What's in a MEME?

Read This! The Geek Anthropologist

Memes are cultural ideas that spread and repeat themselves across society. Add the Internet and an evolving sense of humor, embracing the absurdity of the times by making memes about it.  CHECK THIS OUT

The Internet meme: a vessel of communication, a signifier of the comedic zeitgeist, and a device for channelling the inherent anxieties of youth.

1. Memes of today drip with Internet-trademarked black comedy. They’re embellished with a vernacular particular to Internet-molded youth, making them fascinating and frustrating to older generations. 
2. When Gen Z memes remark “oof” or “yikes” to the irreversibility of the Earth’s environmental damage, or express the urge to “yeet into the void” to escape the harsh realities of our times, the blasé responses can be hilarious. But they also contain a blunt and powerful kind of honesty.
3. Perhaps the poignancy of meme humor lies in that Gen Z has no other choice but to embrace the absurdity of the future. Or deal with the environmental consequences of generations before them. 
4. But they aren’t carrying this burden with existential dread. They are using the tool they know best—technology—to lighten the weight with a little levity.
5. Memes carry forward a movement defined by both humor and a defiance of past ways of thinking. Because if you can’t laugh in the face of your existential dread, what else can you do?

You can recognize a meme because they often consist of a picture – normally derived from pop culture such as cartoons and viral videos – followed by a caption above the picture which references ‘relatable’ scenarios or even something related to any relevant social, economic, and political news. Memes are most commonly transmitted via the Internet, especially on social media, and their aim is to entertain, which has sparked the term ‘meme culture’.

memes have now become such a common part of people’s social media lives that they are often quoted outside of the internet, with people finding ways to incorporate memes into any and every conversation.

To generations such as Millennials and Generation Z, the concept of online communities across various different platforms on the Internet is not foreign to them. 

• These generations are also aware of the spreading of memes beyond their own demographics: older generations have also jumped onto spreading memes. Simply by looking at social media platforms like Facebook, one can immediately recognize the use of memes by older generations. 
• The reason why many people of different generations are able to understand memes is that anyone can make one – this means people can make memes with different target demographics, subcultures, therefore memes can reach people of all ages.

Genes and Memes are self-replicating too.  But what they encode is not instructions for building proteins in our bodies, but instructions for building behaviors, beliefs, and emotions into our brains. 

• they reproduce culture
•  Like genes they compete with each other.  The memes that win survive. The memes that lose, die off. 
• But there’s a huge difference between the way genes spread and the way ideas spread.  Genes make actual physical copies of themselves.  Ideas don’t. 

Think about how culture is passed on to the next generation.  That’s the kind of thing that memes can help explain.  

for most of us, most of the time, acquiring an idea from another person is more like catching a cold.  In other words, ideas are like viruses of the mind that spread through a contagion-like process. 

memes are: digital content units with common characteristics, created with awareness of each other, and circulated, imitated, and transformed via the Internet by many users.   

• What makes memes and virals successful?
• What are popular meme genres?
• Are memes a new mode of political participation in democratic and nondemocratic regimes?
• Are memes as agents of globalization?

HMMM...

 Ever since Richard Dawkins coined the term in 1976 to describe gene-like infectious units of culture that spread from person to person, memes have been the subject of constant academic debate, derision, and even outright dismissal. 

• the phrase “Internet meme” is commonly applied to describe the propagation of content items such as jokes, rumors, videos, or websites from one person to others via the Internet. 
• According to this popular notion, an Internet meme may spread in its original form, but it often also spawns user-created derivatives.
• Memes, since at least as early as the 1990s, have been said to “replicate at rates that make even fruit flies and yeast cells look glacial in comparison” 

How, if at all, is the meme concept useful for understanding digital culture? 

 “Three main attributes ascribed to memes are of particular relevance to the analysis of contemporary digital culture. 

• First, memes may best be understood as cultural information that passes along from person to person, yet gradually scales into a shared social phenomenon. 
• Although they spread on a micro basis, memes' impact is on the macro: They shape the mindsets, forms of behavior, and actions of social groups  
• This attribute is highly compatible to the way culture is formed in the so-called era of Web 2.0, which is marked by application platforms for facilitating user-generated content. YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia, and other similar applications are based on propagation of content, so such sites represent “express paths” for meme diffusion: content spread by individuals can scale up to mass levels within hours. More broadly, this decentralized, nonhierarchical, and user-based model also drives new mindsets and social norms occupying media use 
• A second attribute of memes is that they reproduce by various means of imitation.  
• In the digital age, people  can spread content as is by forwarding, linking, or copying. 
• people do choose to create their own versions of Internet memes, in startling volumes (Bernie). 
• Two main repackaging strategies of memes are prevalent on the web: mimicry and remix. 
• a plethora of user-friendly applications enable people to download, re-edit, and distribute content very easily 
• User-driven imitation and remix have become highly valued pillars of contemporary participatory culture
• A third attribute of memes that makes them appealing for scholars interested in digital culture is their diffusion through competition and selection. 
• Memes vary greatly in their degree of fitness, that is, their level of adaptiveness to the sociocultural environment in which they propagate 
• digital media have afforded researchers with the ability to trace the spread and evolution of memes

• MEMES REQUIRE SOCIAL CONTEXT
• THERE USE ACROSS TIME AND SPACE SOLIDIFIES THEIR MEANING
• MEMES ARE EASILY CIRCULATED AND REPRODUCED
• 3 COMMON USES
• Revelation: the way a meme can be used to expose underlying meanings, logics, and processes in an experience, event, structure, or institution. by describing mundane practices like shaving as exotic, the way traditional anthropology approached non-Western cultures. These memes reveal the strangeness of everyday social practices that are so normalized we don’t question why we do them or if we even need them.
• Critique: they can focus on familiar, everyday practices that go unquestioned, while offering broader sociocultural, political, and economic critiques. Instead of just revealing that an experience or practice exists but often goes unnoticed, these memes are critical in some way. Critique memes interrogate issues relating to equity, justice, freedom, liberation, and other sociopolitical themes. 
• ideation: ow memes are used to imagine new futures. Although similar to critique, these memes focus more on what a world might look like in the absence of a practice, system, institution, policy, etc., rather than focusing on injustice itself.

The adaptability of meme usage and messages doesn’t discredit the classification of memes, but it does reveal the inherently social nature of digital media.