User:Brice/UTC/UTC

UNRAVEL THE MEME

For this first project you will take look at particular given memes and analyse them. Formulate your own questions in order to dissect, interpret, assess, the meme. For example: What characterizes your meme? How is it used? How widespread is it? Where did it originate from? What are keywords that you would attach to it? What is it’s effect? What are it’s components? What does it link to? What is your opinion of this meme? How is it transformed? How would you categorize it’s iterations? What story might you want to tell about this meme? And how would you visualize this story? Ultimately your findings will be displayed as a mini-exhibition during the Wereld van Witte de With.

3 Wolf Moon T-Shirt

About

Three Wolf Moon is a t-shirt that was ironically made into one of the top selling apparel items on Amazon in 2009 after being inundated with tongue-in-cheek customer reviews. Three Wolf Moon t-shirt was designed by Bulgarian artist Antonia Neschev and produced by The Mountain, a New Hampshire-based company that offers a variety of nature-oriented graphic tees. The Amazon product page received its first ironic review on November 10th, 2008, when reviewer named Brian Govern hailed the T-shirt as a magical product :

• " This item has wolves on it which makes it intrinsically sweet and worth 5 stars by itself, but once I tried it on, that's when the magic happened. After checking to ensure that the shirt would properly cover my girth, I walked from my trailer to Wal-mart with the shirt on and was immediately approached by women. The women knew from the wolves on my shirt that I, like a wolf, am a mysterious loner who knows how to 'howl at the moon' from time to time (if you catch my drift!). The women that approached me wanted to know if I would be their boyfriend and/or give them money for something they called mehth. I told them no, because they didn't have enough teeth, and frankly a man with a wolf-shirt shouldn't settle for the first thing that comes to him. I arrived at Wal-mart, mounted my courtesy-scooter (walking is such a drag!) sitting side saddle so that my wolves would show. While I was browsing tube socks, I could hear aroused asthmatic breathing behind me. I turned around to see a slightly sweaty dream in sweatpants and flip-flops standing there. She told me she liked the wolves on my shirt, I told her I wanted to howl at her moon. She offered me a swig from her mountain dew, and I drove my scooter, with her shuffling along side out the door and into the rest of our lives. Thank you wolf shirt."

Three Wolf Moon is an example of an Internet phenomenon known as “customer review comedy”, which occurs when an online product page is inundated with humorous customer reviews. Examples of this include the Amazon review pages for Tuscan Whole Milk and a Laptop Steering Wheel Desk.. On January 7th, 2009, Body Building Forums member user787877877 posted a thread titled “Just bought a wolf tee (srs)”, to which member steve_nash replied with a link to the Three Wolf Moon Amazon page. On May 20th, a Facebook page titled “Three Wolf Moon T-Shirt” was created, which accumulated over 3,700 likes within the next three years. As of September 2012, more than 2,200 Amazon customer review posts have been submitted to Three Wolf Moon T-shirt’s product page.

News Media Coverage

On May 21st, the BBC published an article titled “Joke Review Boosts T-shirt Sales”, reporting that the shirt’s Amazon sales increased by 2,300% as a result of the ironic reviews and quoted Amazon senior manager Russell Dicker revealing that it had reached the top selling item in their clothing store. On the following day, The Washington Post published an article titled “It’s Made of 100% Cotton; Its Sales Are 99% Ironic.” On May 24th, The New York Times published an article titled “Think a T-Shirt Can’t Change Your Life?” A Skeptic Thinks Again", revealing that the original ironic reviewer Brian Govern was a student at Rutgers School of Law in Camden N.J. who created the review on a whim. He was searching for a textbook and decided to make the review. He did not actually own the shirt. The meme has spread on the image-sharing site Flickr, the microblogging site Tumblr and the social news site Reddit.