Internet memes have been used in various ways such as expressing emotion and sharing joyful images with friends. Evolving internet memes which are constantly emerging, especially among younger generations, influence society in unexpected ways. The Chonnam Tribune introduces some popular internet memes in history.

Dancing Baby (1996)
    Dancing Baby is known as one of the earliest internet memes. It is an animation video showing one baby dancing. This meme of a funny dancing baby gained popularity through email chains in 1996. Since then, diverse video clips and image macros are widely used as digital memes and various kinds of jokes, parodies, and some phrases also gradually started to be used on the internet.

LOLCats (2007)
    LOLCats are one of the most famous memes consisting of humorous pictures of cats with captions. They are usually photos of cats with some superimposed texts that depict the scenes. Known as LOLSpeak where ‘LOL’ is an acronym for ‘Laugh Out Loud’, the captions are written with creative spelling or text message language such as UR that indicates ‘your’.

BBC Dad (2017)
    BBC Dad is a video of an interview whereby the children of Robert Kelly, an American professor at the university in Busan, gatecrashed his room where he was discussing the impeachment of the Korean president in 2016 on Skype with the BBC. Since it was an unexpected situation and the cute children’s visit was funny, the original video went viral across the world at that time.

Bong Joon-ho Making Oscars Kiss (2020)
    Bong Joon-ho Making Oscars Kiss is one of the best memes in 2020 so far by the Times in June. After the photos showing Bong Joon-ho making his two Oscars kiss each other spread on Twitter, they have been applied in various situations. People applied funny cases to the three characters in the picture with captions such as Bong being referring to as ‘My mom’ and the two Oscars indicating ‘Me’ and ‘That one girl I mentioned something about’.
 

By Jo Ye-rin, Student Editor