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Early internet gems were weird, simple, and impossible to forget. One funny picture could live in our heads for years, and that's why we still remember them today. There were hilarious main characters like Trollface or Lolface who starred in our first meme shares. We sent them to our friends through email chains or message boards, saved them on our family computers, or maybe we saw them in a YouTube video.
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The internet felt smaller and stranger back then, before social media feeds and algorithms decided what we saw, before the internet was full of influencers. Discovering memes felt like sharing an inside joke with other early internet kids, as if we all spoke the same language, even if we lived on opposite sides of the world and had never met.
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The fun thing about memes is that most of them show bizarre moments we all recognize but never really thought about until we saw them turned into a visual joke. Those relatable situations we can still share today bring back memories that make everyone who lived through that era feel like one big, borderless digital family. Because everyone who experienced this era made internet culture happen. Because we didn't just watch memes, we helped create a culture. Because if you were there, you get it. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk. *mic drop*
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