That Facebook cartoon character meme

Last week, several of my friends changed their profile pictures to cartoon characters from the 80s and the early 90s. They posted on their status boxes: “Change your profile picture to your favorite cartoon from when you were a kid. The goal of this game is not to see a human picture on Facebook, but an invasion of childhood memories until Monday, Dec. 6. This is for violence against children.” Totally missing the error in the last sentence, I decided to play along. And so did majority of my 1,000 plus friends. 

In a couple of days, my Facebook was indeed an invasion of childhood memories, as each cartoon I recognized blasted me back to those joyful days when I could spend all summer just watching television. Not surprisingly, my favorites showed up, like The Last Unicorn, The Land Before Time, The Smurfs, Superbook, Flying House, and Astroboy.

Happily, some of those I’d forgotten also reappeared in my life: Shirt Tales (those Hallmark Cards animal characters wearing statement tees), the Snorkels (the underwater version of the Smurfs), The Brave Little Toaster (a film that tells the story of five electric appliances who travel from their little town to the city to find their owner), Puff the Magic Dragon (based on the Peter, Paul and Mary song; a dragon befriends a young boy and helps him come out of his shell), and Candy Candy (the grand story of yet another endearing orphan girl).

It’s beginning to look like I’ll be hunting for old DVDs this Christmas break. I have so much to introduce to my four-year-old niece.

Anyway, back to the meme. In the Philippines, the meme was supposed to be an awareness campaign for children’s rights. If true, it wasn’t a bad one, if you ask me, because it all brought out the child in us. However, digging deeper, I discovered that it was for different reasons in other parts of the world. 

In www.allfacebook.com, comments to the post “Cartoon Character Meme Spreads Around Facebook” give us an idea of these reasons. A woman named Eliana wrote, “In Italy we are doing it to celebrate the Week for Children’s Rights.” A guy named Stuart replied, “In the U.K. we are doing it to support the NSPCC (National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children).” In the Philippines, of course, it’s “for violence against children.” But yeah, we know it’s really against it.

The website knowyourmeme.com traces the origin of this wildly successful meme to either Greece or Cyprus, with the first status update translating in English to: “From the 16th to the 20th of November, we shall change our profile pictures to our favourite cartoon characters. The purpose of this game is to remove all photos of human for a few days from Facebook.” Notice that there’s no mention at all of child abuse.

A lot of people have since called this slacktivism, a term that combines “slacker” and “activism,” used to refer to the things you do that make you feel as if you’re contributing to a cause but don’t really bring about the desired change. Of course, another argument on the difference between “being aware” and “making a change” arose, but I don’t want to get into that.

I did come across a Yahoo News article entitled, “Children’s Charities Benefit From Mysterious Facebook Trend.” It claims that children’s charities “around the world received an unexpected boost in traffic and donations recently thanks to a popular Facebook trend that encourages members to switch out their profile pictures with images of their favorite childhood cartoon character as a way to raise awareness about child abuse.” 

A charity mentioned, ChildHelp, was wise enough to support the initiative and put up a message on its page. It boosted their traffic to 10,000 instead of the usual 2,500.  Another charity, The Child Abuse Prevention Association, received a large amount of small donations. 

Personally, I was happy to have joined in, with our without the cause. It was a riot to get an idea of how old my Facebook friends were, based on their choice of a “cartoon from when you were a kid.” My sister first posted a picture of South Park’s Kenny (as in, “Oh my God, they killed Kenny!”) before changing it to Takore, the whistling kettle slash time machine. Both were hits from the 90s. Another contact posted Bambi (1942) and Snow White (1937)—shown when my parents weren’t even born yet!

I’m also happier now that I know for sure some charities seemed to have benefited from this new wave of “slacktivism” to hit the social network. Maybe “slacktivism” isn’t really the right word for it. First one to name this monster may just be the first one to tame it.

So, which cartoon character did you choose?

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