Be a Content Creator!
Social Media is full of “memes” — those
- appealing images
- enhanced by text,
- that get “shared” or “reblogged” or “re-posted”,
until they flood your Facebook page and push your Great-Aunt Mildred’s post about her sciatica off into the algorithm’s no-man’s land. The most popular memes are amusing; but some are touching; a very few are inspiring, and a sadly significant number are pure schmaltz. It’s the schmaltz I want to address here: maudlin sentimentality presents such a low bar, that any member of Emmanuel’s extended community might easily produce something better. And how much fun would it be, if instead of just sharing whatever facebook.com/bestchristianmemes has posted today, we were posting amusing and inspiring images that originated from Emmanuel’s own community.
Like this one:
So, how do you make a meme?
- A meme starts with an image. A lot of memes start with a stolen image: someone else’s photograph or artwork downloaded off the internet and used without permission. But the power of originating our own memes right from our very own social media is the power of originality. With a modern cell-phone in your hand you have access to a camera to capture your own realistic images, and drawing software to create your own abstract images. Even without a cell-phone, you may have access to an old film camera or a set of watercolour paints; and those images can be scanned into a computer for use in a meme. That’s the hard part.
- Then you just write your inspiring, sarcastic, humourous, or whimsical message across your image, and it’s ready to go viral.
- If you have a Facebook account, you can post your creation on Emmanuel’s community group. Then it’s simply a matter of sitting back to see whether it gets “shared or reblogged or re-posted” and so achieves the third part of the definition of a meme.
Whether your meme becomes viral or not, as soon as you are putting your own artwork and ideas online, *you* are a content creator, one of the stars of the internet. And as a Christian content creator, you are using the power of the world-wide web to glorify God.