Memes are cultural shorthands that, like all forms of communication, evolve with those who use them. No one can claim to know or understand all the memes out there. There are simply too many of them, and they can often be too personal for the people who create and share them. However, there are some common elements that can help you understand them.
What makes a meme a meme?
Even if memes seem impossible to understand, chances are you’ve come across at least one over the years that makes sense to you. Whether you’ve participated in the Ice Bucket Challenge, have a mug of “Keep Calm” on your desk at work, or have ever used the words “failure” or “victory” ironically or not, you’ve participated in a meme. You learned it by word of mouth, understood it, changed its context, and appropriated it for your own use. And these are the key components of what makes a meme a meme.
While it’s hard to pin down a direct definition of a meme, the term is most commonly associated with an image or video depicting a particular concept or idea that is then often spread on online social platforms. This idea is further spread through social media, forums, instant messaging apps, and even news sites. The images and videos that convey the message are often modified and updated during this process, often resulting in the evolution of the original idea into something completely different. They can simply be published with a new title that shows the modified form.
Context can have a big impact on what a meme means or how relevant it is to the recipient.
Memes can also convey much more information than plain text. In the same way that emoticons were used to convey complex moods or emotions, memes can convey a complex idea, mood, or shared understanding much faster than writing and reading a written explanation of an idea.
From dancing babies to Momo challenges
Some researchers trace the idea of the meme back hundreds of years, but most believe that its modern interpretation was coined by British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. He described the idea of memes in his 1976 book. a selfish gene as a cultural entity or idea that is replicated, developed, and transmitted from person to person. He couldn’t have known it at the time, but the term would later be used to describe an infinite number of permutations of different phrases, images, sounds, and videos, all of which were spread across the Internet in an effort to exchange ideas and thoughts of each other. quickly and concisely.
Most would consider the first internet meme to be a dancing baby. Sometimes called “Baby Cha-Cha,” a short GIF of an animated dancing baby became a hit in 1996. It spread through email chains and appeared on popular TV shows like Ally McBeal. However, it wasn’t until the 2010s that memes became a cultural phenomenon in their own right. Today, they are one of the main ways people communicate online, with millions of permutations of the most popular ones.
The memes that have come and gone over the years are too numerous to count and too varied to cover in detail (although we’ve rounded up all the most famous ones). But you can include everything from planks to Good Guy Greg to Momo Challenge on the list. Memes are incredibly diverse, constantly changing, and impossible to classify into any neat, defined category.
The speed at which they are shared and created is also accelerating, so trying to learn or understand them all is an impossible task. But that doesn’t mean we can’t try to cover the most important ones.
How to understand memes
Some memes are easier to understand than others. The simplest are known as “macro image” memes, which usually include some kind of expressive image and a block of text. They are emphasized and designed to help convey an emotional state in a way that is easy to understand. They acknowledge the shared experience between creator and viewer.
Others can be a bit more difficult to solve. Something like Slender Man can look scary or dangerous. Others can be weirdly vague, referring to a specific episode of a TV show or movie that aired decades ago. Often the origins of such memes can be buried in such deep context that understanding their origins requires dedicated research.
How important this is depends on why you want to understand memes. If you just want to use it yourself, it’s often enough to find a rough idea of what it means from recent usage to create your own and get in on the joke.
If you would like more information about what this means so that you can determine if it is something you want your children, students, or dependents to be associated with, they are the best people to ask for more information. Helpful resources like Know Your Meme and Wikipedia (for the more famous ones) can further shed light on where a meme originated and how it developed and evolved over time. However, it is important to note that memes are constantly changing. How the people you want to protect actually use those memes could be completely personal to them. They might even have a collection of their own memes that aren’t that popular.
Most memes are created to be funny, and their impact depends on how they are perceived and used by the people who see them. If someone in her life frequently sends memes or sees memes that she just doesn’t understand, we encourage you to ask them to explain their meaning. If necessary, you can cite the broader meaning of what it could mean beyond the communication tools and platforms you grew up on.
Another option is to start making your own memes if you’re interested. Popular websites like ImgFlip and Kapwing’s Meme Maker are great places to start your new meme-making hobby. If you need more help, we’ve created a great guide that will walk you through the process in a list of easy-to-follow steps.
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Categories: GAMING
Source: newstars.edu.vn