Sha­had Ali

Se­nior Press Pass Cor­re­spon­dent

In­ter­net memes are prac­ti­cal­ly tak­ing over our so­cial me­dia news feeds. These in­ge­nious con­cepts are set to go vi­ral, with some memes be­ing shared up to 1000 times in a giv­en week. Memes are root­ed in pop­u­lar cul­ture and are aimed at a gen­er­al au­di­ence and there are nu­mer­ous pages on face­book that are run by our very own cit­i­zens. One of these pages that stand out among the rest is 'Mean­while in T&T', a face­book \page that fo­cus­es on pop­u­lar lo­cal cul­ture. The page it­self is run by an av­er­age of six anony­mous ad­min­is­tra­tors. Found­ing mem­ber of the Mean­while in T&T page "Batz" ex­plained to gieMAGAZINE that their iden­ti­ty is nev­er re­vealed be­cause so­cial com­men­tary can some­times be very risky. "We had our ad­mins on stand­by dur­ing the ar­rest of Ian Al­leyne. Since so­cial me­dia is so pop­u­lar these days, pho­tos are eas­i­ly made avail­able for the most re­cent events." Batz fur­ther ex­plained that once they had enough in­for­ma­tion to go on, a se­ries of com­i­cal pieces were made by dif­fer­ent ad­min­is­tra­tors and up­loaded to the page. The re­sponse by their 10,000 fan base was very pos­i­tive. "We do it to en­ter­tain!" quipped their newest ad­min­is­tra­tor, "Le Bis­cuit". Ac­cord­ing to Batz, Le Bis­cuit was re­cruit­ed be­cause of his con­tin­u­ous orig­i­nal lo­cal memes that he post­ed on­line. Le Bis­cuit, de­spite be­ing very new to the page, has been able to gain hun­dreds of likes for very sim­ple, fun­ny and ef­fec­tive memes. Per­haps the most com­i­cal is the one that reads:

"Ey girl yuh from Ma­coya awah, cuz yuh look­ing like d Cen­tre of Ex­cel­lence"(lol).

His most re­cent, pop­u­lar meme that has gained over 700 likes on face­book is his lo­cal satire on the pop­u­lar sang by GO­TYE "Now you're just some­body that I used to know." He re­placed the lyrics with:

"Now you're just some bo­di that I used to grow."

The page was cre­at­ed out of a very sim­ple thought from Batz him­self. An in­ter­na­tion­al pho­to with a plane odd­ly parked in a sub­ur­ban area. Batz al­ways thought of the word 'Pe­nal' to be fun­ny. The way it's pro­nounced, the way its spelt and the whole cul­ture of it be­ing a rur­al area. He took the pho­to and just sim­ply placed the words "Mean­while in Pe­nal..." and for an odd rea­son the re­sponse to the meme was over­whelm­ing. The ma­jor­i­ty of his face­book friends found it to be ex­treme­ly fun­ny! There are many com­pet­ing pages which have got­ten more likes than 'Mean­while in T&T'. These pages have been able to com­mand an on­line au­di­ence of up to 100,000 in­di­vid­u­als. As such, these pages have been able to in­vest their cre­ativ­i­ty in­to on­line ad­ver­tis­ing. They gen­er­al­ly post your prod­uct or ser­vice dur­ing prime time face­book hours, when their memes are card­ed to have the most ex­po­sure to their fan's news feed. While these pages cater for a more in­ter­na­tion­al au­di­ence, 'Mean­while in T&T' is keep­ing it lo­cal. "We have not gone in­to ad­ver­tis­ing as yet. We want to push our cre­ativ­i­ty be­yond a bound­ary," re­vealed Batz, adding that he and his team are work­ing on a se­ries of lo­cal memes to see what type of re­spons­es they get. Thus far, they have been able to cre­ate a meme that re­sem­bles so­ca su­per­star Machel Mon­tano, but are still work­ing out the kinks as to what ex­act­ly this meme would com­ment on. "It's a work in progress" said Batz. If you like lo­cal cul­ture and can­not get enough out of In­ter­net memes be sure to vis­it 'Mean­while in T&T' on face­book. They will have you laugh­ing through­out the day!

PHO­TOS PRO­VID­ED BY: Mean­while in T&T