pop culture, or memes. “Everybody knows” a generation raised on feeds and apps must have focus issues, and that assessment isn’t totally false. Even as a concept such as “average attention span” is not incredibly useful to psychologists who study attention (different tasks require different attention strategies), there’s a general assumption that this number is shrinking. While tracing the origin of any individual meme requires a separate trip down the rabbit hole, it makes sense to assume that memes die because people get tired of them. The recent “Disloyal Man Walking With His Girlfriend and Looking Amazed at Another Seductive Girl,” the title of the stock image shot by photographer Antonio Guillem, just made the rounds a few months ago.Īt a glance-even from a digital native-meme death seems like a much less mysterious phenomenon than meme birth. The constancy of this narrative may be observed in any number of internet memes in recent memory, from the incredibly short-lived ( Damn Daniel, Dat Boi, Salt Bae, queer Babadook) to the ones seemingly too perfect to ever perish like Harambe the gorilla and Crying Jordan.