Without the possibility of every waking moment being immediately memed into oblivion, this year would have stripped us of every ounce of hope. Memes save lives, squidbrains. One of my personal favorite 2017 memes, though it technically originates from the much better year of 2015, was this reactionary blinker:
Of course, the final stage of a meme is the early morning TV interview. Drew Scanlon, the guy seen shock-blinking in the still ubiquitous GIF, joined Good Morning America Thursday to (very briefly) chop it up about his post-meme existence. "We don't really have a way of communicating body language over the internet, like with text or anything, and memes are kind of that," Scanlon said.
The blinking meme portion of the GMA segment begins around the 1:19 mark in the video up top. According to Scanlon, the unedited version of the interview is much longer.
As touched on in the GMA segment and in previous investigative pieces, Scanlon's planet-uniting blinks were originally unveiled way back in 2013 in a video from gaming site Giant Bomb, where Scanlon works as a video producer.
In a chat with Thrillist earlier this week, Scanlon touted the trend-starting biology class tweet (see above) as his favorite. "That showed the perfect way for [the GIF] to be used," he said. "It was just a really well-crafted tweet."
If blinks aren't really your bag, I suggest turning to a more recent entry in the 2017 hall of memes: Larry King vaping.
