About

“I Have No Idea What I’m Doing” is a catchphrase often used in image macro captions featuring photos of animals, typically canines, posed as if they are performing tasks associated with humans, in a similar vein to “Yes, This is Dog” and the Dog Fort comic series.

Origin

The earliest known appearance of the photo of a Golden Retriever posing with a camera appeared on the Hong Kong Wordpress site Photoblog^[6] on November 20th, 2010. On February 27th, 2011, a photoshopped version was posted by Ben Grelle (a.k.a The Frogman) to his Tumblr^[1] blog with the caption “I have no idea what I’m doing.” The post received over 5,000 notes in less than a year.

Spread

On March 3rd, 2011, Frogman’s image was submitted to Reddit^[2] and reached the front page accumulating 3,609 up votes prior to being archived. In the thread, Frogman responded with a complaint that his watermark had been cropped out of the image, and provided a link to his original post.

The earliest known instance of the chemistry dog with the “I have no idea what I’m doing” caption was posted to the Lolabego Tumblr^[4] on June 17th, 2011. On December 2th, 2011, an image of a dog sitting at a laptop accompanied by the catchphrase was submitted to the /r/funny subreddit and reached the front page accumulating over 4,500 up votes within 6 weeks.

Notable Examples

Non-Canine Images

Between 2012 and 2013, the phrase continued to grow in popularity as the scope of its usage began to expand beyond photographs of clueless-looking dogs.

Search Interest

Search queries for “have no idea what I’m doing” picked up in March of 2011, the same month the original Frogman instance was posted.

External References