Cars, Politics, and Memes
The past month has been a real eye opener for me. Every day I go either on to Facebook; Twitter or even Instagram and see these Memes that will either make me chuckle or roll on the floor laughing so hard. Every day I have a notification from Ifunny, this is an app that is a way to post Memes and hope you are one of twenty that are posted out of hundreds of thousands Memes that are posted in a day, and these notification is the twenty that are featured. These are there the twenty that mostly have the best Kairos, or are just the most favorite Memes. Well the past month has taught me that creating funny Memes is an art and is severely underrated talent. I am a double major, Automotive Engineering Technology and Mechanical Engineering Technology so my Memes have to do with quick remarks about cars. People talk about what they know best and with myself that would be cars but with politics I care to not talk about them because I do not have a strong view on politics, so making jokes about it was a bit out of my comfort zone but using politics made them funnier and more relevant. I tried to create Memes that would appeal to people who share the same love of cars as I do, but still find humor in politics.
Figure 1
So in light of recent political Memes and just basic knowledge of what is happening with the political race we all know college students as president because he promised free college. Well this is true or some because yes that does sound amazing but if that happens then college students that work on their cars will no longer have loan money to buy parts for their cars. For this first Meme (see Figure 1) I used logos and pathos. Logos has to do with logic or reasoning, well from the statements you can reason that if school is free then I will spend my loan money on my car. Pathos has to do with beliefs, well talking about politics has to do with beliefs and people have strong feelings towards politics. I also use adaptation in this Meme because I used a popular Meme image and re-purposed it to justify the enthymeme. The use of enthymeme is here because the conclusion of actually spending the loan this way is unclear.
Figure 2
For my first Meme I was unsure where to post it. So I decided to post it to the Meme creator that I used to create it (see Figure 2). As you can see by the hundred views and only three vote ups that it was not very successful here. I did not meet my attended audience of car lovers. This was the first ever Meme that I have posted so I did not expect it to be too successful but I figured it would be better than only three people liking it. I then adjusted where i posted it for my next Meme.
Figure 3
For my next Meme I was unsure about whether to sick to my original Meme creation plan of politics and cars, so I decided to try just a car Meme. As you can tell I absolutely love Subaru Imprezas, I drive one myself. It is common car logic that Impreza’s are expensive cars to maintain, and expensive to perform upgrades on, but to the common person this is unknown. I used a visual narrative technical to tell my audience about that its like to own and drive a Subaru. The last image here, “What I Really Drive”, helps support the adaptation fallacy, this helps the reader draw the conclusion that Imprezas’ are expensive and hard to own.
Figure 4
For this Meme post I kept the same intended audience, but I changed where I posted it. I posted it to a page that I am apart of on Facebook (see Figure 4), which is just a page where we talk about our cars and find new cars. This being a page about cars I assumed that my friends on the page would find this funny, but as you can see with the two likes that they did not find it too funny. So for my last Meme I went back to my original idea of cars and politics with an audience of car lovers and people who love jokes about politics.
Figure 5
Third and final Meme is when I used a kairotic which uses a very relevant event to help support an argument. My kairotic event here is the recent news about Donald Trump wanting to build a wall on the United States and Mexican border. This supported my argument by helping the adaptation fallacy that most of the car parts at Autozone are quote on quote, “hecho en Mexico” (see Figure 5). This is also helps the idea that idea we cut ties with Mexico then our economy might suffer some.
Figure 6
For this last Meme I again posted it to the car page that I am apart of (see Figure 6). With this Meme I dropped sticking to one car manufacturer and stuck to a broader topic because that did not work with the last Meme. When doing this I received more likes for the post not to mention the slight humor in politics joke. What could have made this Meme better would be to post it to bigger pages with a few hashtags to help narrow down the results.
This project was one of the few in college that put me out of my comfort zone. It helped me realize that not all Memes are not just supposed to be funny and that most have an argument that we need to start paying attention too. Making Memes are not an easy task as I have learned over the past few weeks, but it is an art and is actually quite fun! Making the best Meme is not about being the funniest person in the world, it is about learning about kairotic moments and utilizing them to the fullest!
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