It’s what we mostly see on our social media feeds. You can’t escape them and you can’t help but to laugh at them. The most popular memes are the ones that contain a picture of a person accompanied with a phrase with the intention to make fun of the person. We laugh at memes not realizing that the protagonists are people with feelings that might not like the idea of their faces being all over the Internet.
Recently a Taiwanese model, Heidi Yeh, has come out to reveal that her career as a model has been ruined because of a meme. It all started when a picture she modeled for made it onto the Internet with a caption intended to make fun of plastic surgery. The purpose of the picture was to be used as an advertisement for a Taiwanese cosmetic clinic. The picture showed good looking parents with their three children. The faces of the kids were altered, the kids now have smaller eyes and flat noses. To advertise plastic surgery the picture has a caption, "the only thing you'll ever have to worry about is how to explain it to the kids." Nowadays anything can’t stay at one place and this picture made into the web with a change made to it. It had the caption, "Plastic surgery; you can't hide it forever."
Yeh has modeled for big companies as well as being featured on TV commercials. Yeh told BBC News that the meme has decreased her modeling offers. "People refused to believe that I had never had plastic surgery. Clients would ask me if I was the woman in the picture. After this, I only got small roles in advertisements." Yeh found out that the meme was even translated into multiple languages.
But sometimes memes turn out be positive for its protagonists. We’ve all seem the “Bad Luck Brian” meme, it was created and posted by Kyle Craven’s (“Bryan”) friend. This meme made Kyle Internet famous and he made money from all the merchandise that had his face on it. Kyle also got to attend Internet conferences where he was able to meet fans of the meme. Kyle sometimes gets ask to use his picture for advertisements in different countries.
Being Internet famous out of the sudden has it ups and downs. Let’s keep in mind that these memes were published without the person’s permission so the outcome is not always going to be the same. There are so many memes out in the web that have a real story behind it but we don’t think about that, we just laugh and share them for more people to laugh at it. It's sad to admit that we live in a world where we tend to overshare without thinking of the consequences.
