From wildfires to Bernard Drainville to meta news bans, the news has kept meme artists busy in 2023. The doctor of semiology Jean-Michel Berthiaume analyzed the trends of the year in this cultural network of the country, which has sometimes even crossed borders.
Even
Concept (text, image, video) that is massively taken up, rejected and redirected on the Internet in an often parodic manner, spreads very quickly and thus causes a stir.
– Larousse dictionary
Forest fires
The fires that devastated the forests of Canada appeared to be fertile ground for the memosphere. It was a perfect visual component, you just had to put an orange filter on an image and it worked [pour représenter le smog]Details Jean-Michel Berthiaume.
This resulted in interesting image components that primarily touch on nostalgia, such as the use of the Romano Fafard spaceship flying over Mount Royal in Montreal. This is a reference to the iconic children's television series In a galaxy near you, whose crew was on a mission to find a habitable planet to which 6 billion Tatas could be transported since the Earth was dying.
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In this meme we can read the text of the opening credits of the youth series “In a Galaxy Near You”, which aired on Vrak.TV around the 2000s.
Photo: Francis Naud/Facebook
According to Jean-Michel Berthiaume, who is writing a book on Quebec memes, this is the best meme of 2023 related to a current event.
Another montage: an image from filmmaker Denis Villeneuve's film Blade Runner 2049, whose visual signature is reminiscent of the orange smog filter, with the Montreal Olympic Stadium as a background landscape.
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Smog gripped Montreal in the spring and summer of 2023, recalling the orange aesthetic of the 2017 film Blade Runner 2049.
Photo: Messages in Memes
Forest fire memes also had success that reached beyond the American border and were smoked against will across the United States. It was the biggest international viral success. Even New York has made memes about Canadian fires, the expert points out.
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We suspect that weather presenter Colette Provencher, like that character from the video game series Grand Theft Auto, felt that poor air quality was a recurring theme in 2023.
Photo: Fruiter
Barbie
It's difficult to talk about the memes of 2023 without mentioning the phenomenal success of the Barbie movie. The Mattel doll received royal treatment as part of its marketing campaign, including providing a selfie generator website (Barbie Selfie Generator) that allowed anyone to add their photo to the doll. pink universe of the film.
The meme was so popular that Québec Solidaire took the plunge and applied the filter to a picture of its former co-speaker Manon Massé. Apparently there aren't many connections between Barbie and Manon Massé. […] “But making this connection between these icons of feminism I found consistent with the way we talked about the film,” analyzes Mr. Berthiaume.
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The web phenomenon “Barbenheimer”, a word invented in the wake of the cinematic double of Barbie and Oppenheimer, released on the same day in the summer of 2023, has not left its place on the Internet, with montages pairing the two characters . However, her online presence was significantly lower than that of the doll, according to the expert.
New era of AI signed meme
Creating memes is an art form, and like artists in many creative professions, those in this web culture have seen the democratization of generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools.
The fake comedian Sonia Bélanger, generated by AI at the initiative of activists from the Instagram page No Girls on Pacing, who announced her presence at comedy evenings without women in the program, helped to leave the ball, according to the doctor of semiology.
Sonia Bélanger has become the solution to all deficiencies, especially those related to the lack of representation of women.
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Sonia Bélanger, an AI-generated persona, made a splash in the comedy industry in Quebec in 2023.
Photo: The teachers' room
The AI has also been an opportunity to reinterpret some of the great classics of Quebec folklore in the Pixar style, he notes. From the Xavier Dolan film “Mommy” to the “Black Turkey” meme, the public asked Maxime Larrivee-Roy of the site “L'Actualité en memes” to create all sorts of images with references to local web culture. He even reinterpreted his signature image “Mersi Kémion,” which the expert named Meme of the Year in 2022.
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The “Mersi Kémion” meme was reinvented by artificial intelligence.
Photo: Messages in Memes
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The “Mersi Kémion” memes in 2022.
Photo: Zone 3
He wrote the commands in Midjourney, a very public AI tool. Anyone could have done it, but people wanted to see their favorite site do it for them, he points out. According to him, he is one of the first popular prompt artists in Quebec – prompts are the commands given to the AI to generate content.
Bernard “Burnout” Drainville
The Minister of Education, Bernard Drainville, is undoubtedly the most suspicious personality who stood out the most in 2023, according to Jean-Michel Berthiaume. Netizens have even renamed him “Burnout Drainville” or even “Burnout Drained” because of his sometimes angry tone when journalists ask him questions.
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Bernard Drainville takes the form of a hermit crab in this meme that describes his feelings, all of which are similar, with one in particular standing out: karaoke. This is a reference to the moment when the minister performed the song “Toune d'Automne” by the entire Cowboys Fringants in honor of Karl Tremblay during a press conference.
Photo: Messages in Memes
As a former columnist and ex-radio presenter, he is often asked for his comments, the expert emphasizes: He was present in so many social debates in 2023, and he always offers new facial expressions in accordance with the events. He has one for every occasion.
According to the pop culture specialist, he even steals the attention of Prime Minister François Legault, whose different expressions are nowhere near as varied as Drainville's.
A difficult year for meme artists
While the tone for memes is often parodic, the year has been particularly difficult for this community.
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According to Jean-Michel Berthiaume, Meta's blocking had an impact on content moderation on meme pages.
Photo: Messages in Memes
Since the blocking of news on meta-platforms in response to the online news law resulting from Project C-18, meme pages have been relegated to some extent to the importance of information, explains Jean-Michel Berthiaume.
Now this [les gens] can no longer spill their bile in the comments of articles, [ils] Check out the comment sections of meme pages. [qui redoublent d’efforts] in moderation to ensure the space remains safe.
The site L'Actualité en Memes began denouncing the situation by citing the main post of the day – an image exposing a comment deemed inappropriate. The slaughterhouse activists' side doesn't hesitate to block and exclude people when things get out of control, the expert says.
This is perhaps also one of the reasons that led to the closure in 2023 of the activist site Co-constructed structure organization of reflexive Practitioners (OrgStruCo), whose memes were mainly aimed at people in the health sector and represented a kind of mobilization center for them.
The creation of memes on topics such as professional burnout, layoffs, inconsistencies and paradoxes of the healthcare system helped everyone understand that they were not alone in this experience, emphasizes Jean-Michel Berthiaume. He also praises her ability to portray a lot of psychological suffering with a light tone.
OrgStruCo was important to the Quebec meme community. It's a big page that rotates.
The health strike was called a few weeks after the site was shut down on November 1, but failed to stop the spread of memes. [favorables]notes the popular culture specialist.
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The moment Bernard Drainville sang the song “Toune d'Automne” in full during a press conference in tribute to Karl Tremblay of the Cowboys Fringants greatly inspired the meme pages.
Photo: Empire K
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Labor disputes were the subject of many memes towards the end of 2023. And Minister Sonia Lebel is not spared either.
Photo: Memes and Words
While 2023 was a particularly tricky year for memes, with many political images denouncing the inflationary context, among other things, the trends for 2024 are already looking weaker with the return of fake Facebook events.
Jean-Michel Berthiaume delights in crowds commenting on fake events, including a Christmas party at Walmart's self-checkouts, or on Internet users looking for the little bums described by Yolande Ouellet, whose reaction to the camera as they leave a room at the Trois- Rivières in 2000 left his mark on the Internet in Quebec.