Tuesday, April 1, 2014

Kilroy was here




Memes...

Everyone likes to talk about them now, but few (including me) truly understand it. What's the difference between a meme and a joke? Was "joke" too simple of a definition and had to be expanded to become memes? How do you pronounce it? Why is it such a silly looking word? 


Who knows. 

But what I did come across after reading about Richard Dawkin's book that references memes (which I talked about here) is that one of the first memes ever was the Kilroy Was Here phenomena back during World War II when the term meme didn't even exist. 



 


It's a simple graffiti that by most accounts started (published) when a worker in a US shipyard used it as part of his daily duties to confirm something, sort of like a visual marker. It was then replicated (retweeted / reshared) when countless army personnel begin to use these ships during the war and were baffled/inspired by the inadvertent graffiti and begin to use it on military equipment and war zone buildings e.t.c. (early evidence of trolling?)

Eventually it lost it's popularity after the war but it definitely left its mark. Rumors have swirled about how both Hitler and Stalin had run-ins with this graffiti character. 

I always find strange little snippets of history like this incredibly interesting; especially when they're connected to such a modern concept (memes). Street art is a recognized form of visual art but I still didn't expect it to be the medium where the first meme would have originated.






1 comment:

  1. Interesting! I wonder if people still post Kilroy anymore, or if there are only those rare sightings from when it trended it the 40s.

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