Sociology 167, Fall 2013
Assignment #5: Internet meme
Ole Martin Ellingboe Nilsen
UC Berkeley
The “Advice Dog” meme is
an image macro series, which features the head of a smiling Labrador puppy on a six colored rainbow wheel
background that provides somewhat unethical or sarcastic, advices to people. A
properly constructed advice dog consists of 2 short phrases, one on top and one
on the bottom, with the dog itself in between (urbandictionary.com).
Advice Dog was first
published in 2006 on a forum tread on the website
themushroomkingdom.net/, which is a Super Mario
fan site. The user “Mariko” asked for advices about kissing girls and in one of
the responses, the user “TEM” (Evan Herrington) posts the original picture of
his dog’s (Boba Fett) head on a color wheel background
(knowyourmeme.com). The post would later be awarded “post of the year”
on the website.
The meme started getting adopted by other forums and made it onto 4chan’s /b/ within July, the same year. However, the meme wasn’t considered to be well known, until after it
got posted as post #76.000.000 on 4chan. The following year (2009), Ferenc
Somos created MemeGenerator.net/, which made it very easy for the average internet user to contribute
with his or her own macro of many different memes.
*not to be confused with
the unrelated, but similar search term: training advice for dogs, which might
explain the baseline search rate prior to 2006.
As shown on the graph,
the meme had its golden age between 2009 and 2012. Due to Google’s
normalization of data, we can’t know the exact search rate, but we know the
majority of search requests came from the U.S., the U.K. and Australia. As for 2013, MemeGenerator had created close to 55.000 advice dog
images.
The advice dog meme gave
rise to a whole series of spin-offs, commonly referred to as Advice Animals. The concept is still the same, but it’s no longer
limited to a dog’s head. Also, all of the animals usually have their own characteristic
personalities.
Reference list:
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