It’s been a year on the internet—slop, rap beef, brain rot, and, yeah, hawk tuah.
Don Caldwell, editor-in-chief of Know Your Meme, an online database that records trends, claims that the unofficial definition of memes has broadened to encompass any kind of viral internet phenomenon, including slang phrases like rizz or skibidi, that comes to life on social media.
According to Caldwell, the level of literacy needed to comprehend a meme can be quite high and intricate, as it takes knowledge of five distinct memes throughout the history of the internet to even get the joke.
According to Jamie Cohen, a specialist in digital culture, memes of days typically start as references to or responses to other things, such pop culture or news events.
According to Cohen, an assistant professor of media studies at City University of New York-Queens College, many of these methods of reading media are similar to translating content in real time if you’re constantly or eventually online. Today, memes need to be more culturally aware than ever before.
NBC News compiled the most significant memes and events that influenced 2024 for individuals who weren’t very active online this year.
Brat
summer
This year, Charli XCX’s sixth studio album, Brat, was unavoidable because to her green wallstop presidential campaigning. The album reinterpreted the term “brat” as a denial of excellence. According to Charli XCX, being a brat means being straightforward, honest, and a little bit erratic. It makes sense that an album this hedonistic and sensitive would serve as the background music for a year filled with historic natural disasters, celebrity feuds, elections, and more.
For years, Charli XCX has been in the middle class of mainstream music, but her most recent release suddenly shot her to new heights. She probably received several Grammy nominations as a result of the virality, including one in the coveted album of the year category.
The great X-odus
Mastodon was the first. Next, threads. Now, Bluesky (again). Since Elon Musk acquired Twitter in 2022, former users have been leaving the platform on and off, but the largest user exodus started after this year’s election. Alternative text-based social media applications like Threads and Bluesky, which saw notable increases in user signups following the election, have attracted millions of users over the past month, including numerous celebrities and corporations.
Numerous X users have brought attention to escalating problems like abuse, politicized ads, and bots. When Donald Trump was re-elected president this year with Musk’s backing, the dissatisfaction hit yet another tipping point after earlier waves of users left the app for a sought-for but yet elusive Twitter substitute. In the meantime, Musk has been predicting that news media outlets will replace Xas.
The Paris
Olympics
Perhaps the year’s most significant cultural event was the Olympics. Over the course of the 19-day competition, there were spectacular opening and closing ceremonies as well as numerous sporting victories, including those by Team USA, which won 125 medals. Numerous viral moments became viral on the internet, boosting the spirits of viewers at home and making some rivals even more famous.
Team USA gymnast Stephen Nedoroscik (also known as the pommel horse guy) and Team USA rugby player Ilona Maher gained so much popularity during the Games that they were cast on Dancing With the Stars; South Korean pistol shooter Kim Ye-ji and Turkish shooter Yusuf Dike wowed viewers with their skills and style; and Norwegian swimmer Henrik Christiansen enthralled the world with his TikTok videos about the Olympic Village muffins.
It was a star-studded event as well. With her first performance since announcing her stiff-person syndrome diagnosis in 2022, Cline Dion wrapped up the opening ceremony. The ceremonial and symbolic handover of the torch to Los Angeles, the site of the 2028 Summer Olympics, marked the end of the Games. In addition to performances by H.E.R., the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre, and Billie Eilish, the event featured a stunt by Tom Cruise.
Hawk tuah taking the internet by storm
This summer, Hawk Tuah went viral on the internet after Haliey Welch said, in a Southern accent, “You gotta give em that hawk tuah and spit on that thang” in response to a street interview question on what move makes a man go crazy in bed.
A Barstool-like throng of online users applauded Welch’s audacious, unabashedly sexual humor, propelling her into overnight fame as the clip gained popularity. Hawk Tuah Girl has used the attention to develop a brand based on the tagline, which includes her podcast, Talk Tuah, and other business endeavors, despite the fact that many people online criticized her for her sudden popularity.
Very
demure
and an effort to trademark virality
Everyone became fixated with acting extremely modest or adorable and being quite conscious of their behavior in 2024. After a TikTok user named Jools Lebron posted a video describing how she manages a wide range of everyday situations, the words went viral online.
After a surprising trademark application in August caused a flurry about the legal rights to the viral term, Lebron’s viral stardom was accompanied by an unexpected trademark dispute. Lebron covered the battle to obtain ownership of the Demure trademark, demonstrating the difficulty innovators face in making money off of their unexpected online celebrity.
Lebron informed her fans that she had finally resolved the trademark dispute. She now switched to a full-time work creating content, and she said that the money she earned from brand deals allowed her to cover the remaining costs of her gender transition.
The rise of underconsumption core
Online shoppers appear to have been under constant pressure in recent years to purchase the newest, trendy products, from Stanley water bottles to apparel that mimics the newest, sexiest fashions. However, following every trend has put a strain on customers’ finances and resulted in a lot of clutter in their houses.
The underconsumption core, which gained popularity on TikTok this year, exhorts users to ignore microtrends and concentrate on the items they genuinely use and appreciate on a daily basis. It may be simpler to stay out of the latest trends if you remind yourself that you have all you need. Along with other online-popularized movements like loud budgeting and de-influencing, this is the newest trend to promote the normalcy of not spending money.
A lookalike frenzy
MakerPerhaps his greatest obstacle is the Timoth e Chalamet lookalike contest. Anthony Pois is well-known for organizing outrageous events in New York City. Numerous imitators appeared all across the world after thousands of people, including the genuine Chalamet, attended the lookalike competition.
Lookalike competitions for celebrities such as Jeremy Allen White, Zayn Malik, Paul Mescal, and Dev Patel have also emerged since the Chalamet event in October, attracting sizable crowds in several cities.
The proliferation of AI slop
He’s half-shrimp, Jesus. Bible-wielding flight attendants bravely wading through muck. Children who are malnourished, deformed, or suffering from chronic illnesses are pleading for birthday wishes. This year, the surge in artificial intelligence-generated art gave rise to a deluge of AI slop, which is typically distinguished by its absurd picture conceptions and illogical anatomical mistakes. The pictures may be instantly identifiable as fraudulent to many people on the internet. Others, however, lack this discernment.
These images, which are frequently shared by networks of Facebook spam pages, have garnered hundreds of millions of interactions from people commending the efforts of an AI-generated child who allegedly constructed an intricate statue out of plastic bottles, wishing happy birthday to fictitious children sitting pathetically in the mud, or Amen on the strange biblically themed imagery. Users have been both amused and perplexed by the phenomena, with some questioning whether bot activity or even scammers are at play.
The return of the diss track and Drake and Kendrick Lamar’s never-ending beef
The diss track, a vital instrument in hip-hop culture for resolving conflicts, saw a return this year. At the center of the trend were rappers Drake and Kendrick Lamar, whose longtime feud reached a boiling point this year.
The squabble first blew up online when Lamar dissed Drake and J. Cole in his song Like That, a collab with Future and Metro Boomin released in March. Drake in turn responded with his own diss tracks Push Ups and Taylor Made Freestyle, the latter of which he took down afterhe faced legal actionfor using the AI-generated voice of the late Tupac Shakur. As the rappers produced track after track during the summer, they continued to back and forth. Drake tooktheir beef to courtclaiming in a filing last month that Universal Music Group, the distributor for both rappers labels, artificially inflated numbers for Lamar sNot Like Uson Spotify.
Our collective ‘brain rot’
Oxford University Press defines brain rot, itsword of the year, as “the supposed deterioration of a person s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging. Additionally: something that is thought to be prone to such degradation.
The term has primarily been linked to Gen Alpha, defined as children born after 2010, who have created their own language within their online communities. Brain rot lingo is often associated with words like: sigma, someone who is cool or a leader; gyatt, which is an exclamation for a curvaceous woman; and Skibidi, as in Skibidi Toilet, a term derived from aYouTube seriesthat is now used to mean basically anything.
Note: Every piece of content is rigorously reviewed by our team of experienced writers and editors to ensure its accuracy. Our writers use credible sources and adhere to strict fact-checking protocols to verify all claims and data before publication. If an error is identified, we promptly correct it and strive for transparency in all updates, feel free to reach out to us via email. We appreciate your trust and support!