Meme+Proposal

A Meme (De)Construction

After watching several videos hosted on Know Your Meme http://knowyourmeme.com/, I begin to see a pattern in meme construction. Many of them that go viral regardless of whether they are an image, a photo or a video, all have some quirkiness in them. Most are done by or are about a certain niche of people, and yet attract attention waaaay outside of those circles.For example, I managed to watch "Interior Semiotics" more than 5 times (I suppose views on You tube are counted by different IP addresses, however even that might not be a true indication of number of unique visitors....) because...I am not sure why. It is by far the strangest video I have ever seen, and yet I thought I have some understanding of art, CAN appreciate art, well contemporary at least and most importantly of all can RELATE to art- there is a big NO to to all three in this case.

The video reached **857,943** views on YouTube, a 7:42 minutes performance of a girl in front of a college audiences. She is opening a can of spaghetti, in strict silence, up until one point where she delivers a nihilistic speech about "everything is nothing, nothing has meaning and nothing makes sense-everything is shit in this world". She builds a very tensic atmosphere by spreading the can contents all over her shirt until completely of the blue, with no prior warning, not at least implicit cuts a piece off her pants, fingers herself and pies in front of the crowd.

Back to the question of why viral? One reason I though of is curiosity, people are curious about other people, there is an entire science behind, social psychology (Gabe?) Another major one, people like to SHARE things, more so certain people have reputation as opinion leaders online thus they can be a significant factor in increasing popularity of memes. The network effect is one obvious, as well as micro communities- people affiliating themselves with others with similar tastes.Last but not least, the remix spirit is important because many people who are creative, have the time and means to make a parody out of the old.

A job interview failure-hilarious!

The idea is to create a single panel comic to illustrate a job interview situation. Usually, interviewees invest a lot of time and effort in trying to impress the recruiter in order to get the job. However, since this is a situation in which high level psychology takes place, it is often tricky for the recruiter to make sense of verbal and nonverbal cues to decide how suitable someone is for a position, the tension is huge. Also, I think job interviews have become the second worst "out of comfort ground to perform", only with talent show auditions preceding them. As a result, incumbents often reach out for outrageous solutions in order to grab attention from employers. Our hero, after going trough the standardized questionnaire and a feeling that he/she is not going to get the job, decides to make a proposal to the interviewer:puts a jar of salsa on their desk with the line "if you give me the job, I will spice things up".