The New York Times learned a fun new word for this article about Instagram memes
An article about the latest trend in low-effort, absurdist posts pushes the paper of record to publish a new term
Aux Features Instagram
The Old Gray Lady has succumbed to the tides of history and today, at long last, published the term “shitposting” for the first time. Naturally enough, the word appeared in an article on Gen Z’s latest innovations in the form, which currently sees the young and hip filling Instagram with posts that resemble Tumblr memes from a decade ago.
Taylor Lorenz’s New York Times article “Text Memes Are Taking Over Instagram” describes this new school of posting, summarizing it as “barraging people’s feeds with seemingly indiscriminate content, often accompanied by humorous or confessional commentary.” The key passage in the piece comes just before this: “Known in internet slang as shitposting, this style of posting involves people publishing low-quality images, videos, or comments online.”
The rest of Lorenz’s article goes on to explain how popular accounts like @carti_xcx, @on_a_downward_spiral, and @lifes.a.bender “nearly all feature screenshots of text on top of photos, made using the anonymous confessions app Whisper, or Instagram’s ‘Create’ mode, which lets people design text posts on top of gradient backgrounds.” It describes how Instagram has basically usurped Twitter as the prime venue for shitposts that grew out of younger social media users laughing at “people’s overly earnest Facebook status updates” last summer, probably, at least in part, as a way to make fun of an older generation while dealing with being trapped indoors and communicating with friends online during a pandemic.
What we’re most interested in, though, isn’t the way the article highlights how the rapid pace of modern culture lays bare just how cyclical social media trends really are or its insights into the development of new forms of internet behavior. No. We’re mostly just tickled that The New York Times has finally had to acknowledge the practicality of a term as precise as “shitposting” in order to engage with a world absolutely filled to the brim with it.
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30 Comments
So I guess, The Old Gray Lady, she ain’t what she used to be?
that guy’s giving it away!
Lest ye forget, NY Times was raked over the coals for discovering this newfangled ‘boba’ thing…in 2017.https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/17/reader-center/our-readers-call-us-out-over-bubble-tea-they-are-right.html
To be fair, when did it become mainstream among non-Asians? Personally, I’ve been drinking it since the 1990s, but that’s because I worked with a lot of East Asians in grad school, but back then it was only available in restaurants that specifically catered to them.
I’m the whitest of white dudes and grew up in the whitest of white small suburban towns in Colorado, and we had a Boba cafe near our high school in 2003.
you use respect when you talk about the most notorious bounty hunter in the galaxy!
‘Lobo’ sounds nothing like ‘boba’!*test fires flamethrower, knows where this is going, grins evilly*
I mean, shitposting is really just the latest iteration of people being juvenile, right? People drew penises on things as a joke (as opposed to, like, as a form of fertility worship) thousands of years ago.
Absolutely correct. I saw an ancient Egyption tomb in a museum a while back, it had been carted over brick by brick and had graffiti in a bunch of different languages.
“Ra sucks your moms cock” – Anubis
Ptah RULEZ!!!
My favourite is the stuff found in Pompeii and Herculaneum:“Restituta, take off your tunic, please, and show us your hairy privates”“Weep, you girls. My penis has given you up. Now it penetrates men’s behinds. Goodbye, wondrous femininity!”“Amplicatus, I know that Icarus is buggering you. Salvius wrote this.”“Theophilus, don’t perform oral sex on girls against the city wall like a dog”“If anyone sits here, let him read this first of all: if anyone wants a screw, he should look for Attice; she costs 4 sestertii.”“Secundus defecated here”
I really wish I’d known about those when I visited Pompeii in 1987.
I know I still have that page bookmarked, and the graffiti from Pompeii and Herculaneum is proof positive that humanity as a whole hasn’t really evolved in well over thousands of years. It also shows that our combined sense of humor is pretty base and transcends cultures and history. On one hand, it’s kinda nice to know that we really are all the same in a lot of respects. On the other, it’s still kind of embarrassing to think that (presuming we’re still around in a few thousand years) many, many generations down the road, they’re gonna look at what we left behind and go, Huh, they sucked just as much as we do now.
IIRC, they found an inscription of Norse runes way up in a corner of a cave, and when they finally translated them, they found out the runes said, “This is very high.”
*farts*
Excuse, my entire country’s culture is based entirely on shitposting, and I’ll thank you for not calling it “juvenile”.
Hey, I’m American too.
Penises: Still funny after all these millennia.
Shitposting isn’t just being juvenile. Thomas Jefferson funded newspapers so that he could anonymously shitpost about the Washington Administration, of which he was a part.Then again, maybe Thomas Jefferson isn’t the best example of “not juvenile”.
Social media being full of shitposting and the world being full of it are two very different things.
Do not slander Taylor Lorenz, the main character of the New York Times!
have they been publishing the word “shit?” if so, what was keeping them from using “shitposting?” if not, wow!
“if so, what was keeping them from using “shitposting?””
Nothing. They DO use shitposting.
Well done shitposting is an art form. Most of it isn’t well done.
I mean, what is the NY Times Vows section if not rich-person shitposting?
Still not as egregious as the creator of 4chan discussing in public court what a newfag is.
That was nowhere near as hilarious as the Gawker shitcunts get reamed by the lawyers during their trial.
Not nearly as badass as the Nazis getting destroyed at Nuremburg!…er…