The Whale Swims On

I thought it'd be interesting, since the semester is ending, to go back and find out what has become of the iphone whale meme that we discussed in class a while back. In doing so, I went on the trusty Knowyourmeme page and found the following results....

While the peak of the meme occurred in early September, it still has some momentum and prominence in the meme world...even experiencing a small spike in search query's over the past couple of days according to knowyourmeme.

The live Twitter feed for the iphone whale even has an iteration as recently as 4 hours before this blog post was created. What I find most interesting, and ridiculous, and hilarious, however, is what there is to be seen under the derivatives section of the page...

And to further compound the ridiculous nature of the meme, people started creating iterations such as these....

After having a class discussion, and deciding that this meme's lifespan would not be very long, I think it is safe to say that we were sadly mistaken. With no end in sight, the iPhone whale continues its selfish demand for attention, and it would appear that the sky is the limit, for the mobile Free Willy.

Accounting produces memes, too: Unit III Blogger Assignment

For our accounting class, there was a Facebook group established in which people would gather to help each other out on the practice problems and arrange time to study together, etc. As the semester wore on, and people became attuned to the quirky habits of our teacher, a meme arose in which a background picture of him was coupled with one of his goofy sayings. It started out with this image macro that a student in the Facebook group made...

After the original image, many others were created in which people merely copied this background photo, and added on their own commentary. A few others are....

The last two, as well as many of the iterations not posted here, refer to our class custom of playing lemonade tycoon to learn useful insight about the accounting material we were being introduced to. People were so taken aback by the teacher's jovial approach to teaching that a meme arose in response. The target audience is only people who have been in one of this teacher's classes, since it would be pointless to attempt to understand the meme if you could not identify with the commentary about the teacher's style.

This is an excellent example of the life and death of a nanostory. I believe that this meme will be abandoned very soon since the semester is coming to an end, and people will no longer have a reason to get on the Accounting Facebook group, signaling the death of this meme as it exists within that conversation. Isolated iterations might no doubt still pop up, but I would argue that the meme has seen its peak popularity and will now start to quietly vanish into the troves of other memes who have experienced the same fate.