Professor finds his third-grade photo online — and realizes he’s been a meme for years
A North Carolina scientist’s third-grade photo was made into a meme — and he didn’t know it for years.
Adrian Smith said he was checking Instagram over the weekend when he stumbled across the familiar school picture.
“I was just looking through stories and all of the sudden bumped into myself there,” he told McClatchy News in a phone interview Thursday. “I thought maybe he just saw the picture on the internet and thought it was funny and posted it, but then he had some text at the bottom.”
It turns out, the photo depicting Smith as an 8-year-old had found another life as a series of internet memes featuring a character named Grayson. It has appeared in posts on the teenagestepdad Instagram account since at least 2017.
One meme shows the character Grayson transformed into a Chia Pet, while another says “like this image of Grayson to revoke his computer privileges,” according to photos Smith reposted on Twitter. There are even shirts for sale with his face on them.
To Smith, seeing an old picture gain new attention was amusing.
“I never got the sense of meanness or any sort of bad intentions in his stuff, especially related to this,” he told McClatchy News.
So, Smith said he embraced the memes and shared the story behind them Tuesday on social media. Two days later, his series of tweets had more than 10,000 reactions.
“I think people like it because I think they can see themselves in it, maybe,” he said.
In response to the Twitter thread, one person commented: “This is amazing and also now I am super terrified my kid photos may also be a meme somewhere.”
Other reactions were mixed, with some social media users wondering if Smith would get profits from the meme-related merchandise while others were interested to learn the back story.
“I’m so glad you did a thread on it,” one person tweeted. “I always worry that people are hurt by these things.”
When Smith made the discovery, he said he weighed his options, including just letting the meme continue to live on the internet.
“I could get mad about it and tell him to take it down and ‘give me all your profits’ — and just be upset about it,” Smith said. “Or the thing I ended up doing which is just owning it.”
Smith, a biologist and research assistant professor at N.C. State University in Raleigh, said he thinks the meme was created after he shared his third-grade photo on a Tumblr blog in 2008 or so.
“I think it’s a weird instance of how stuff you put on the internet can live on,” Smith said. “I think about putting stuff on the internet all the time with my own profession and the work I do as a scientist.”
Smith is also a scientist on exhibit at the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences, and his videos about insects are featured on his YouTube channel called Ant Lab, McClatchy News previously reported.
This story was originally published December 3, 2020 at 3:54 PM with the headline "Professor finds his third-grade photo online — and realizes he’s been a meme for years."
