Analysis


 * “Don’t Feed The Hipsters”**


 * Analysis:**

Prior to starting the production of our meme, we conducted some research by looking at how memes are made, what forms a meme, and what makes it memetic. We also looked at different types of memes, including images and videos. We decided on making an image document instead of a video because we are aiming for a specific target audience instead of focusing on the mass population.

After thorough research and thought, we have decided to create our meme based on the theme of “Hipsters”. Hipsters are a group of people who are usually in their twenties to thirties. Hipsters strive and aim to look and act “cool”. They usually shop at vintage or thrift stores such as Value Village, Goodwill and Salvation Army, or they purchase garments that look vintage. Hipsters usually wear tight-fitting skinny jeans, old school sneakers such as the ones from Vans or Converse, tight V-neck T-shirts or wife-beaters, thick-rimmed glasses and colorful clothing garments in general. The target audiences that we have chosen to focus on are the individuals that find the whole “Hipster” lifestyle and subculture amusing, over the top, overrated and exaggerated.

Moreover, Hipsters often listen to the Indie-rock genre of music, or music that they think are “exclusive” and not meant to be produced for the mass audience. Hipsters like the “underground” scene because it differentiates them from the mass population and other individuals in their age group. The main characteristic of Hipsters is that they base their lifestyle, taste, social attitudes and opinions on what they consider as cool, unique or different. They reject the idea of mainstream culture, music, attitudes, clothing and trends.

We used social media websites such as Tumblr and Flickr to launch our meme to our designated target audience because these websites are becoming increasingly popular among users that often use social media forms. Tumblr and Flickr allow users to upload images, GIF files, videos and music. Hence, Tumblr and Flickr were the two main outlets that we chose to launch our meme in because many image memes are published on these two websites. By using Tumblr and Flickr, more individuals will be able to see our meme and we will be able to achieve the goal of making our meme viral. We also passed on the Tumblr account we have created for our meme to people on Facebook and Twitter.

We chose to use “Don’t Feed the Hipsters” as our main slogan for our meme because of a photograph that we saw online while researching. The photograph was a simple sign that said, “Don’t Feed the Hipsters”, located in Brooklyn, New York. We thought that this slogan was well fit for our theme, and we decided to use this slogan, and create a new meme about Hipsters.

We chose to use a baby as the base figure in our Hipster meme because it is a well-proven fact that babies are cute, and make for an automatic meme. Moreover, because babies possess the cute factor, Internet users will be interested in looking at our meme. Furthermore, it has become a fact that teenagers such as high school students are beginning to act and look like Hipsters. This means that the age group for this Hipster subculture is increasingly expanding into a wider demographic range.

The idea is to tell people to not let their children turn into Hipsters and to show the fact that there are a large number of Hipsters around us today. The Hipster baby wears big headphones to show that Hipsters listen music that are “exclusive” and unique, and wears thick-rimmed glasses because that is a symbol for classifying Hipsters.

We created seven images for this meme to create diversity to illustrate the idea of “Don’t Feed the Hipsters”. We incorporated different captions to create the humorous factor, and used different colors on the babies’ wife-beater top to create diversity within the seven images. All of the seven memes consists of the same background and the same baby to create a pattern and to illustrate the fact the theme that we have chosen can be recreated into another meme. We plan on expanding this meme by uploading the original image and allow different Internet users to design their own version of a Hipster meme. Users will have the opportunity to change the caption, add objects that are “Hipster” related, and generate their own humorous meme that mocks the Hipsters.

In conclusion, for this meme project, we have incorporated humor and cuteness into our meme, which are two of the main qualities that makes a meme memetic. We used the Hipsters subculture as our theme for the meme, with the slogan of “Don’t Feed the Hipsters.” Our meme was passed on and spread in the Internet effectively through social media forms such as Tumblr, Facebook, Flickr and Twitter to our designated audience. Lastly, we used the same images and designed different versions of our meme to create diversity and variety for our topic, and allow other users to recreate their own versions of "Don't Feed the Hipsters."