A Baby Photo Becomes an Internet Meme

A Baby Photo Becomes an Internet Meme
By Matt Gross
September 15, 2010
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/16/fashion/16meme.html

A father posts baby photos of his son on his personal website and somehow one ended up on various types of Japanese visual entertainment, where people edited it for fun.

Back in the year 2000, Mr. Allen S. Rout posted baby pictures oh his son, Stephen, on his website, being very happy that his son was really happy. 10 years later, when Mr. Rout would never think of the photo, he did a google search of himself and surprisingly found the picture of his son edited into many other things. Some pictures had cartoonish backgrounds and word bubbles with Japanese writing. Others had Stephen's face edited into other pictures, such as Mount Rushmore. These images even showed up on TV game shows.
To put it all together, this photo became an "internet meme," which is an idea, image, catchphrase or video that gets crazy or starts a huge spark of humorous interest. They usually form from random inside jokes.
The baby photo was somehow found by KnowYourMeme.com, a site that records memes and creates humorous videos to explain the meme. The photo was originally used for a video, "Aka-San" ("Mr. Baby" in Japanese). Luckily for Mr. Rout, Stephen's photo was just used as an open-source stock image; it had nothing to do with Stephen's identity. Its pretty much like use google to find a picture for a project.
Stephen, who is now 10, doesn’t hate this. Instead he is learning karate and reading sci-fi novels during his summers. He was really surprised, amazed, and weirded out.

I chose this news story because I found it really interesting. Most of the other stories in the technology section are boring to me, they're mostly about business sites and companies, things adults would read. Also, I chat in internet forums quite often, so memes are common to me and I know what the internet is like. It’s much easier to understand this article because of my background knowledge.

This article doesn't really connect to the unit we are studying (scientific revolution). This is modern day, while that’s decades before computers were invented.