The Year In Review

• Meta-memeosis of the Internet Culture: With the meme culture (as we know) now passing its first decade mark on the timeline, the Internet has been slowly digging deeper into itself. One of the most noticeable and exciting developments in the internet memescape this year can be described as the evolution of meme elitism into a higher-level of ironic appreciation for memes that have been either abused to excess or misused by newcomers, as we can observe from the recent influx of slang words and expressions that are specifically used to comment on the quality of an internet meme, like "Dank Meme", "Well Meme'd!" and "Nice Meme", as well as the widespread practice of deliberate shitposting well on its way to becoming the new norm in the creative process.

• Problematization of Identity Politics Everything: The year 2015 can be also characterized by the aggrandization of gender and culture wars and ever-increasing use of inherently biased language in online discussions and debates, with words like "problematic" and "trigger" being tossed around and labeled onto practically any hot-button topic or issue that the speaker cannot tolerate or agree with (for instance, see microaggression and cultural marxism), a phenomenon which in itself seems to be a …problematic and worrying trend that reflects the extreme polarization of public opinions on the Internet as discussions of identity politics continue to intensify without a plateau in sight.

• Xerox-ification of Memes in the Social Media: While virtually all major social media networks have enabled ways to reblog and share an existing post without breaking the chain of authorship, this year was also marked by the mass proliferation of secondary-source memes and digital artifacts that were scooped up and transplanted across a wide range of platforms, whether it be freebooting of video clips from Vine to YouTube or sharing screen-captured images of tweets on Tumblr, essentially creating a black hole for proper attribution of original content in the meme world.

• The Epic Rise of Black Twitter: Ever since the term Black Twitter first began seeping into the mainstream consciousness a few years ago in 2011, what was still then understood by many as a relatively minor-scale subculture on the microblogging network (and even disputed by some as a racially segregating label) has now grown into a juggernaut, if not the new standard, in the realm of online humor and memescape at large, well beyond the ethnocultural boundaries.

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