The Many Faces of “Distracted Boyfriend”

On stock photography memes and the illusion of reality

Around 2013, a relatively new meme format went mainstream. Stock photography juxtaposed with lines of surprising text was suddenly comedy gold, as Redditors proved — particularly when they took the benign and made it dark.

But there’s a lot of life in stock photo memes besides rude subversions. The “distracted boyfriend” meme will probably turn out to be among 2017’s most recognizable, as users assign the role of disloyal man, offended girlfriend, and “other woman” to all kinds of concepts. Stock photos, with their exaggerated reactions and comically generic situations, have become core to the internet humor tool set, and their popularity reveals a lot about us when it comes to shifts in digital identity, the way we conceptualize others online, and even the ways we contend with new definitions of reality.

It took only a couple decades for the internet to transform from a weird underground hobby to an entirely new medium for the self. One of the earliest draws of internet…