In the early twenty-tens, one cottage industry in digital journalism was the unmasking of Internet memes: a journalist would identify the source of a

What Doge Taught Me About the Internet

submited by

Style Pass

2024-06-07 04:30:04

In the early twenty-tens, one cottage industry in digital journalism was the unmasking of Internet memes: a journalist would identify the source of a popular image or joke just as one might dig up the etymology of a word. I was chasing that trope as a freelance writer, in December, 2013, when I found myself curious about the origins of a meme known as Doge. It was a photograph of a Shiba Inu dog lying on a couch with its paws crossed, giving a baleful side-eye; social-media denizens covered the image with multicolored text phrases like “so amaze” and “much wow” in Comic Sans. My investigation was not, I admit, a Watergate-level affair: I did a reverse Google Image search for the photo template; found the popular pet blog of a Japanese woman named Atsuko Sato, who shared photos of her cats and her fluffy yellow dog; and contacted her via the site. Sato and I eventually discussed the dog’s surprise Internet fame through a translator. A subsequent article that I wrote for the Verge came out on New Year’s Eve, after a lightning-speed edit. Unsurprisingly, the piece proved to be a big hit on Twitter, which was in its heyday. Sato told me that the dog, who’d been rescued from a puppy mill, was named Kabosu, after the Japanese citrus that the pooch’s round face resembled.

Two weeks ago, Sato announced on her blog that Kabosu had died, at the age of eighteen. Kabosu was not the first animal behind a meme to go; Grumpy Cat, the famous frowning feline, died in 2019, at the age of seven. But Kabosu’s death reminds me how much has changed in the decade or so of Doge’s fame. Internet memes once functioned as shibboleths, references that signalled one’s belonging to a particularly online tribe. I now cringe remembering that my friends would use Doge vocabulary aloud, saying “much wow” and the like, during the same peak-millennial moment that included American Apparel skinny jeans and side-swept bangs. The infantilized language spoke to the peculiar twee-ness of those years, a post-financial-crisis desire to forestall an already halting adulthood. My favorite riff on the meme was a photo of Kabosu tucked cozily into bed between fuzzy blankets: “such tired,” “so beauty rest.” I confess that I designed at least one party invitation in the style of Doge. Boomers were only beginning to take over Facebook at the time. Instagram had barely entered into mainstream consciousness. The Internet, over all, felt more isolated from day-to-day reality–an illusion that would be fatally punctured by the election of Donald Trump, in 2016, with the help of targeted social-media advertising and the fragmentation of news consumption on personalized social-media feeds.