“Spicy Boi” Meme Floods Hillary Clinton’s Instagram, Tapping Into the Anarchy of Internet Culture.
While many of us think of “memes” as an image with a joke written over it (invariably in the Impact font), this is actually what’s called an image macro, which only becomes a meme once it reaches a certain level of notoriety within a community. Memes as such are “an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture,” kind of like an inside joke.
But words and behaviors mean something. The fact that one idea spreads in a community while another doesn’t indicates something about that community. So what’s important about the “spicy boi” meme on Clinton’s Instagram, beyond the humor that, depending on one’s age, may or may not be apparent?
The New York magazine piece concluded, incorrectly I think, that the meme doesn’t actually transcend humor. “It’s just for kicks,” one iFunny user told them. But there is an undeniable political undercurrent to it all. The Twitter handle @OldRowOfficial, an account followed by the unwaveringly conservative demographic of Southern frat boy, was responsible for signal boosting the raid. So was the recently banned conservative writer Milo Yiannopoulos. Many comments followed “spicy boy” with references to the email scandal or the Black Lives Matter movement.
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