Warwick memes: go hard or go koan

It’s 3.42 a.m. In just under six hours I have an essay due in, which I should probably start sometime soon. I’m staring at my laptop with a hopelessly vacant expression. I am defeated. You survey the screen for signs of productivity, but find none. Microsoft Word has been bested by a worthy adversary. I don’t always visit Warwick Memes, but when I do, I don’t leave.

Many of us have suffered at the hands of the dangerously addictive Facebook group, but I’m not going to labour that point any more. The trouble is, it’s incredibly difficult to find anything to say about Warwick Memes that hasn’t already been said far more concisely, by someone far funnier than me, on the group itself. On the one hand, I don’t want to praise Warwick Memes – it’s ruining my degree. On the other, I don’t want to criticise it – it’s hilarious.

I certainly don’t want to write an article entirely constructed of thinly- veiled references to the most popular and prevalent memes. I’ve got nothing to say and yet I feel compelled to say something – you can’t explain that.

Perhaps that’s the point. Denouncing dismally high prices in the library café and protesting the location of the post room is nothing new for students; it doesn’t have to be. The growing popularity of the Warwick Memes group has provided a platform where students can come together and stand in staggering unity.

For the first time since I joined the university, I’ve seen how hundreds students can rally around a particular issue and find common ground in vast numbers – for better or worse. Warwick Memes has engaged students in a way Society Executives, Union Officers and lowly Boar Comment contributors (who far too readily capitalise their titles) can only dream of. What’s more, a similar thing is happening at other universities.

Before making such generalisations, it is worth pointing out that Warwick’s meme group is one of the most popular in the country. Why is this? Why have Warwick students taken to memes so readily, rather than, say, poorly written, pretentious Comment articles filled with pointless rhetorical questions?

Perhaps it’s because Warwick is blessed with numerous creative minds – minds which have finally found an outlet where they can flourish. Or, it may be because the infamous Warwick bubble so proficiently provides the aforementioned ‘common ground’ on which memes appear to thrive. It could be any of these things, a combination of them, or none of them at all. It could, for that matter, all be the work of the Koan.