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Screengrab via Szlifier/YouTube Remix by Jason Reed

This white dude blinking is the most applicable GIF of 2017

Use it to show surprise or indignation.

 

Jay Hathaway

Internet Culture

Posted on Feb 20, 2017   Updated on May 24, 2021, 11:29 pm CDT

If you were wondering what would follow Roll Safe—a.k.a. “smart black guy”—as the next big mainstream meme, here’s one likely answer: It’s this white guy blinking.

Giant Bomb

His name is Drew Scanlon, and the GIF comes from a show on video game news site Giant Bomb. Drew is reacting to someone doing a little “farming, with my hoe here.” 

The clip is from 2013, though, and the context doesn’t have much bearing on the meme that’s popping up everywhere this week. Divorced from its context, the White Guy Blinking GIF can be a surprised, stunned, or indignant reaction to just about anything.

The revival of the GIF seems to have been instigated by this tweet, way back on Feb. 5:

https://twitter.com/eskbl/status/828137274592235520

It’s now spreading like wildfire on Twitter, where people have found all kinds of diverse uses for it. Many of them have to do with the management (or mismanagement) of personal finances: 

https://twitter.com/PLAIDvillain/status/832649998336618497

https://twitter.com/jaboukie/status/831917168799469571

Or, following on the original tweet, problems at school:

https://twitter.com/Josephmorgan96/status/832025326406529025

https://twitter.com/Yahiam_/status/831307991945199618

But really, it’s universally applicable to anything that surprises you, even if it shouldn’t.

It even applies to the meme itself: 

This is a double joke because it’s not much of a pop quiz: Most people are calling the one with the blinking white guy “White Guy Blinking.” You could call it “the Drew GIF,” but nobody outside of the Giant Bomb community would know what you were talking about.

The interesting thing about this meme’s positioning on the viral internet is that it’s completely mainstream and Twitter-based. Unlike a lot of memes that start on Twitter (especially in the Black Twittersphere) and end up co-opted by Reddit and 9gag, “Dank meme” subreddits and meme economy investors don’t seem interested in this one at all.

On Reddit, Salt Bae was adopted but quickly dismissed, Roll Safe was embraced and mutated, and the purple Trash Dove was immediately rejected as “cancer.” Blinking White Guy might be the first big Twitter trend of the year to go completely ignored by people who consider themselves serious about memes

Only one reaction seems appropriate:

Giant Bomb

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*First Published: Feb 20, 2017, 3:48 am CST