BY KRISTIN GRONINGER, Junior
BLYTHEWOOD - A new trend is appearing on several social media sites like Instagram or Twitter but especially on Facebook, where the whole trend started. You probably already recognized the picture who pops up more often and often. The pictures which get published are images with stick figures named Bill next to a “smart” advice about what you should and should not do.
These new pictures are called “Be like Bill” memes. Bill is perfect and doesn’t do things by which behavior other people get annoyed by, to show off they are creating “be like Bill” memes. Examples are “Bill doesn’t post a lot of picture of his girlfriend every day” or he “doesn’t post on social medias that it is snowing”, when everybody can look out of the window and can see that it is snowing.
Every “Be Like Bill” meme is structured the same way and shows of the same pattern “This is Bill. Bill saw Star wars. Bill is later on the internet. Bill doesn’t want to spoil it. Bill is smart“ Other memes are structured like this, they only personalized with the certain situation and behavior a person gets annoyed by.
And sometimes the stick figure is changed as well. Normally it is just a male stick figure with a beanie on top of it. But sometimes you can see him with another stick figure or sitting in a bathtub.
The Image started to become popular in the last month.The “Be Like Bill” Meme existed already since 2015. On a Facebook page simply named “Be Like Bill” is created by Eugenic Croitoru and Debabrata and posts a variety of “Be Like Bill” pictures sent in from their followers and the page already earned around 1.6 million likes.
Also on several pages, you can now already start to personalize and create your own “Be Like Bill” meme. Just add your name in the search box on this website and the website starts creating your own “Be Like Bill” meme with your own name.
But also apps are constructed to create your own “Be Like Bill” meme with it. The “Be Like Bill” meme generator was downloaded over 5,000 times. And over the half of the users were men, and it was most used by the younger generation ages 18 to 34 according to the statistics from “Be Like Bill” meme generator on the website Momo.
“After the second try, the image fit to my personality. To create your own ‘Be Like Bill’ images was funny,” Tori Shepard said. She already tried one of the websites to create her own “Be Like Bill” meme.
Even in other countries like Russia or the Ukraine the “Be Like Bill” memes reached popularity. And several memes are already created in their language to make it more native in their countries.
But because you can see these memes now all over the internet several people start getting bothered by it. The image and the text are structured every time the same way what let’s the image get boring really fast.
“First it was funny to see all these memes because you could identify yourself with it. On Twitter, Facebook and elsewhere you see these picture popping up over and over again and by the time you just get annoyed by it,” Amalie Madsen, sophomore, said.
The Facebook website is getting an impact on it as well and records already bad number and has a negative quote on the New Page Likes. The Memes needed a long time to get popular on social networks and are disappearing already again.
