About

Cultural Impact refers to a series of tweets which make comically hyperbolic arguments that a frivolous song, moment, or artist has had more cultural impact than something which has been well documented to have a massive cultural impact. The tweets mimic a bar graph by having the frivolous object represented by four stacked black squares and the other object represented by a small line.

Origin

On June 9th, 2018, Twitter user @praisejeebus^[1] tweeted a chart that said Miranda Cosgrove had more influence than Elvis, The Beatles, and U2. The tweet gained over 80 retweets and 600 likes (shown below).

Spread

The format did not see much popular spread over the following year. It was not until September of 2019 that the format began becoming a trending meme. On September 6th, 2019 user @farringt0n posted an example that gained over 100 retweets and 700 likes (shown below, left). On September 9th, 2019, user @saddestcowboy_ posted an example that claimed the Trying Kombucha video was more important than The Beatles that gained over 15,000 retweets and 140,000 likes (shown below, right).

Other popular examples include a tweet by @skinkshame that gained over 7,300 retweets and 22,000 likes (shown below, left) and a tweet by @jaboukie that gained over 4,300 retweets and 26,000 likes (shown below, right). Jokes were covered by Mashable^[2] and AV Club.^[3]

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References