Illustration by Chrisine Hipp.

When “Julia,” a television show about a black nurse and single mother came on the air in 1968, many viewers — white people and people of color alike — wrote in to thank NBC for finally taking a chance with some positive representation of black America.

Some black viewers took their appreciation a step further, offering unsolicited yet earnest advice to the show’s writers:

It’s great you have a black main character that isn’t a buffoon (see “Amos and Andy”). But that doesn’t excuse the whitewashing.

To be realistic, the title character in “Julia” should speak differently, they said, and she should have more black friends. A few even went so far as to suggest themselves as inspiration for new characters, drawing from their own lives to propose episode plot lines.

Whether it’s healthy or not, people always have and always will relate to television. That black viewers unsatisfied with “Julia” would even bother writing in proves the power of the screen — however lacking in believability it was, “Julia” still had allowed them a glimpse into an impossible version of their own world, and the experience was an intoxicating mix of comforting and hollowing.

So they wanted more. And they wanted it to be better.

Now it’s 2012, and nobody writes letters anymore — they write blog posts. If you haven’t seen the online response to Lena Dunham’s new HBO project, “Girls,” consider yourself warned, because it’s a mixed bag of the wise and the reactionary, the insightful and the simple-minded, those with exciting new points and those who miss the point entirely — and sometimes you can find all of that in a single post.

Among the main complaints about the show: Groundbreaking though it may be in its frank depiction of female sexuality and the disappointments of post-college life, “Girls” fails to include representation of any race or class outside of Dunham’s own white, upper middle–class world.

But here’s what I like about “Girls,” and I think I can speak for a lot of viewers on this point: It’s not perfect, but, to borrow a phrase from Dunham herself, it is “a young, young person trying very, very hard.”

Trying at what, you ask? Well, there is a scene in the second episode that had me jumping up and down on my couch. Shoshanna, the girl on the show most likely to identify with “Sex and the City” characters and who is often thrown in for comic relief, is reading aloud from a self-help book, the kind that addresses its readers as “ladies.”

“I’m not a lady,” says Jessa, her cousin and roommate, irritably.

“Yes, you are,” says Shoshanna. “We’re the ladies.”

“Don’t I have a choice?”

That’s what “Girls” is trying to do — it’s trying to represent and entertain the Jessas of the world, the ones who have no interest in being a self-helping lady. It’s trying to be a show that will help girls — and surely plenty of guys as well — feel less lost, that will cut through some of the pseudo-post-lip-gloss-feminist bullshit thrown at us lately via other “girly” shows like “Whitney” and “Two Broke Girls.”

For the record, I do wish “Girls” was more diverse (a process which should always begin in the writers’ room, not with the cast, to avoid tokenism), or at least that there were more diverse shows with the refreshing viewpoint of “Girls,” because everyone deserves representation. But like the “Julia” viewers who wrote in with suggestions and still kept watching every week, I’ve already been hit by the show on a level I’ll never recover from.

Black audiences appreciated “Julia” because they got to see someone with their skin color who wasn’t portrayed as a criminal or idiot on primetime. I appreciate “Girls” because I get to see people with my reproductive organs and around my age who aren’t ladies or whores, aren’t saints or bitches, aren’t larger-than-life caricatures stomping around the city in Jimmy Choos — they’re just, well, girls. That’s enough for me.

In a small classroom hidden at the end of the hall on the first floor of UC Santa Cruz’s social sciences building, six students and their instructor struggle to say,“I like the weather today”in Yiddish. It sounds simple, but several students have already stumbled over the treacherous, paradoxical grammar.

After a few false starts, one student finally gets it right, eliciting cheers and applause from her classmates. Wielding a shard of yellow chalk in one hand and an enormous eraser in the other, Jonathan Levitow — UC Santa Cruz’s only Yiddish language instructor — holds his arms out wide and grins sheepishly, as if to apologize for the small triumph enjoyed by his class.

“Yiddish is too difficult to be learned by human beings!” Levitow said.

Illustration by Louise Leong.

Yet humans — at least Jewish humans — continue to learn it, as they have for the last thousand years. Originally the language of Jews in Eastern and Central Europe, Yiddish spread across the globe on the tongues of Jewish immigrants, arriving in the United States in the 19th century as the spoken and written language of tens of thousands of Jews on the East Coast.

Following World War II, however, the Yiddish-speaking population of Europe was decimated. The adoption of Hebrew as the national language of the state of Israel dealt Yiddish a second deadly blow by denying it a homeland. In the United States, Jewish immigrants often neglected to teach their children Yiddish in an attempt to expedite assimilation, wiping out a pool of potential Yiddish-speakers in the course of a single generation.

Today, there is a popular misconception that because of all this, Yiddish is a dead language. While this statement is far from true, it is also not quite a lie.

Crippled by genocide and decades of bad luck, Yiddish survives in sizable pockets of speakers — mostly ultra-Orthodox communities of Jews and enclaves of aging native speakers in New York — but lacks the cohesion or popularity needed to regain its stature as a daily language used by Jews at home and in public.

In 1970, the U.S. Census found almost 1.6 million Jews who spoke Yiddish as a home language. By 1980, that number had dropped to 315,953. In 1990, it fell again to 213,054. Between 2000 and 2007, the number of Yiddish speakers in America fell to 158,991 — almost a 90 percent drop between 1970 and 2007.

Despite its wounds, Yiddish continues to thrive in some circles. More than a dozen Yiddish programs have sprouted up in American universities in the last 20 years, according to a 2010 study by Dr. Zachary Berger entitled, “The Popular Language That Few Bother to Learn.” In the midst of budget cuts and slashed language programs, Yiddish has managed to take root at UCSC with only a handful of students and educators.

Openly passionate about the language and the program, a small pocket of students and teachers are making a stand to preserve the cultural and linguistic heritage of a language they have come to love.

Introductory Yiddish was first offered at UCSC as a course in the Jewish studies program in spring 2010. Thirty students enrolled in the class — about six times the number of students enrolled at the Yiddish program at Stanford, which is also taught by Jonathan Levitow.

Bruce Thompson, lecturer for the history and literature departments, classifies the upcoming generation’s interest in Yiddish as part of a cycle. Photo by Prescott Watson.

Bruce Thompson, a lecturer for the history and literature departments at UCSC, said one reason for the popularity of Yiddish is the renewed interest many young Jewish students have had in reclaiming their cultural heritage.

“It’s a characteristic swing of the pendulum: The second generation wants to lose it, and the fourth generation wants to get it back,” Thompson said. “There’s a recognition that there was a rich Jewish culture in Eastern Europe as well as a rich literature, and it did so much to shape modern Jewish secular culture and identity.”

Rachel Starr-Glass, a third-year Jewish studies major, said her family was originally from Eastern Europe. A major reason she decided to take Yiddish was so she would be able to explore her own cultural connections to the language.

“There’s so much Yiddish literature out there, and I feel like if I could have direct access to that, the whole world opens up,” Starr-Glass said. “There’s a whole Yiddish culture, and I want to be able to directly access that. My grandma speaks a little, and my brother. It’s in the family.”

Professor Murray Baumgarten, co-founder of the Jewish studies program at UCSC, said knowledge of Yiddish also allows students to access thousands of texts accumulated over the centuries that would have been lost to the ages if not translated into Yiddish.

“One of the things that marks Yiddish is the numerous number of texts of world importance that were translated into Yiddish,” Baumgarten said. “I mean, political science, economics, literature — there was a great sense that Yiddish wanted to be connected to the larger world of Western culture.”

Students realize the double entendre in a joke in Professor Jonathan Levitow’s Yiddish class. Photo by Prescott Watson.

At UCSC, finding financial support outside the classroom has been integral for not only the preservation of the Yiddish language course but also the Jewish studies program that runs it. Founded in 2000, the Jewish studies program was given its start by donations from the Helen Diller Family Foundation, which allowed the program to establish a major, run independently of university funding, and hire faculty members like Yiddish lecturer Levitow.

Despite a rich literary tradition, some Yiddish scholars worry that even as the number of programs devoted to teaching Yiddish culture and literature at the university level increases, the actual number of speakers learning Yiddish outside of Hassidic or Charedi communities is dropping at an alarming rate.

A 2006 study by the Modern Language Association found 969 students enrolled at four-year colleges and graduate programs learning Yiddish. In 2009 (the most recent year available), that number dropped to 336. Although this drop is partly due to the drastic class reductions in one rabbinical academy and one state school, it still represents an enormous blow to the national Yiddish-speaking community.

Michael Wex, Yiddish scholar and New York Times best-selling author of “Born to Kvetch,” a humorous linguistic and sociological history of Yiddish and Jewish culture, said the plight of Yiddish is best reflected in the Jewish community’s sudden interest in preserving Yiddish.

“There’s a very positive attitude towards Yiddish these days, and has been for a couple decades now — and that worries me,” Wex said. “When Yiddish was healthy and flourishing, everyone was ashamed of it and trying to hide it. Now it’s not very healthy and it’s become our legacy.”

Wex said symptoms of Yiddish’s poor health are evident in the popularity of Yiddish phrase books that promise to teach readers exotic food words, cute endearments and juicy curses. Wex said these books promote a superficial knowledge of Yiddish that at best scratches the surface of Jewish culture, and at worst misinforms the reader.

“The interesting thing about Yiddish is that the number of people who know the difference between ‘fuck on’ and ‘fuck off’ is tiny and diminishing,” Wex said. “I’m not a prig, but the Yiddish is wrong — a book that tells you how to ‘fuck on’ is absolutely useless.”

One of the most basic problems obstructing Yiddish education is the lack of certified teachers. Berger cites the Yiddish Teacher’s Seminar in New York — which was closed in 1987 — as one of the last institutions to offer graduate students serious education as Yiddish instructors. Wex mentioned the article as he addressed pressing issues facing Yiddish advocates.

“Who is teaching the spoken language in universities? How many of these people are native speakers?” Wex asked. “It’s a big problem because you’ve got some relatively capable people who are trying to immerse themselves in the language, but it gets harder and harder because there are fewer places to go.”

Jesse Kirchner, a visiting assistant professor of linguistics at UCSC, studied Yiddish throughout his graduate career. In discussing what might endanger a language like Yiddish, Kirchner drew parallels between Yiddish and other extinct or endangered languages.

“What has caused those languages to become extremely endangered are things that were done to break the connection between one generation and the next,” Kirchner said. “As long as something like that doesn’t happen, Yiddish can endure indefinitely.”

However, given that this generational break has already occurred with Yiddish, Kirchner could not predict whether it would survive as a spoken language.

“It’s safe right now because there’s a generation of speakers learning it,” Kirchner said. “But to project out further than that, the future is very much in question for all the other languages in the world — and that would include Yiddish.”

Although Levitow did not agree with the idea that Yiddish is a dying language, he did say that Yiddish culture has been made increasingly irrelevant in modern Jewish communities, especially with the adoption of Hebrew as the official spoken language of Israel and, consequently, the global Jewish community.

“To me it seems kind of obvious — the whole center of Jewish life changed,” Levitow said. “When I was a kid, if you went into the synagogue, people spoke Yiddish. Now, you have to make an effort to go out and learn it. It takes hard work.”

Starr-Glass’ glowing opinion of the class and Reb Yankel (the Yiddish title for Levitow in class) was echoed by her classmate Ian Flanagan, a fourth-year history major.

“If there was one person [in the class] he’d still teach it,” Flanagan said. “He teaches the class — he doesn’t let the book teach the class. He’s so passionate about the course, but not overbearing.”

Flanagan said he has frequently encountered people who do not understand that Yiddish is still a spoken language with vital communities around the world.

“A lot of people will ask, ‘Why are you taking Yiddish? Nobody speaks Yiddish,”’ Flannagan said. “But [Levitow] brought in Yiddish newspapers from New York, so it is prevalent in certain areas, in New York and European countries. If people understand that it’s still in use, it will come back.”

Levitow’s normally cheery face clouded over as he addressed the notion that Yiddish had been left behind in the modern age.

Illustration by Louise Leong.

“Here in California, you really get the sense that Yiddish is of another time,” Levitow said. “But in fact, it’s not true. There are a lot of people who still speak Yiddish — they make an effort to keep it going in their families. New York is a center, also Toronto, and Chicago and L.A. All places where people speak Yiddish day-to-day.”

The absence of an iconic, permanent Yiddish-speaking community is something author Wex believes is permanently stunting the growth of Yiddish.

“One of the big problems [with] teaching Yiddish is it’s very difficult to get any outside-the-class support,” Wex said. “You can’t say, ‘Well here’s a program where you can go to Yiddish Land during the summer.’ It’s not the fault of anybody teaching Yiddish — it just doesn’t exist.”

Levitow said UCSC’s program is exceptionally lucky to receive private funding, because more than almost anything else, steady cash flow is the necessary ingredient for building a stable Yiddish-speaking community.

“The problem really is, in a nutshell, money,” Levitow said. “If you’re running a synagogue, an adult education program, you’re constantly trying to save every dollar you can. So do you hire somebody to teach Yiddish if there are only three students? What we really need are a few more millionaires who could fund Yiddish educational foundations that were stable and could count on funding.”

The Koret Foundation — one of the main donors supporting the program — gave the Jewish studies program a three-year grant to run a Yiddish course. But even private funding cannot guarantee a program’s survival. Last year, as the Yiddish program was just starting up, UCSC’s Hindi/Urdu program lost its own private funding and was forced to close down.

In response to an email query, Koret Foundation communications officer Kirsten Mickelwait said she could not divulge grant information nor speculate on future support for the program. She did say UCSC’s program is the only one Koret funds specifically for Yiddish education.

For students like Starr-Glass, the uncertain future of the Yiddish program and Yiddish itself has had no effect on her enthusiasm to learn the language — in a large part thanks to Levitow’s class and teaching style.

“I love it, I really do,” Starr-Glass said. “His way of teaching is really natural, it’s conversation, and he’s funny — we’re laughing 75 percent of the class. There’s definitely a lot of grammar, the structure of sentences. But the majority of the time we learn by conversation and a lot practice reading and writing.”

For Michael Wex, learning practical conversation skills and grammar is the only efficient way to bring Yiddish back as a language of daily use.

“I think it’s important for the textbook to teach you unremarkable day-to-day expressions,” Wex said. “When the plumber comes, you have to be able to tell him what’s clogged. If you can’t do that, you’re not fluent.”

Lecturer Thompson said there are a number of practical reasons to continue teaching Yiddish, but for the best reason, one should just ask the students studying it.

“Ask any of our students who are taking Yiddish about his or her experience,” Thompson said. “I bet you that the first response before the student says a word is a smile — a broad smile. With all due respect to all the other languages that are offered at UCSC, you don’t get that same smile — but you get it with someone who’s learning Yiddish.”

Asked to elaborate on what students might gain from learning Yiddish, Thompson hesitated, picking his words with care.

“I suppose it’s not only a feeling of accomplishment,” Thompson said. “But there’s also a special feeling of satisfaction that you’re keeping alive something that nearly died. It’s quite a wonderful thing that college students are really doing this.”

Fourth-year student Flanagan said it’s frustrating to see the low enrollment in Levitow’s class, which he blames on the recent arrival of the program and its virtual invisibility on course registers.

“Nobody knows it’s being offered. Once I found out and I took it, I became the biggest cheerleader for it,” Flanagan said. “We have pride in what we’re learning because nobody else is studying it. It’s something unique to me and I want to see more people speaking it.”

Photo by Prescott Watson.

Starr-Glass said that although she is not sure how far she will take her Yiddish education, she would be interested in taking another Yiddish class if it were offered. But it was difficult to imagine learning enough Yiddish to make it the home language of her family, she said.

“I’m not really sure about that — it would be hard. I think I would have to move to a Yiddish-speaking community to do that,” Starr-Glass said. “When I have a family, I want Yiddish to be familiar to them. I don’t know if me speaking alone to them would be enough, but I want to pass it on to them.”

Wex said that in the ideal world, Yiddish would be taught not as a class, but as the language of instruction in an entire university.

“No single teacher, no matter how intelligent or gifted can [possibly] cover it all,” Yiddish scholar Wex said. “There’s never one professor for a whole area. This is what you need in Yiddish, the idea of a university, one that covers liberal arts, and social science, that really does run in Yiddish.”

Wex also noted that despite efforts to make Yiddish a secular language, the religious component is too vital to the vocabulary and structure of the language to be excluded from study. Wex said without knowledge of the forms and rituals that defined Yiddish as a sacred language used by Jews for a millennia, a student could not achieve more than partial understanding of the language.

“I don’t think you can make this stuff work [by saying]… ‘Here are some dirty jokes, here are some insults you can sling at people,”’ Wex said. “You end up with a culture where all you can do is curse.”

By the end of Levitow’s two-hour class, nobody had uttered a curse, but the students had reviewed a quiz and covered several complicated grammatical constructions. Class was concluded with the reading of two jokes from the textbooks. By the end of the first joke, class was over, but nobody wanted to leave until the second joke was finished.

Line by line, the second joke is read through until the last student read the final sentence, sounding out the Yiddish words before translating them into English. It takes a second for everyone to put together the translated joke, leading to a collective groan at the punch line. But Levitow beamed and bobbed uncontrollably on the balls of his feet, unable to hide his delight.

“I saw the light go on in your eyes!” Levitow said. “It was very exciting!”

Illustration by Matt Boblet.

The faucet is running. My compact, powder and mascara are in my bag and that girl who just came in the bathroom door didn’t see a thing.

About two years ago, I began to feel the need to be more of a ninja in these types of situations while on campus at UC Santa Cruz.

I began to pay more attention to my surroundings after an uncomfortable encounter in the Social Sciences 2 building.

A sweet-looking, button-nosed girl came up to me as I adjusted my makeup in the bathroom mirror and said, in a condescending voice, “You’re beautiful without makeup, you know?”

My first thought was, “Have you been following me? How do you know what I look like without makeup?”

I tilted my head and thought, “Wait, do you think I’m not being a good feminist? What does that even mean?”

Her words stung, and I didn’t really know what to say. I just shrugged my shoulders and probably made a funny face.

I hate to sound shallow, but I’ve always really liked makeup, especially during my adolescent years when I wasn’t allowed to wear it. It was a rush with blush.

There were so many bright blues and greens, all probably with harmful ingredients that have aged me prematurely.

I remember sneaking around with my friends and exchanging makeup that was, in my mother’s words, not for “niñas” (girls) in middle school.

At 12, I was hiding from my mother. Now at 21, I’m hiding from hyper-critical students. The digits have switched, yet here I am. I just hate that I feel so self-conscious about people seeing my makeup ritual.

I even feel self-conscious about looking at myself.

Next time you — men, women, and everything in between and outside — go into a public restroom, look immediately in the direction of the mirrors. Someone just flinched and played off adjusting their hair. I do it all the time.

I wouldn’t say I have a fixation when it comes to makeup. I just really like wearing it, and have an unfortunate glandular problem. That’s right. I’m a sweaty girl. By 2:30 p.m., half my face is an inch lower than the other side.

Like Photoshop, I get to work with my brush. I “restore” my image. It’s my little ritual.

By doing this, I risk confronting another Button-Nose.

I’d like to know: What’s the difference between society telling women what to do and a type of feminism that tells us what to do? It’s hard to please both my Beyoncé-look-loving side and Button-Nose.

At least I’m not the only ninja with this problem. My housemate was energetically telling me about having to face this fear after running short on time in the morning.

“Yeah, I put my makeup on,” she said with pride. “IN PUBLIC!”

Rebecca Walker, daughter of famous novelist Alice Walker, dealt with a similar fear of judgment. In her book “To Be Real,” Rebecca Walker spoke about her experiences with her mother.

“Young women feminists find themselves watching their speech and tone in their works so as not to upset their elder feminist mothers,” she said in the book. “Younger feminists definitely have a hard time proving themselves worthy as feminist scholars and activists.”

Though Rebecca Walker has been criticized for being self-righteous, she does make a point in saying that some have developed an overly standardized view of what feminism should be for everyone — not what feminism and empowerment means to individuals.

Feminist literature throughout the decades has pointed to the diversity among women’s wants and needs. More than half of the anthropology students in that Social Sciences 2 building could lecture Button-Nose on a thing or two about cultural relativity.

I’m not saying that there isn’t a reciprocal relationship. Outside the walls of UCSC, people are unfairly partial to “mainstream” looks, dolled-up faces and the latest season’s colors.

To be honest, I’m often one of those people who say, “You’re beautiful without makeup.” But why can’t it be both? Who am I to say what people should do?

Though I am an exceptionally good ninja, I’ll try not to flinch next time someone walks in on me staring at myself. Let’s be comfortable with ourselves, and let’s be comfortable with others’ choices.

There is a gray cat with a pop tart for a body on the computer screen.

Its pixilated body is flying through animated space, leaving a rainbow trail in its wake. A grating but catchy tune plays over and over.

“Nyan, nyan nyan nyan, nyan nyan nyan nyan, nyan nyan.”

“The appeal is that it’s just nonsense,” said Joel Johnston, a sophomore broadcasting major at San Francisco State University. “There are some people who like the song.”

This is Nyan Cat, a recent example of an Internet meme, which is an image, video, or saying that spreads virally over the World Wide Web.

The word “meme” first appeared in Richard Dawkins’ 1976 book “The Selfish Gene.” Dawkins defined a meme as being any sort of idea that spreads from person to person within a culture and catches fire. It played on the notion of a gene, as both genes and memes multiply with human-to-human contact.

As UC Santa Cruz computer science professor Gerald Moulds put it, “Every idea that manages to self-replicate is a meme.”

Internet memes are much the same thing. They spread from website to website, from community to community, from user to user across the Web, mutating and bonding together, and taking on different meanings along the way.

Moulds says he has “been plugged in to the Internet before most people knew there was an Internet.” He was online during the days of purely text-based message boards, called USENET newsgroups, where he says he experienced his first meme: a message board with the address “Alt.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bork.” The name references the Swedish Chef, a character on the Muppets.

“That was the first really well-known, completely whimsical thing [on the Internet],” Moulds said.

As often happens with memes, the message board spurred imitators and variations, such as “Alt.wesley.crusher.must.die.die.die,” this time poking fun at Star Trek: The Next Generation.

This was happening in the mid-1980s, but most of the memes Moulds can remember are from the last decade. Today, the Internet is much more sophisticated, though memes operate mostly the same way: an absurd or relatable concept takes form, usually in an image, and is released onto the Web, where just about anything can happen. They can remain in obscurity, or they can take over an entire section of the Internet — at least for a couple of days.

The last huge medium to take hold before the Internet was television, which brought mass culture into the home in a way it had never been before. The “Idiot Box” had the potential to be a voice for and of the people, but commercial interests outweighed realistic representations and varying viewpoints.

It’s widely acknowledged that the Internet is in some ways replacing television, and thus memes are poised to rival television as a form of mass entertainment. The popular meme database website Know Your Meme currently has 5,525 memes catalogued total, and that doesn’t count all the variations that come about within each meme.

Compare that to the 70-something channels that come with most cable packages for television. Some would say that you can’t look at TV shows and viral Internet images the same way, but what it all boils down to is the influence of ideas, and in numbers, memes have a lot more ideas, and a growing influence. Johnston spoke about the inevitability of encountering memes in today’s world.

“It eventually just happens,” he said. “If you’re on the Internet, you’re eventually just going to get exposed to memes. My mom isn’t really into the Internet — she just uses it for email, but even she knows about some of them.”

The Internet currently has less corporate control than other mediums. Because of this, memes are a form of entertainment that is actual popular culture in the purest terms: a culture of the people. They imitate TV’s instant-gratification format, but project a voice that is really from the masses, for the masses. Advertisers are constantly trying to produce an inauthentic copy of this, and many criticize meme culture for its anonymous, anything-goes approach. But the populist entertainment ventures on — for better or worse.

“Friday,” that infamous Rebecca Black music video, was inescapable for two weeks in March of this year, and even surpassed Lady Gaga’s single “Born This Way” in hits on YouTube. The song was originally produced and promoted by label Ark Music Factory, but what made the fervor so intense was the work of millions of people on their computers, posting links wherever they could.

And it wasn’t just the video itself that caught on. Different memes dissecting and analyzing small parts of the video, and comparing it to other parts of popular culture, were all over different sites.

One popular image had two panels: in the first, Rebecca Black is smiling, with a caption that reads “Which seat should I take?” a line from the popular song. In the next, the character Gretchen from the popular teen movie “Mean Girls” grimaces, and the caption is a line from the movie: “You can’t sit with us!”

There were hundreds more like it, and thousands of other memes take the Internet by storm every single day. It is a mass medium that, thanks to the omniscience of the Internet, is constantly evolving, an ever changing and growing set of inside jokes and references upon references upon references.

By taking apart Rebecca Black’s cheesy, generic pop song, the masses used humor to reject the disintegration of the music industry. Memes aren’t important because they make stars out of 13-year-old girls — they’re important because they allow the public to speak, and to decide what’s valuable. They are, in a way, a re-appropriation of American popular culture.

And this re-appropriation has concrete results. On April Fool’s Day of 2008, YouTube linked all featured videos on its front page to the music video for Rick Astley’s 1987 song “Never Gonna Give You Up,” copying a popular practice from Internet pranksters known as “Rickrolling.” The song shot to number 77 on Amazon’s online store.

The meme site ICanHazCheezburger, which bought Know Your Meme in March for an undisclosed seven-figure amount, receives around 2000 submissions a day alone. The site focuses on LOLCats, a type of meme that takes humorous images of cats and imposes absurd text laden with purposefully poor spelling and grammar.

For much of the 2000s and still today, LOLCats were and are inescapable. Their signature “I can haz [insert thing here]?” has become an acceptable way to request something, and people are expected to know what is being referenced. Emily Huh, editor-in-chief of ICanHazCheezburger, explained why she thinks certain memes take off so much.

“It has to have some entertainment value, whether it’s funny or whether it’s so horrible that it is funny,” she said. “Like Rebecca Black. It was so horrible that you just had to laugh at it. You don’t necessarily have to relate to it, but just understand it.”

San Francisco State student Johnston, who can spend an hour or two going through different memes in one sitting, echoes Huh’s opinion.

“I think the absurd nature of a lot of [memes] definitely make them entertaining because you just can’t really expect them,” Johnston said. “They’re all very accessible. A lot of people can see them and understand them, and a lot of people can use them in their own way.”

“People come to our sites because they get to connect and share with people what they have made or seen,” Huh said. “People get a few minutes of fame. They get really excited when they make a submission and it gets to the home page.”

An example of a relatable meme is Rage Comics, four-panel comics that always end the same way: with a stick-figure man looking upwards, his face contorted, mouth agape, with the text “FFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUU.” The situations leading up to the almost-expletive are always everyday annoyances — the sort of things that happen to everyone at some point, but that are so mundane that most people never talk about them, like being too lazy to tie your shoelaces and then tripping over them.

The “fffuuu” guy is one of a cast of characters in the meme-verse. Also present are Forever Alone and the Troll, different unattractive faces that have their own comics and followings.

These memes, like many others, originated on 4chan, an anything-goes message board site which grants users complete anonymity. Wade Hastings, a student at Cabrillo College, has been using the site for about five years now. He first looked at it after he repeated a joke he had heard someone else tell, only to be told that the joke originated on 4chan.

“I read that thread [rage comics] when it first happened,” said Hastings. “It was just some guy, he made a four-panel comic, and it ended with the ‘fffuuu’ guy.”

4chan is known for having no boundaries or limits for what is acceptable to post. That means a lot of awful stuff, like child pornography and extremely racist, sexist, and homophobic posts, pop up. This is the price that is paid for a democratic, populist form of entertainment — all democracies depend on free speech.

“I do think the anonymity of the Internet has inspired creativity without traditional boundaries, and much of what’s been created seems like a response to the those traditional boundaries,” said UCSC professor Moulds in an email. “Some of what is created is small-minded or mean, and maybe much of it wouldn’t be out there if every creation were clearly linked to its author. But it would also chill free expression immensely if people thought that every off-color joke or juvenile Photoshop could be tied to their real names forever.”

And alongside the offensive material, memes that later take hold of the entire Internet start on 4chan. For Hastings, the limitless atmosphere is key for creativity free from judgment.

“It’s almost completely anonymous, which is a huge helper, because people aren’t afraid to post a word,” he said.

After a meme pops up on 4chan, it takes a while to spread to other sites, like Reddit, a more policed message board, and Tumblr, a popular micro-blogging site. Once there, in the mainstream, the memes can blend together with each other to create a sort of pop cultural society and language. Christopher Price, editorial director of Tumblr, spoke about this phenomenon.

“I think that the graphical Internet memes are almost like hieroglyphics [because] you couldn’t express that sentiment any simpler than that,” Price said. “And so it’s just a guy saying ‘fuuuuuck,’ you know, that’s a pretty clear, basic sentiment. We all get that. We all have been there before.”

Price also talked about a recent trend on Tumblr, which has been to essentially tell stories using different memes to express emotions. In a world that is becoming more and more wired, things like body language and facial expressions are being replaced by animated images called Graphics Interchange Formats, or GIFs.

“They have their GIF folder on their computer, and they pick the best animated GIF from Harry Potter or something to express how they feel. And that’s rather an amazing way to communicate. It’s bizarre,” he said. “There are so many references, so there’s really a lot to be communicated there, but the person doesn’t necessarily do any of the communicating.”

Because memes are a form of entertainment that is easily manipulated and created by anyone, the potential for cross-sectional references are infinite. GIFs depicting the movie “Inception” and the show “RuPaul’s Drag Race” can be placed right next to each other, creating a completely new hybrid. In yet another Rebecca Black meme, 50 Cent and Elmo can ride in the same car, both of them laughing at the tween singer. It’s a pop culture junkie’s dream come true.

But entertainment isn’t the only world memes can comment on. Almost immediately after Osama Bin Laden’s death was announced, images were circulating with the text “America! Fuck Yeah!” and pictures of Bin Laden made to look like the lead character in “Black Swan” saying “I was perfect” also made the rounds. The nation wanted to celebrate the death of a man widely regarded as evil, and they turned to GIFs and Photoshop to do so.

But there are still drawbacks. Because memes rely on catchphrases and single images, patience for anything longer is running low. A UCSF study released in April showed that extreme multitasking associated with the Internet can limit the brain’s attention span.

“There’s very much simplicity, and short is important. And sometimes I get a little scared about that,” UCSC professor Moulds said.

He tells a story of receiving an email with a link to a video, and after seeing how long it is, thinking to himself, “A minute and a half, that’s forever!”

But perhaps more threatening than length is the possibility of being monetized. Viral marketing tries to synthesize the organic way memes can spread, creating ads with the goal of having amused Internet users doing the publicity for them.

“I think it doesn’t become a meme, usually, for money,” Moulds said. “In terms of the memes becoming popular, that seems to happen purely by accident. There are attempts to replicate that, of course. ‘Snakes on a Plane’ was introduced as viral marketing.”

Movies like “Snakes on a Plane” and “Cloverfield” are famous for viral marketing campaigns, as are brands like Skittles and Burger King.

Wade Hastings remembers seeing a supposed feud between Lady Gaga and Weird Al played out on the pages of Reddit surrounding Al covering one of Gaga’s songs. He suspects it was really all viral marketing.

“All of a sudden, these two people had huge bursts of publicity. Hundreds of thousands of people saw that on the front page of Reddit,” he said. “It’s viral PR firms. I don’t mean to sound paranoid, but it’s kind of like mind control in a way. It’s manipulation.”

But despite these worries, Christopher Price from Tumblr has an optimistic outlook for the future of memes.

“I think there will always be an element of Wild West, anything-goes, because it’s just the nature of the Internet,” he said. “It’s a platform that encourages you to use it and create your own stuff for it. There are always going to be these people in their basements making really weird stuff that nobody understands. And I think that’s great, because it’s that weird stuff that gets refined and refined and refined, and then it somehow makes sense to people.”

For Hastings, memes have nowhere to go but up. He waved his hands around and opened his eyes wide as he spoke about their future.

“I think it’s going to be like the next Beatles. I mean, that’s kind of a weird reference, but the Beatles were huge,” he said. “Meme culture is going to explode. I’m really excited. Ten years from now there’s going to be an Internet culture class at prestigious universities.”

Maybe that will happen someday. But for now, memes are still in their own world, what San Francisco State student Johnston calls the “subconscious” of the people. And maybe the people don’t want to turn over their own mass medium to the established media just yet. Maybe they want to keep memes weird.

After all, that pop tart cat is still on the screen, reblogged on Tumblr by Topherchris, also know as Christopher Price, a day after we spoke. And the caption underneath is as follows:

“I almost attempted to describe Nyan Cat to a reporter yesterday, but decided against it because I didn’t want to sound batshit crazy.”

Photo by Alex Zamora.

Last week, I met a girlfriend at Lulu Carpenter’s for some coffee and much-needed gossip time. With the end of the quarter looming around the corner, “coffee and life” was our first choice for a stress-relief fix.

We sat at a table and decided to get a few hard-boiled eggs to share. Six eggs and 45 minutes later, we were left with a mound of eggshells and the conclusion that homework is overrated, men are dodos, and that we should seriously major in procrastination.

Since then, hard-boiled eggs have become our passion. Every time either one of us needs to vent, we simply split a bowl of eggs and peel every last one.

We needed a distraction, an activity to perform while our minds frantically traveled at the speed of light to list each and every one of our stresses, concerns and daily anecdotes. 

Our conversation was meaningful, but would it have been less memorable without the bowl of eggs to center our attention? 

The fact is that people as a whole need some kind of social activity to distract themselves from each other. “Multitasker” is the average American’s middle name, and with the onset of the digital revolution, focusing on one activity is virtually impossible. 

We have lost our ability to sit still and have a legitimate conversation with someone else. We always need to include a third-party distraction, from hookahs to beer pong, either to initiate the connection or at the very least continue it. 

Multitasking to prevent the risk of awkwardness has never been more fashionable than with our generation.

Now I would never be one to oppose whatever is en vogue. It isn’t really about multitasking — rather, it’s the idea that we try to avoid the potential awkwardness of a conversation without some sort of distraction.

Picture a group of college stoner boys sitting in a circle passing a bong around. Now take away the bong. You won’t typically find a group of college guys sitting in a circle, chatting about life without some sort of object of diversion.

As a woman, I can admit that we, unlike our male counterparts, can sit together in a circle and have long discussions. However, we still need the comfort of our cell phones, Blackberrys or laptops to keep us occupied. 

While these activities may seem perfectly normal to us, if we took a minute to step back and look at ourselves, we would probably look like a bunch of anxious sociopaths, furiously texting or lighting up cigarette after cigarette while attempting to maintain a decent conversation. 

We form and base the quality of our conversations on activities like smoking and drinking because those are things we like to do together. People can’t help but enjoy sitting in a circle passing the hookah hose from person to person.

So what ever happened to social interaction, as opposed to social distraction? If someone doesn’t drink coffee or spend all of their time on Facebook, do they miss out on social opportunities they may never get back? 

We use these activities to channel our anxious energy, but the real question is why do we feel so naked without them?

The answer is simple. There is nothing that scares us more than an awkward silence. By distracting ourselves with other activities, we allow those silences to slip by unnoticed. 

What we as a society consider awkward is actually what it means to be real. From our day-to-day conversations, we want to portray ourselves in a specific light. Feeling vulnerable or awkward immediately strips us down to the basics of who we really are. 

Our society’s obsession with not seeming vulnerable by constantly seeming busy is an epidemic. 

Renowned psychology professor Albert H. Mehrabian’s studies from the 1960s and ’70s show that in a normal conversation, words account for 7 percent, tone of voice accounts for 38 percent, and body language 55 percent of communication. Knowing that actions speak louder than words, we shield ourselves with tedious actions to avoid opening up to people.

True, opening up to people is scary, but if we turned off the televisions, put out the ciggies, and dumped out the coffee, we would be able to give each other the full attention we deserve. 

Although we face the harsh reality that we will always shield ourselves through certain social activities, these are the activities that will perpetuate both positive and negative conversations — and without those conversations, there would never be any change. Maybe the first step to fixing it is to talk about it. And doing so distraction-free may be a step in the right direction.