Apathetic Dog
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HYPE ALERT
This is a meme entry concerning a low-level phenomenon that has been grown in ideal circumstances that may negatively impact its longterm survival rate.
About
"Apathetic Dog" is an exploitable Photoshop meme that began as a photo from Tumblr that made Digg's front page that people began to edit on Buzzfeed.
Origin
Buzzfeed is where the photoshopping was encouraged. More about that in the next section.
How it came to be called a meme.
Although this can be more or less ascertained from the sentence in the About section, the original image was uploaded to a the Dogs And Great Views Tumblr.
On Saturday, June 19th, 2010, the image was submitted to Digg by the user Travelet in a thread entitled Dogs don't give a shit about great views.
Travelet seems to have had some practice making things popular on Digg.
About:
Full time on net > Digg, Stumble, Reddit, Mixx, Care2, Ebausworld, …… Add me and share … O_O
Dugg: 34,681
Comments: 153
Submitted: 490
Made Popular: 132
Popular Ratio: 27%
Profile views: 32,917
Dogs don't give a shit about great views reached Diggs front page with 2397 Diggs, attracting 249 comments.
The image was then submitted to Buzzfeed by Digg Top Links. This automatic submission did not fair well with only 908 views, 5 Facebook Likes, and 9 responses either of "CUTE" or "LOL."
But then Buzzfeed Top 20 user Rebecca E Photoshopped the dog onto a screenshot of the Buzzfeed page, submitted it with the title Apathetic Dog with the "Add Yours" badge.
This time, Apathetic Dog received 4,236 total views, and it was photoshopped 16 times by 13 additional people.
The image, along with the Keanu instance and a blank, exploitable template were posted to Urlesque on June 21st, with the unfortunate practice of meme-declaration. That is, judging the meme's value based on its novelty and ease of replication rather than any trend of genuine interest.
Apathetic Dog is the latest dog meme to take off on the web, thanks to a big boost from Digg.
Unfortunately, the author has put the carriage before the horse. A big boost from Digg (or more accurately, a Dig power-user) has resulted in a few photoshops on a thread from Buzzfeed.
Controversy
This type of meme spread has more to do with the influence of certain users within these sites than it has to do with a contagious idea. While this reinforces the idea that what Gladwell called the influentials or "early adopters" are the ones who set the trends, it ignores the kind of substance and background story that contains a social imperative for people to share it.
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