1. The three memes I chose (which I will embed below with link) are, the keyboard cat video, tired Spongebob and crying Kardashian. I think the keyboard cat relates to my website topic of piano/re-learning piano fairly well, as thats how I sometimes feel when I practice a song long enough to get good at it, and I’m finally able to play it through. I think the tired Spongebob meme really expresses how I feel when I am either trying to re-learn or learn a hard song on Piano, and it requires more than five minutes of my time and effort. Lastly I think the crying Kardashian meme, is best representative of when I keep making the same mistake on a piano song, at the same spot, and cannot seem to fix it no matter how slow, or how many times I practice it. I think my audience can really connect to all these memes, as all of the experiences I noted are ones that all piano players usually go through at any level of piano playing.

2. So when looking at ideals of my memes, which means the”concept or ideas conveyed” (Mandiberg 123), it is apparent that we think cats playing instruments are funny (as keyboard cat is a really famous one), that Kim Kardashian is dramatic but also funny, and that Spongebob is funny, but also represents a strong piece of our generation.

3. The behaviors of my memes are all similar as they were all taken and uploaded to the internet, and were not edited past the original photography. The keyboard cat originated from “VHS footage” (knowyourmeme) of fatso the performing cat in 1984, the video was subsequently taken by the owner and uploaded to youtube in 2007. The video was not very popular until a famous youtuber put it in one of his videos, two years later, with the phrase, “play me off keyboard cat”. The tired Spongebob meme comes from a “Season 1 episode” (knowyourmeme) of Spongebob, the image was then taken from the episode, and put in a Twitter post, where somebody captioned the picture describing an action that takes very minimal effort, but feels like a lot. The post gained a lot of traction after it went viral and people started making their own versions of the memes which got even more popular than the original. The last meme of Kim Kardashian crying is not actually a specific meme on ‘knowyourmeme’, but is part of a broader group meme, simply known as, Kim Kardashian (lol). Kim Kardashian became so meme’d because she essentially “attained celebrity status for no particular identifiable reason” (knowyourmeme), as being dramatic does not usually justify getting celebrity status. The memes only kept getting more and more popular as her Tv show took off, and as her family was thrown into the spotlight from a wide array of public controversies.

4. All of these memes have the same manifestations in a sense, as none were essentially photo shopped, they are all just the “progression of pixels subsequently uploaded to the Internet” (Mandiberg 123). They can be differentiated though in manifestations, when looking at which parts of the internet they were uploaded to, and if anybody who receives these images on the internet decides to alter them and put them back up. (such as putting music behind the cat video). This can also apply to other memes in general as well, where putting music behind a vanilla video, can still change it’s manifestation completely. Now, if we’re talking about manifestations in other terms (such as how the images manifested in society itself, not just on the internet). We can see that all of the memes I chose, have a broad range of opportunities for humor, as they have all manifested into an explanation for emotions regarding a particular (but still broad) set of circumstances.

5. I think the specific manifestations I chose will really appeal to my audience as they can come to represent a wide variety of circumstances, that as piano players we experience, but are specific enough in nature to be humorous in any one of our situations. Furthermore I think the images I chose are appealing also because as a smaller community, (piano playing community) less people are inclined to understand the circumstances of which we find the jokes funny, hence being even more funny to those who understand it!