Wednesday, April 4, 2012

High School Menes


          Wow. If you haven’t been following, the internet was set ablaze last night around Maryland after students discovered a new website called High School Memes. The domain hsmemes.com was launched on the 29th of February, 2012, but it appears to have only recently hit the masses at Park and other Baltimore County schools in the past few days. The premise of the website is that every high school has their own page, where anyone can create and post anonymous memes pertaining to that particular school using a rudimentary text overlay web-app. Dictionary.com defines a meme as: “a cultural item that is transmitted by repetition in a manner analogous to the biological transmission of genes.”
High School Memes gives the user an option of 43 popular meme templates, or uploading his or her own image. Once you select a picture, you choose what words you want to place at the top and bottom of the meme, and then you’re done; it’s as simple as that. Park’s first meme went up on March 28th. On April 2nd there were about 6 pages of them— as of now, there are over 30 pages.
The website warns users, “be nice... we don't want to spoil the fun with bad posts. Flag stuff that's inappropriate. And no student names in the memes!” Yet it states nothing about teacher names. In 24 hours of my knowledge of this site, I’ve already seen numerous references and personal attacks to both teachers and students. Under the blanket of anonymity, students can brazenly post on whatever subject they please, not having to worry about the repercussions. Toms River High School in New Jersey was forced to call in local police to patrol the campus this morning after an episode of severe online bullying of students through the website last night. The Superintendent of Toms River Regional Schools said that High School Memes had "a flood of negative and abusive postings.”
What was momentarily a fun and humorous idea almost instantly turned into an anarchic and cruel forum for students to wittily chastise their faculty and peers. By the end of X block today, hsmemes.com had already been blocked on the Park network. Even in the past 20 minutes, there’s been significant escalation on the website as more and more kids are being exposed to it. And I don’t foresee things settling down, either. The memes are going to continue to become bolder and more offensive, crossing new lines just to elicit comical reactions from their friends. Be extremely cautious if you decide to post something on this website. I can assure you, it won’t be long until the administration gets involved. 

5 comments:

  1. Have an opinion? Email us at studentparkingonly.blogspot.com or post a comment right here.

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  3. of them are funny and even a bit truthful. There are some targeted at groups of people, rather than an individual, which I am not saying is okay, but maybe we should use them to take a second and really think about what is being said. Talking about alcohol in public or smelling like smoke(definitely guilty) are legitimate things to make a comment about. I am in no way saying that how people are acting and what is being posted is okay with me, but I do think we can at least think about things a bit more, things that may have some validity. I also think that this just shows how immature people are and makes whoever keeps doing this look terrible. And slipping through channels on TV, 'Cyberbully' is on, side note!

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  4. i don't think that they're trying to say that some of the memes aren't clever or warranted or w/e. just that when people post memes with the intention of being rude or hurtful or even just for the sake of posting one- it gets old and not funny reaaaalll quick. this site has the potential to be a pretty great and humorous thing where we can share inside jokes about our school- yesterday most of the memes were creative and, quite frankly, pretty funny, but when people get malicious and post dumb things it's just unnecessary. the memes aren't necessarily supposed to be subtle or nice, just think before you post something as to whether it's actually clever or it just makes you look like a dumb ass.

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  5. My problems are two-fold.

    One is with the people who either make memes that simply are not funny, or don't know how to make them correctly. It's just misinformed and incompetent.

    More importantly, the problem with the people who are targeting small groups, and individuals, is that they are doing it anonymously. otherwise, it's fine, because they'll have no choice but to own up to the douchey actions. the anonymity just gives them the opportunity to be assholes without being judged.

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