Blog Entry #3: We're All Just Scumbags In The End
The third meme that I have decided to examine for my meme analysis blog is one of the more recognizable memes of the Internet. The name of the meme is “Scumbag Steve” and it revolves around an image of a young gentleman dressed in a fur coat and baseball cap. The photo is captioned with something terrible that somebody has done, for example, “Grandpa gets surgery/ Steals pain meds” (Know Your Meme). As the meme continues to live and thrive on the Internet, its variations are all popular in their own right.
Steve’s origins are hilarious, as the photo of Scumbag Steve we know today was actually a photo taken for the album cover of “My Gangsta” by the rap group “Bean Town Mafia” (Know Your Meme, par. 2). The photo would later be posted to Reddit as part of an image compilation which received thousands of upvotes before being archived on the website. From that post, the identity of the man in the photo was revealed to be Blake Boston, who went by the rap name of “Wheezy B” (Know Your Meme, par. 2).
There have been equally famous derivatives of Scumbag Steve, such as Scumbag Brain, which is based off the same logic as Scumbag Steve but the photo is a stock image of a human brain with a caption. A female version of “Scumbag Steve” exists as well and is appropriately named “Scumbag Stacy” and has found similar levels of internet fame.
This meme can be seen as beneficial because it serves as list for the greater online of community of behaviours and actions that should not be repeated. It plays off the idea of learning from another person’s mistakes and making sure that the same mistakes is not repeated. In the comment threads of Scumbag Steve photos, you can see online community members writing about how they’re reminded of someone similar in their life or are alternatively offering their condolences for the actions of the scumbag individual in question.
It is very difficult to find something negative amount this meme, though there are still minor problems. Another negative thing about the meme is how online users are using the meme to tell the internet about the terrible things that people in their life have done instead of talking to these people directly. This fosters a society with a lack of communication as well as hurt feels and strained relationships.
To wrap it all up, Scumbag Steve has been able to survive for so long because of the relatibility of the meme and how well it taps into the concept of “networked individualism”. The concept of networked individualism comes from the idea that “ people use memes to simultaneously express both their uniqueness and their connectivity” (Shifman, pg. 30) which is clearly visible in a meme like “Scumbag Steve”. Users continuously post instances of the scumbag things that people have done in their life in a weird contest of trying to one-up someone else’s instance of a scumbag relative or friend. No matter how you look at it, it seems that this meme just proves that we’re all scumbags deep inside wether we realize it or not.
“Scumbag Steve”. Know Your Meme. Cheezbuger, n.p. Web. 24 Feb 2014
Shifman, Limor. Memes in Digital Culture. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2014. Print
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