History of Internet Memes: The Rise and Fall of Boxxy

I’ve found there aren’t enough resources on the internet for the cataloguing and explaining of Memes. We’re currently in the Golden Age of the Internet and unless we do something to preserve it, much of this early (irrelevant) history will be forgotten.

The latest (and one of the shortest) memes to spread across the internet is Boxxy.

A year ago, a young sixteen girl who liked to hang around the social friend website, Gaionline, made a few videos for her friends and put them up on youtube. Like most of the thousands of videos uploaded everyday it was lost amongst the crowd and forgotten. That was until sometime in late December when someone stumbled across her videos and started posting them on the big image board sites like 4chan (4chan, if you don’t know is the birthplace of many of the internet’s more endearing fads).

The subsequent reaction to Boxxy seemed to surprise even the internet, (which is used to the unusual). There was an explosion of controversy, splitting the male residents of 4chan into two groups: the lovers of Boxxy and the haters. Some wanted to name her queen of the internet. Some just madly wanted her to go away and stop clogging up their forums. (The female forum residents, the nerd girls, were just perplexed)  In a matter of days, Boxxy went from being nowhere to being everywhere. But it doesn’t stop there.

Due to internet detective work, we now know that Boxxy’s real name is Catie and that she lives somewhere in California. Boxxy’s popularity/unpopularity stems from her youtube videos, which are, at times, strange, frantic and above all sweet. She's just a young girl with a lot of energy, eyeliner, a surreal black background and a truckload of interesting facial expressions telling the internet how much she loves her friends.

Boxxy is an inadvertent celebrity. She didn't want to be queen of the internet, but she was made one against her will and then she was removed as one just as quickly by those who disapproved

Many of the most virulent haters, who saw the Boxxy meme spreading across the internet like a plague, the ones who found the situation intolerable, formed a coalition called the Center for Boxxy Control and Restriction (CBRC).

They declared war on the Boxxy meme and vowed to expose her identity and use it as blackmail to get her to leave the internet forever. Through some tough detective work, they managed to find an older youtube account of Boxxy and later to get an email and to hack into her video accounts. With control over her youtube, they sent Boxxy a video telling her never to post again or they’d release her contact info to the world. Boxxy has so far abided by their rules. The Boxxy lovers were defeated.

This is seemingly the end of the Boxxy meme. It lasted roughly twenty days, but in that brief time, Boxxy scored almost a million google searches.

The internet is full of thousands of cases like this, they come and go and diseappear and most people are completely unaware that they ever happened. See below for other prominent and sometimes outrageous examples.