A popular Internet phenomenon turned Spartan green this weekend when a California-based online class note provider connected memes with college campuses.
Memes are images with captions typed overtop of them, often relating to humorous situations or occurrences. The most popular images often turn viral and prompt people all around the country and world to create new captions for the same picture.
Students at about 60 colleges and universities, including MSU, now have Facebook pages with memes about school-specific issues, said Saif Altimimi, who helped launch the meme pages through his company, Notewagon.
The college meme phenomenon started at Altimimi’s San Francisco-based Notewagon, a free online service to aid students in note taking.
Initially, the promotion was meant to be a friendly competition between rival schools, seeing which college could get the most votes during a period of time, Altimimi said.
But once the memes gained momentum — Altimimi estimates the college memes have gotten more than 90,000 Facebook likes — the company decided to let the meme pages take their own course.
“We never really expected this — it was really random,” Altimimi said.
Since the “MSU Memes Facebook page”:http://www.facebook.com/msumemes’s creation last weekend, more than 2,000 people have “liked” it on Facebook, and many have uploaded their own student-created pictures and memes.
Images on the MSU Memes page are a mix of those used in memes globally and new memes unique to MSU, such as Sparty, CATA buses and pictures from MSU sporting events.
Captions on the images are about issues such as problems with MSU’s current course management system ANGEL, water quality in some of the buildings and the ongoing rivalry between MSU and other Big Ten schools.
MSU students have hopped on to the trend through likes and shares on Facebook, said genomics and molecular genetics sophomore Michael Rozwadowski.
Rozwadowski, who created several of the memes featured on the page, said he thought many of the memes reflected what students think of MSU.
“I suspect that as the site grows, creativity will rise and the memes will get much better,” Rozwadowski said.
Other sites supporting MSU-based memes also have popped up, including an MSU Memes Facebook page.
Altimimi said he sees the popularity of college-themed memes growing as more students get involved and think of interesting ideas for the site.
“It really does relate to students,” Altimimi said.
Accounting senior Jennifer Dedo said she hopes to see more MSU-specific memes.
“It’s the MSU community … having stuff about MSU is more fun to read and relatable,” Dedo said.
Staff writer Samantha Radecki contributed to this report.
To create an MSU meme of your own, visit facebook.com/snews.
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