, Beacon Correspondent/strong

Emerson’s self-contained culture produces many defining quirks.  With more inside jokes than one cares to count, the eccentricity of the student body lent itself particularly well to one thing this week: a hilarious meme.

Memes are defined by Merriam-Webster as an idea that spreads from person to person within a culture.  Thanks to the Internet, memes are a pandemic manifesting in many forms  — be it a witty image or inside joke.

Katie DeWitt, a freshman performing arts major is the mastermind behind an image macro — a picture captioned with superimposed text — called Emerson Kid Lion that mocks Emerson College’s idiosyncracies.  The image features a maned king-of-the-jungle smoking a cigarette and wearing photo-shopped hipster beanie.

DeWitt said she was inspired by her love for Tumblr, and other memes such as “Advice Dog.” DeWitt said she didn’t have a difficult time coming up with ideas. “There’s a lot of ‘typical Emerson’ types of things that pop up in your every day life, so it wasn’t hard to think of the first few,” she said.

The meme, created Monday night, blew up quickly.   Emerson Kid Lion’s mockery of the college’s unreliable wireless network, the painfully long walk to the Paramount center, and other things that are “#soemerson” have become a source of entertainment for Emerson net denizens.

An upperclassman posted on the Emerson Kid Lion Tumblr praising DeWitt’s cleverness for picking up on Emerson inside jokes as just a freshman.  Dewitt accepts suggestions via Facebook and opened an askbox on tumblr where people can submit ideas and be attributed for their work. Emerson Kid Lion can be follwowed on Tumblr: emersonkidlion.tumblr.com

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