Political cartoons vs meme: Meme wins

Comments ⁵

1. Marshall Smith

   Er, what this graph tells me is that “political cartoons” has *never* been a popular search term. Yes, that’s a big spike for “meme”. I’m guessing three years ago is about when it was entering general use. That seems late to me, but I could be thinking in internet time. Regardless, this graph in no way shows any relationship between these terms. Just because “meme” is increasing doesn’t necessarily mean it’s *displacing* “political cartoons”. This graph actually demonstrates the opposite.

2. Philip Taterczynski

   Are meme?s the new editorial cartoons?

   I dont know. I do know that editorial cartoon’s have been around a lot longer than meme’s, and that apostrophe’s have been around longer than either of them, so I would expect that even cartoonist’s would know the rule’s governing the use’s of apostrophe’s.

3. Brian Fairrington

   It is interesting that the spike in searches for “memes” happens to occur around the 2012 presidential election cycle.

4. Mike Peterson

   The term “political meme” not only wasn’t used to produce the results, it wasn’t asked at all.

   Ask again, but this time include the qualifiers used in the meme search for the cartoon search: “funny cartoons” and “cat cartoons” and then use the terms used in the “political cartoon” search to look for memes: “obama meme,” “political meme,” “bush political meme.”

   Granted, there are some editorial cartoonists who work on the level of cute kittens, and I’ll even grant that some editors prefer pie-in-the-face and Pearly Gates to actual commentary, but, if you don’t ask fair questions, you don’t get meaningful answers.

5. Jim Lavery

   This just in: “Hot Babes” has trended higher than memes in search engine results. Hot Babes is now the new political cartoons!!