Say What You Meme and Meme What You Say

Everyone knows that in college and all schooling, it is a serious violation of academic integrity to copy another student’s homework and submit it as their own. Such plagiarism will not be tolerated in academia and generally is frowned upon by society. That is for good reason, you don’t want someone else taking credit for your work, and in all honesty is it really that hard to avoid copying an article word for word? Well, apparently, in pop culture it is difficult to come up with original content. Luckily for pop culture we tend to have a short attention span as a society, so it’s often acceptable to copy one idea and just change it up a little bit. However, we’ve seemingly caught up and began to see where pop culture has tried to slip one past us, or where it’s funny to think that they have. Pointing these eerie similarities have birthed a very entertaining meme. So I ask you one question, can I copy your homework?

The idea for the meme is one that came from twitter, in which someone compares to articles of pop culture where one has apparently copied the other almost exactly and hasn’t hidden this fact well enough. The caption which accompanies the two pop culture references reads, “Can I copy your homework?” “Yeah just change it up a bit so it doesn’t look obvious you copied” or some form similar. Some cases actually compare things that may have actually copied ideas, while others just have fun with things that coincidentally look extremely alike. According to knowyourmeme.com, the earliest known tweet to use the meme format was tweeted by @essentialpeach 4 movies which seem to have copied animated films from large animation studios. From there, the meme didn’t exactly catch fire, but by the turn of the new year it had begun to pick up steam and as of today it continues to grow.

The result is a meme which can be quite funny but also serves as another way the internet can call out pop culture for trying to get away with things which the internet has proven it can do before. The only difference is that this time the internet is doing it in a way closer to having a friend calling you out for that one time you did something really embarrassing or pretended to know something you so clearly didn’t. None the less it’s worth looking at the mechanism and what the meme does by jokingly calling out plagiarism in pop culture. Being that it is a joke as noted before, does this appear to send the message that recycling and copying old ideas is ok? Is it something that people are actually upset about? I tend to think not and that it’s just something fun to make people laugh. However, some instances of this meme look at some legitimately important plagiarisms like Melania Trump’s RNC speech which echoed, in many parts word for word, what Michelle Obama had orated in a speech of her own. Do memes like this signal that the internet and society has moved past such issues of plagiarism (or in other cases potential patent infringement)? Perhaps, perhaps not, that is only for time to tell.

Finally, as with many memes, this one is relatable. All of us, at some point in our academic career, have asked someone or been asked by someone to copy homework in a manner similar to the way this meme suggests. It’s fun to reminisce and it’s even more fun when it brings in elements of recognizable pop culture, so enjoy some of the best below.