The “What People Think I Do” Meme Was Actually Invented At Wellesley — In 1909

12:00 pm, February 19th | by Amy Tennery

Forget “Know Your Meme” — a women’s college at the turn of the century was the original meme generator.

In case you haven’t caught it yet (i.e., you don’t have internet) the “what people think I do” meme has been just about everywhere lately.

The general concept involves taking a single career (social media managers, for example) and showing how different people “see” you in that job:

It’s funny the first 300 times you see it.

What you probably didn’t know is that this meme actually started out over 100 years ago. No wonder it feels played out already.

In a move that’s pioneering the field of Historical Memery, Buzzfeed dug up the earliest known example of the “What People Think I Do” meme (via Facebook), this item from the Wellesley College yearbook, class of 1909, which shows how the world views women scholars:

Anyone else struck by how — to put it bluntly — awesome this is? You’d think maybe being over a century old this would be a little softer in tone but… nope!

TAGS: wellesley how people see me | wellesley meme | wellesley what people think I do

B Brucker

Cool find, but a couple things I feel need to be said. First, KnowYourMeme.com is not a “meme generator”, but honestly that’s more of a technical, personal beef with this post because I happen to like the site and don’t like to see it misrepresented.

Second, and more importantly, I don’t think one can really say that any one person or place can “invent” memes; they’re really formed out of the general consensus of society. While I think it’s cool that you found a very old instance of a joke of this type, I don’t think you can say it was a “meme” at Wellesley unless there were multiple instances of it, and–since this meme is, like many memes, based on humor, which is timeless–I seriously doubt this is the first instance of this sort of joke. While I think a diligent researcher could dig deeper and find a better example that fit as well as the Wellesley cartoon, this cartoon from 1903 is clearly using the same sort of humor:
http://cartoons.osu.edu/newspaper_artists/mcdougall/country100.jpg
http://g00.me/7k Work at home, $35/h, link

Forget “Know Your Meme”
Anonymous

http://lnk.co/IHOTL
mateo

Here’s another way of playing with this meme: with personalities… here’s one with Jean Dujardin. Quite fun too…
http://jeanpensepasmoins.com/2012/02/24/being-jean-dujardin/

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