Memes and procrastination are two words which have almost become synonymous the past few years. Essays are finished uncomfortably close to the deadline and reading gets put on hold in favour of a few more minutes of idle Facebook scrolling. But what happens when the memes stop being made? Recently the LSE’s two meme pages, ‘LSE Memes’ and ‘Robust memes for LSE teens’, have stagnated in production with their last meme postings being 17th January and 9th January respectively at the time this article was written.
University meme pages are generally meant to forge a ‘common identity’ and create relatability between the institution and its students. When asked for comment, LSE memes said that the reasoning behind their memes, as well as to be entertaining, was to highlight ‘some serious issues at the school which are now commonplace on the public agenda’. These issues have ranged from ‘teaching standards, to pay for GTAs’ and also addressing the ‘predominant culture’ of students being very career oriented.
Sporadic uploads to the pages have led to some students asking when the next memes will be posted. One of the Beaver news editors took it her duty to up her investigative journalist skills and find out the answer to this burning question.
‘LSE memes’ has responded to this by saying: ‘we principally feature memes submitted by our fanbase and our output is now largely down to them’. They also mentioned that the group who originally set up the page have now gone. ‘Robust memes for LSE teens’ have also responded to their inactivity, stating that they like to ‘create memes organically and not simply to push out content’ – they think they allegedly have the ‘best content’ of all the LSE meme pages. There is hope that by highlighting this issue there will be more fan submissions and thus more memes to procrastinate to. ‘LSE memes’ concludes by saying ‘we are always in the business for good memes’.
