(Photo: Facebook)

Though it may seem like the nadir of armchair activism, that red human rights logo that has inundated your News Feed and become the profile picture of everyone from your mom to your preschool BFF may actually have an impact.

According to Scientific American, changing your Facebook profile picture can be an effective way to lodge a political protest because "there's a part of our brains that never quite made it out of high school." Turns out that just seeing the people you care about jump on the profile pic changing bandwagon can have an effect on how you think of the issue at hand. It's a visual reminder of which side of a debate your friends and family fall on, and can help push you to fall in line.

Writes Scientific American:

Based on everything that we know about our brains and their bafflingly strong desires to fit in with the crowd, the best way to convince people that they should care about an issue and get involved in its advocacy isn’t to tell people what they should do — it’s to tell them what other people actually do.

Good to know that our political future depends on the same kind of peer pressure that made us chug gin from a Gatorade bottle after junior prom.

(Photo: The Tony Grands)

Congratulations to every Redditor who has complained about a female friend not giving him the sexual attention to which his penis entitles him: Oxford Dictionaries has immortalized your horrifying plight with the official addition of "friend zone" into the lexicon.

According to Oxford, friend zone is defined as:

noun
informal
a situation in which a platonic relationship exists between two people, one of whom has an undeclared romantic or sexual interest in the other:
I always wind up in the friend zone, watching them pursue other guys

That's not the only internetty word added to the bunch, though. There's also tweetable ("suitable for posting on the social media site Twitter"), dumphone ("a basic mobile phone that lacks the advanced functionality characteristic of a smartphone") and range anxiety ("worry on the part of a person driving an electric car that the battery will run out of power before the destination or a suitable charging point is reached").

That last one is sure to send Elon Musk into a tizzy.

Pandering to the Internet has become something of a pasttime for Oxford. Afterall, this is the company that made "GIF" the 2012 word of the year.

(Photo: Know Your Meme)

The Internet, that beloved series of tubes, is not a thing you can "win." Despite humanity's competitive nature, there are no winners and losers, unless you're playing Words With Friends or something. And yet, throughout the short course of our collective online history, everything from pets to vampiric actors have been announced as "winners" of the Internet.

The popular phrase compares the Internet to a video game and is used to congratulate a person who does something funny/worthwhile on the web. According to the Internet's foremost meme academic text, Know Your Meme, the term originated in 2004 on SomethingAwful's FYAD forum, though it may also have come from a 2002 IRC chatroom. The phrase spread from there, cropping up on 4chan before landing its own Urban Dictionary entry in 2006.

Now it's regularly employed in blog posts and news stories for stuff as innocuous as cute baby videos. Below, a short list of things that have won the Internet, because recognizing we have a "wins the Internet" problem is the first step to recovery.

1. Joe Biden

2. Kid President

3. Nicolas Cage

4. This cat

5. This Community drawing

6. NBA star Roy Hibbert

7. This Melo and Lebron photo

8. Calvin Coolidge

9. Deadspin

10. Guy trolling Westboro Baptist Church

11. Kid dancing at basketball game

12. This Ewan Cumberbatch photo

13. Louis CK

14. Oreos

15. 2-year-old's trick shot video

(Photo: Indiegogo)

In November of last year, Gawker reported that the notorious gross-out site "Goatse.cx," which showed an old man splaying open his anus for all to see, was being transitioned from a nostalgia-laden '90s meme to an actual email service. The site's new owner, an Australian IT consultant who goes by the moniker Jonathan, planned to offer Goatse vanity email addresses for $5 a pop.

After the post hit Gawker and other sites, interest in Goatse emails skyrocketed, and Jonathan created a $10,000 Indiegogo campaign as a clever way to collect the $50 he decided to charge for each account. The campaign has already surpassed its goal, with seven days of funding still to go. Users can sign up to get a Goatse email address by using Goatse search to find their desired username, then forwarding proof of their Indiegogo donation along with their preferred user name to Jonathan and team.

So far, almost 300 people have paid the $50 for an @goatse.cx address, and three paid $140 to have their image displayed on goatse.cx in the Goatse Hall of Fame. Internet notoriety at its finest.

(h/t Boing Boing)

(Photo: Ebay)

The amazingly botched restoration of the famous "Ecce Homo" painting, done by a Spanish amateur painter who turned a 19th century portrait of Jesus into that of a ghost monkey, took the Internet by storm this year, quickly becoming what is arguably the best meme of 2012.

Now, Cecelia Giminez, the painting's infamous restorer, has waded back into the art world with some original work. The Daily Dot reports that she's selling at least one piece, called "The Bodegas de Borja," on eBay. Add that to your holiday gift guides.

The 45 x 34 inch painting depicts some old houses on a cobblestone street against a bright blue sky. It's very nice-looking and does not include any creepy blurred faces, which is a refreshing departure from Ms. Giminez's prior work, completed during her "Whooops!" period.

For just 630 Euros (or about $820) the painting can be yours, but if you're hoping to give it to a particular meme-lover for the holidays, better get to bidding. 31 people have already placed hopeful bids for the piece.

Taylor would never (Photo: Thebosh.com)

Oh god. Fresh out of the U.K. and the dairy aisle comes "Milking," a new internet craze. To be a "milker," one must stand in a public place and dump an entire jug of milk over one's head. It's an extraordinary waste of food and time, but kind of amazing to watch in the worst kind of way.

But what is it with wasting dairy products for the sake of some public reactions? Is "coning," the act of sticking an ice cream cone onto your head while going through a drive-through to blame? This is the worst Internet trend since planking.

[via @MichaelHayes]

Click through for a roundup of hurriedly created hurricane-related memes, from the dedicated jokes to the special editions of old Internet standbys.

The night's winner (Photo: Instagram)

Attending Hallowmeme is like starring in a Disney Channel original movie in which you’re the main character who fell into your computer screen: It's every Internet k-hole you’ve ever experenced come to life. Which sounds scary, but it's actually pretty fun.

The party was at Brooklyn's Bell House, put on by Forced Meme Productions (with an assist from Tumblr and Giant Media). This was the event's fourth year, and co-creator Lindsey Weber told the crowd it was the biggest yet and the Hallomeme of her wildest dreams.

A fabulously accurate Honey Boo Boo took home the top prize in the costume contest. Our favorite costume of the night was definitely Tumblr employee Mackenzie Kosut's interactive Pinterest costume. He carried around a label-maker and a polaroid camera and built his board throughout the party. It was better than any Mormon housewife could've hoped for. Naturally, the pictures he took were automatically uploaded to a Tumblr called I Only Use Pinterest As A Costume.

Evan Gregory, one of the Youtube-auto-tuning geniuses that make up the Gregory Brothers, hosted the night's "Gangnam Style" dance off. There were a couple Psys that made it on stage, but the dance battle was won by someone dressed as Psy's yellow-suited friend.

There were a surprisingly large number of attendees dressed up as breading cats--a not-so-popular meme that apparently has a dedicated following. Most people trying to be Ridiculously Photogenic Guy lapsed into the sluggish awkwardness of a QWOP runner when they tried to dance. This reporter showed up wearing the night's most popular costume: Fitness Paul Ryan.

Photo: Instagram

But if you dress up like the Internet riff that's been done to death, doesn't that make your costume the meme-iest?

(Photo: YouTube)

If those save the children infomercials are any indication, drawing on a guilty conscience is one way to compel American audiences to step off their cushy couch and cough up a donation. Waterislife.com and its ad agency DDB NY both appear toave a pretty solid grasp of this phenomenon.

In a video released last week, the clean water charity urges people to donate to poverty-stricken Haitians by capitalizing on one of the Internet's most widespread memes: First World Problems.

According to Know Your Meme, the first world problems meme was first introduced into Urban Dictionary way back in 2005, but it really took prevalence beginning in 2011. Image macros created from this meme feature healthy-looking, usually white people sobbing with "first world problems" like "I had too much food for lunch and now I'm tired" imposed in bold text on top of the image. The dedicated subreddit for this meme, r/firstworldproblems, has almost 100,000 subscribers.

Now, Waterislife.com has released a viral video showing destitute Haitians reading tweets from the #FirstWorldProblems hashtag, like, “When I have to write my maid a check but I forget her last name," transforming what was supposed to be a (somewhat) self-aware whine into a motivation to give to charity.

"Donate to help solve real world problems," urges the website. The effect is pretty devastating, and it's got to be one of the more compelling ad campaigns we've seen in some time.

“We’re not setting out to humiliate people who have used the #FirstWorldProblems hashtag,” DDB New York's chief creative officer Matt Eastwood said in a statement, obtained by Business Insider. Still, that effect seems to happen all on its own.

Of course, not everyone is open to receiving Waterislife.com's message. "Omg those people understand!!! I hate all those things too," reads the top YouTube comment.

You can donate to the campaign here.

(h/t Hypervocal)

(Photo: YouTube)

On May 15, 2007, a then-19-year-old YouTube user named Shawn Cotter--employing the handle “cotter548”--uploaded the music video for Rick Astley’s 1987 hit song “Never Gonna Give You Up,” intending to troll some of his fellow gaming cohorts on 4chan. Mr. Cotter, who was serving in the Air Force in South Korea at the time, linked to the video under the pretense that it was a new trailer for Grand Theft Auto: IV. But as that now-familiar drum cadence faded in and the caption “You just got Rickroll’d” floated across the screen, users discovered they weren’t watching a video game trailer at all.

The digital bait-and-switch of Rickrolling was born, and 4chan was not amused.

“The reaction was pure rage,” recalled Mr. Cotter with a laugh on a phone interview with Betabeat. “They were so mad because people had been pumped for this game for so long.”

Within days, the video exploded across the web and became one of the modern internet’s most well-known memes. To date, “Rickroll’d” has been viewed over 64 million times--most of them probably by mistake, considering the spirit of the meme. Mr. Cotter remained anonymous before coming forward in a Reddit AMA late last year.

“I figured it would last a couple hours and that was it,” Mr. Cotter said of the video’s success. “I didn’t figure it would get reposted so much. It just was craziness when it did. Within the first day it was up to a crazy amount of views.”

We found Mr. Cotter through his AMA, but were still skeptical that the phenomenon of Rickrolling could actually be tracked back to a single person. In order to prove that it was really he who uploaded the original video, we asked him to add a few lines to the YouTube description. Sure enough, he wrote "Hi, Jessica!" in the description, and we actually felt kind of famous, if only for a moment.

In the ’80s, “Never Gonna Give You Up” was a worldwide number-one hit that catapulted Mr. Astley to music stardom. His first eight singles hit the U.K.’s Top 10, but he decided to retire in 1993—at the ripe age of 27—to focus on his family. But 15 years later, with the click of a Nebraskan Air Force kid living in Korea, he was suddenly relevant again.

We asked Mr. Cotter which video he'd choose to start a similar trend, if he could choose today. "I’m a pro wrestling fan so probably what i would do is instead of doing a music video, I’d bring back a wrestling theme song. Hulk Hogan’s 'Real American'--that’s a classic."

Here's what Mr. Astley thinks of the whole thing.