By Madelyn Stone, News Staff
One does not simply create a Facebook page that gets 3,000 likes in slightly more than a day. Or maybe one does.
Northeastern middlers Dani Weishoff, a music industry major, and Christina Reynolds, a political science major, created the Facebook page Northeastern University Memes Tuesday night, inviting a flurry of snarky Northeastern-themed captioned images. More than a thousand people had liked the page by midnight, with dozens of students contributing their own Husky variations on memes like Conspiracy Keanu, Success Kid and Creepy Willy Wonka.
The News sat down with the page’s creators Wednesday afternoon to talk about the viral trend.
Huntington News: How did you come up with the idea for this page?
Christina Reynolds: It was like this: I was procrastinating on homework last night, it was around 7 p.m. Obviously this is not my own idea, these have been popping up at schools all over the country and especially in Boston – BU and Simmons and Emerson, I think, all had them before us. And so I Facebook searched, and Northeastern didn’t have a page, so I decided to start it. Added a few pictures, invited some friends, but it didn’t really start to go viral until Dani added a photo, which is still the most popularly shared photo, and the most liked out of the group.
Dani Weishoff: Oh, the one with [Spongebob Squarepants character] Patrick, with like “let’s take all the tuition dollars and use it to build statues of cats.” But [Appalachian State University] had one when I was on co-op there, and I was like “why doesn’t someone make a page?” and I just didn’t really want to do it and thankfully Christina had the balls to start one. So, thanks for making me an admin, friend.
HN: Did you expect this response?
CR: I knew it was going to go viral but I didn’t think it would happen so fast. And there have been people posting on it pretty much nonstop, like all night.
DW: There’s some good ones, too.
CR: I was actually kind of afraid to leave my computer for five minutes. I came back and there were like 300 new likes.
HN: Do you have any favorites?
DW: There’s this one kid who keeps posting these really good ones. I think his name is Wells Riley [a senior graphic design major]. He’s been posting these really good ones. I can’t remember but I just remember thinking they were so good.
CR: There’s a lot of good ones. I’m glad that students are embracing it. There’s been some backlash about people saying that people aren’t posting correct memes and you should put in the article that it should rhyme with “cream,” because a lot of people still don’t know how to say it.
DW: There’s a lot of haters. It’s kind of funny because people are just like, “You’re doing this wrong. BU had it first. Like, these suck.” And yeah, it’s getting kind of vicious.
HN: Where do you see the page going?
CR: It’s interesting to see if it will die down quickly or if it’ll slowly peter out. But I mean, I definitely would be down for making T-shirts.
DW: Yesterday though, last night, someone posted a GIF of beating a dead horse so it might be dying out. And this morning someone made one of like “Brace yourselves, bad NEU memes are coming.” That’s kind of disappointing but there are just some party poopers and I guess that’s what happens.
HN: Why do you think the page has received the response that it has?
CR: It’s nice that it’s a source of humor that’s not necessarily crude or crass … you don’t want to resort to posting that kind of thing to get attention or just to entertain other students. So I think it’s really nice and everyone can participate in it.
DW: I’m actually kind of surprised that it hasn’t gotten more vicious than it is. I mean, I don’t know if you saw, but I went into the description and I was like, let’s keep it classy. There was one where people kind of seemed to get offended, the “Are we in math class or China?” So we deleted it. We can delete stuff that’s not fine. It’s fun, it’s supposed to be fun, it’s not supposed to be attacking anyone. We want it to be up and running as long as possible I guess, for everyone to enjoy it.
HN: How big of a deal do you think this is for Northeastern?
DW: Someone called it the “Northeastern State of Mind” of 2012 and it absolutely made my entire night.
CR: I love that video, too.
HN: So you were the only ones who created the page?
CR: There’s been a lot of contributors that have added a lot of photos. Some people more than others. But I mean, everyone that adds has created it. We just started it.
