A few years ago, when I was an editor on our departmental newsletter, one of my co editors came up with the idea to add a couple of memes each week.
The content was otherwise pretty dry, and people had to have some incentive to keep reading once they’d finished my editorial (ahem). I thought this was a fabulous initiative and took to it with gusto. My biggest problem was whittling down the number I accumulated each week from scrolling through facebook down to our limit of two per edition. Actually, no, I lie: my biggest problem, from our head of department’s point of view at any rate, was the number of complaints we got, which was a constant surprise to me. The complaints were many and varied, from not having enough relevance to a hospital anaesthetic department, to perpetuating uncomplimentary stereotypes about surgeons. I’m as woke as they come, but it’s astounding how keen some people are to be unhappy.
Sometimes a meme I found in the weekend was obsolete by the time we came to publish on a Friday, but that was very unusual. We thought times were turbulent during Trump’s first presidency, but the sheer speed and volume of news recently is astonishing. How many weeks has it been since the Ukrainian president was belittled in the White House? It seems an age ago.
184b577d-bfa9-4fb9-9e71-562359b22b0e
Note, this blog does not condone violence.
And Signalgate? That was just last week. If you saw this meme in a newsletter today you’d barely remember the context.
This meme is hot off the press now, but would seem very dated by next Friday.
Luckily it’s no longer my job to curate memes for other people.