Corban sophomores Jeffery Morse and Caleb Stultz had no idea what was in store for them when they spontaneously came up with the idea of making the first “Corban University Meme.” (For those of you who don’t know what a “meme” is, it is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture; in this case, photos on the Internet. They are usually with parody-like quotes and pictures.)
At the end of January, Morse came up with the idea for a meme about Corban. He created the “Lion King Meme” on his personal Facebook wall for his Corban friends to enjoy and have a chuckle. From his first post, Morse had 62 friends share the meme on their profiles. Meanwhile, Stultz, a friend of Morse and a fellow Corban student, created an American Thought and Culture Meme that also received praise from friends.
When the two received great feedback from the first two memes, the guys thought, “Oh, we might just be in business with this whole Corban Meme thing,” Morse said.
While the two memes continued to progress their way around Corban students’ Facebook walls, sophomore Maddison Beals suggested they make an official Facebook page for the Corban Memes.
Stultz and Morse gave Beals’ suggestion some thought and that night, Feb. 13, the Official Corban Meme Facebook page was created. In the first 24 hours, the page got over 200 “likes.” When asked if they expected this kind of explosion, the two looked at each other, laughed, and said, “Nooooo.”
“The response we got in the first day, we thought we’d get in a couple weeks,” Morse said.
“We were expecting maybe 10-15 ‘likes,’ ” Stultz said.
The two spent the evening of the 13th posting about 20 memes to the page. While they were still posting the first pictures, the page “likes” began rapidly multiplying.
“Watching it happen was just weird,” Stultz said.
Several of the photos on the Corban Memes page quickly had numbers of “likes” exceeding 100.
“I thought it was really cool to get over 100 ‘likes’ on just one picture,” Morse said.
Within a week, over 300 people “liked” the page. Both Stultz and Morse are pleased and excited with the reaction to their spontaneous idea. They started posting one new meme each weekday.
Because so many people liked the page so quickly, Morse and Stultz decided to set it up so they were the only two who could post things onto the page.
They didn’t want the page to get out of hand or to have inappropriate things posted on the page. They wanted everything that was posted to be clean and funny.
“We don’t want to call out specific people,” Stultz said. “While it may be funny, it’s not appropriate to be posted or laughed about at all, really. We’re not doing it to bring people down, but more poke fun and make a parody of the Corban culture we have here,” he added.
In light of the page’s unexpected explosion of positive feedback and interaction among the Corban community Morse and Stultz said the page is no longer just “their thing,” but that it has become a community thing.
The two are encouraging Corban Meme fans to email either of them with ideas or pictures for other memes. They want it to be something the whole Corban community can be involved in, and they encourage people to send in their ideas for memes.
The idea of making T-shirts and posters has even been brought up, with the possibility of selling them in the Corban Bookstore.
They plan to stay with what they’ve been doing for now, but with the feedback the page has received so far, Stultz said, “There’s no telling what we could do!”