My original meme

 For my original meme, I chose the "First World Problems" picture coupled with my words to create a meme that reflects my case study of ‘First World Christian Issues’ memes that are prevalent on Pinterest. By employing some of Shifners techniques such as Prestige, humor by incongruity, and provocation of emotions, I was able to create a meme that fit into my meme study that is aimed at practicing Christians. It revealed that knowledge of the Christian culture magnified the humor of the meme so I used the common church issue of overtime sermons as my prestige factor. The incongruity of the depressed woman in the picture coupled with the seemingly trivial church issue created humor for the meme. Christians act like overtime sermons are abominations, so the meme portrays the irony of that thought by using incongruity of the picture and the issue. This leads to the individual coming to a realization that most of our “Christian problems” in developed countries are actually laughable compared to others. This realization creates an emotional response, which moves the person towards clarity on the issue (which in this case would be that many Christians don’t have a church to attend or places to eat at afterwords) which can lead to a greater understanding of their Christian faith.

  

To validate my findings I compared my study to a similar one on mylesmemeblog.blogspot.com. Myles’ meme study is based on another social media, Twitter, and uses the memes as a tool to unite Christians and spread their message to non believers. Her findings communicated that Christian memes are used to uplift others in their community as well as spread their belief of the gospel. Our meme studies are comparable in a sense that we both researched social media Christian memes and how the memes not only bring the Christian community together, but how the memes reinforce Christian beliefs.  Both of our meme studies revealed that strong emotions and prestige play a large part in the humor and reproduction of the memes, which then ultimately lead to lived religion and the deeper understanding of the Christians’ own spirituality. The difference in the two would be the audience; while my selection is focusing on giving Christians a reality check, Myles’ appeals to Christians but also aims to pull in religious outsiders in hopes of spreading the gospel.