Something you need to know about famous ‘Ironic Doge’ meme
- Who is the ‘Ironic Doge’ meme?
November 2, 2005, an ordinary day, but on this day, Kabosu, the dog who has been known by most people in the world was born. She is a little female Shiba inu. On February 13, 2010, the owner of Kabosu posted a few photos of her Shiba Inu lying on the sofa to her blog. In this group of photos, Kabosu stretched his teeth and even lay down obediently, but in the end it was the photo of Kabosu with her arms folded and Shiba Inu’s iconic bean eyebrows looking straight into the camera became popular on the internet.
- When did it become known by the whole world?
People made this Shiba Inu’s photo into an emoticon package and circulated it on different websites and applications. But it will not be until July 2013 that there will be a significant increase in searches for these memes. In August 2013, the American ACG photo discussion topic community ‘4chan’ launched an attack on another community r/Murica on Reddit. They occupied this community with emojis derived from Kabosu photos. The original intention was to choose something to “wash the version”, who knows that r/Murica also likes this dog’s emoticon. So after this incident, the dog emoticon was successfully known to more people. It was named the best meme of the year by “Know Your meme” and is used by more and more people.
- Connection between Kabosu and ‘Dogecoin’
This was also the year when the price of Bitcoin rose rapidly. At that time, many people questioned the value of Bitcoin, and the founder of Dogecoin was one of them. In order to mock Bitcoin, Jackson Palmer bought Dogecoin.com which was originally founded by Billy Markus. This may also be the fiercest taunting skill of the dog head, and its value is immeasurable.
‘Ironic Doge’ Meme In China
- When did it circulate in China?
The doge meme familiar to Chinese Internet users only started in 2014.
Let me briefly introduce several common social platforms in China. The most common is ‘Weibo’, which refers to a short version of a blog. Followed by ‘WeChat’ and ‘QQ’, both of them are chat platforms, similar to Messenger. Then there is ‘bilibili’, which is a video website, similar to YouTube.
Going back to the topic of the first generation of dog head expressions in China, it’s created by the emoji designer of Weibo. Feng Dawei, one of the emoji designers on Weibo, was the first to discover the dog head emoji that was already very popular abroad. In order to be consistent with Weibo’s facial expressions, Feng Dawei did not simply imitate the photos, but enlarged the eyes to increase the cuteness of the eyes. So he created the first generation of dog head expressions.
- Chinese netizens’ interpretations of ‘Ironic Doge’ meme
It turns out that this is a magical dog. Chinese netizens really like the Doge meme. The Doge meme on Weibo is very popular, and other application platforms in China have also followed up, adding the dog head design to their expression system.
Because the dog head expression has its own disdain and magical meaning, people often add it after the content to express irony. So it is also called ‘ironic doge’.
QQ’s dog’s head is said to look like a squirrel, with its two ears closer together, which makes it look more lively.
There are several dog head expressions at Bilibili. The closest dog head expression is very similar to Weibo, but it is more three-dimensional.
- Some thoughts about the phenomenon of the popularity of ‘Ironic Doge’ meme
Kabosu, the dog head prototype, is called an ironic dog because its expression fits people’s mental states at the time — “I just watched you pretend quietly, and see what else you can say.” and “This is what you said and I didn’t say anything…”. These have become people’s interpretations of dog head expressions.
It can be said that Kabosu in Japan just sat on the sofa and her owner took a picture, and people on the other side of the ocean automatically brought their feelings and thoughts into it. 11 years after its birth, the dog head expression has not been outdated, but after the second creation of each designer, the second spring and the third spring are glowing.
The characteristics of the memes (not only the doge memes) are: they are emotional but not too straightforward, and there must be something deliberately unfinished in it. Memes have become a kind of popular culture with blurred boundaries, everyone can participate, everyone can define, but one thing has never changed–they are good at joking about everything and deconstructing everything. This is a social game without boundaries. If you take a close look at the ‘Ironic Doge Meme’, you maybe figure out that being ironic to everything has become a theme in the internet communicating environment. People joke about others, joke about the news, even joke about themselves. Since there are no boundaries, the meme culture shows great tolerance. Everyone can use different dog head expression packs to express their thoughts and emotions. The Shiba Inu meme circulated on the Internet is either a tsundere dog’s head or a stubborn dog. To a certain extent, it also represents our stubbornness and willfulness.
Conclusion
Meme culture is borderless, and it is a new international language. We don’t need to speak the same language, we can achieve the purpose of communication by using memes. Take Doge as an example, Japanese people took photos of her dog, Americans circulated the doge meme, and now it becomes so popular in China. Because memes are distributed in the form of pictures. Pictures are understood by everyone before words, which means pictures are easier for people to understand. So in today’s network environment, memes appear as a bridge to connect netizens in different countries together, it’s a very important element of communication.
Regardless of whether Dogecoin is really valuable or not, people’s love for dog head memes is real. Why not come and create your own ‘Ironic’ doge memes?
Related Sources
‘Ironic Doge Meme’ in the website KnowYourMeme
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/doge
Check out more about ‘Ironic Doge’ meme on Wikipedia!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doge_(meme)
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