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| So true, so sad... |
Wikipedia describes meme as : A meme is "an idea, behavior or style that spreads from person to person within a culture (...) The term "Internet meme" refers to a concept that spreads rapidly from person to person via the Internet, largely through Internet-based email, blogs, forums, Imageboards, social networking sites, instant messaging and video streaming sites such as YouTube.
Almost every user of the internet has seen memes - often unconsciously. If you browse websites like 9gag.com or polish kwejk.pl (which in most cases just copies 9gag memes) you can see thousands of imagines with witty descriptions. The Internet society uses memes to comment all variety of subjects - from funny memes that are just making us laugh to ironic comments on human behavior. The meme culture has grown so much, that it even has its own internet meme database - knowyourmeme.com, where you can find the origin and history of popular memes. A very important thing here is popculture - the internet society is using images of actors, singers, movie characters and all other kinds of well known entities to write them down with a funny, witty or ironic decription.
Sometimes a random person whose picture was used in a meme becomes an internet-wide celebrity that becomes popular in the real world as well. A great example of such a "fame" is "Overly Attached Girlfriend". This young lady named Laina started to post funny YouTube vlogs. Soon after that her face became well known and synonymous with a girl that is overly attached to her boyfriend as the avalanche on memes rolled across the internet.
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| Overly Attached Girlfriend meme example |
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| Overly Attached Girlfriend becomes popular in real life and is used in adverts |
A very essential part on "meme universe" are memes describing social behavior (with often use of animals): Courage Wolf, Socially Awkward Pinguin, Bad Luck Brian etc. Every person can find something to identify with or recognize one of those archetypes in your friends or classmates or the people he or she works with. Everybody knows someone who is Good Guy Greg, or Scumbag Steve - don't we?
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| a classic Socially Awkward Pengun |
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| Good Guy Greg |
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| Scumbag Steve - a guy you don't want to have anything in common |
However my personal favourite kind of memes are those related to movies and tv series. For example the one I used below presents a character from "The Game of Thrones". The original phrase "brace yourself winter is coming" has been paraphrased into the countless statements. The other very popular movie meme (with the same actor by the way) is the one with Boromir from the "Lord Of the Rings". "One does not simply walk into a Mordor" gained completely new meaning thanks to the people of the internet. If you want to describe something that may become too difficult - no problem! "One does not simply..." meme is there for you!
Memes became so popular that you don't even need a graphic tool to
put writings and image together. The only thing you need to do is to visit memegenerator.net, pick an
image, write a text you want to appear and there you go! You have just
created your own meme that is ready to be published all over the
internet. And as you can see at the beginning of this post - with the help of Meme Generator I was able to create my own meme as well :)
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| Example of tv series related meme (Game of Thrones) |
Memes are not only funny pictures. There is a group of memes that point out flaws of the modern world in a specific sarcastic way. Memes cannot only make you laugh, but they are also a way to express your thoughts on the internet.
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| Example of political memes |
Questions:
1. What do you think of this phenomenon?
2. Do you have any favourite meme? Share it with us!
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ReplyDeleteMems is often interesting interludes in our daily work. I know people who spend a lot of time on portals such Demotywatory. Recently, they also began to appear on social networking sites.
ReplyDeleteWhat about them I think - I think are funny, and for me this is their great advantage. Sometimes one such meme can cause us to break away from reality that, so you do not go mad at work or after work when we have a lot on your mind. It is a very good interlude work or a way to quickly exchange ideas with friends.
The phenomenon itself has become a fashion statement. This is one of the following examples of the Influence of the Internet on our lives. I do not know if I have already, but probably soon marketers will use it to promote products. It seems to me that there are a lot more memorable than normal advertising. At the same time reach different target group. Therefore, I see great potential in them.
Mem for now :)
ReplyDeletehttp://sphotos-a.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc7/374377_429992650389080_512726632_n.jpg
@Cezary, nice concept of mems marketing. I think that's really possible to happen but don't you think that would succesfully ruin the brand? I guess the big companies would not try to make their brands on mems, but who know, maybe there are some sucidial marketers. Why would it ruin the brand? Because in marketing, you know there is a border and when you reach the limit you must stop there and not to make another step forward, and this is why good marketing should not promote itself but it should still concern the product or service you'd like to advertise. So i would certainly not identify mems with products. But of course they are a total fun on the Internet, and i had some thoughts on them couple days ago, they totally changed the level of our communication. They are more abstract than words, more abstract than just a drawing, and more abstract than comics, so this is why they are so cool, we can express the essence of life better than ever just by putting a little text on a specific image :)
Oh well, yet again I see 'internet memes' being referred as a funny pictures of the internet culture. But thats just effect of its populairty which made them leak into popculture and becoming mass sensation.
ReplyDelete@UP - yes, there were few companies trying to create brands out of memes and they failed. You can still see them in some stores, for example Toys4Boys. But thats just pathetic.
Memes were brilliant outcome of internet culture and were created because of simple human idea to simplify communication through imageboards. Those 'favourite images' of yours were symbols of certain situations and emotions.
To make it easy I'll explain it on example of music in movies: you know when theres something bad going to happen in movie theres certain music coming up? Or when something ends up well theres happy tune in the background? Theres a reason for it, it puts you in the mood and brings up specific emotions.
Now imagine internet chat rooms, image boards and email groups few years ago, you could describe some situation in the text but then someone came up with idea of universal symbols for those situations. All he had to do is to find that image which will be familiar with that situation for everyone, hence came symbolic images of animals followed by pictures of steretypic apperance of specific people. Someone else just added few words filling that story and 'internet memes' were born. These were widely used among few communities by people familiar with them.
Results were astonishing, just by looking at one picture and reading two lines of text you could imagine whole context in few seconds. Now try to explain that to someone unfamiliar with 'internet memes', it's gonna take some time for sure.
Then due to raising popularity came image aggregating websites, those places where moderators were putting 'funny images' or they were being examied and voted by the community. One by one, 'memes' were being introduced to masses and become known as 'internet memes'. Starting off with our demotivators, kwejks or international demotivators, 9gags and and resulting with overuse and wide exploitation. Now who browses demotivators anymore? Same thing is going to happen with 'internet memes'. Just like any other popculture element, once they will reach peak of their populairty they'll become common and start washing out. In their place we will get 'reaction faces' or 'youtube haikus', all we need is technology to make animated tshirts with sounds.
Memes is the thing that makes my life funny.
ReplyDeleteThere are a lot of sentences that I use every day. I'm not talking about pictures with some text, but i.e. some sentences from movies.
In my work those sentences are using very often.
About picture memes. I like them too but there are a lot of really poor pictures. They are popular so many people start to make their own. Now I need to see more than 10 poor memes to see 1 really funny.
My most favourite mem is Sad Keanu. You can see some of pictures here:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/memecore/10-best-sad-keanu-images-1ea9
http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/keanu-is-sad-sad-keanuhttp://knowyourmeme.com/memes/keanu-is-sad-sad-keanu
1. Memes were very cool and witty when they had surfaced the internet initially. They used interesting images and the text was well thought. Nowadays, they are seen everywhere,especially on social sites like Facebook or MySpace. People use memes to express themselves or comment on current situations,e.g. recent election in USA. I like the concept of the memes,but to be frank,I am a bit tired of seeing funny images of cats or owls.
ReplyDelete2. If I had to choose one meme,I would go for This.Is.Sparta. This meme is based on the famous movie 300. The word Sparta can be replaced with anything making it a very witty meme. I find this quite funny.Please see picture below.
ReplyDeleteThis is very nice phenomenon! Every century has his own, some of them has people like Shakespeare, Bach and in our beautiful and modern century we have simple picutrues with no more than ten words. What a accomplishment! We should be so proud;)
My favouirite meme is "Courage Wolf" example:
http://d24w6bsrhbeh9d.cloudfront.net/photo/5572954_700b.jpg
Memes are really amazing phenomenon. I like them a lot. Mostly they have simply texts but with a picture they have a deeper meaning. Many of them comments about what`s going on in the world or what crazy things people do. But I don`t have a favourite one.
ReplyDeleteIn my opinion memes are sometimes funny but most of them are funny just because they are memes. I think that people are not objective anymore when it comes to memes which are just known for being amusing. However, those who look for funny memes and are so to speak addicted to them, waste a lot of time. I browse neither 9gag nor kwejk but I know some funny memes just because someone has shown me. My approach is quite skeptical as I just hate the fact that people who claim not to have enough time to do something spend hours browsing the websites with memes. There are some boundaries which should not be crossed but I am not saying that memes are something totally wrong. Some of them are really funny and worth looking.
ReplyDeleteI find memes interesting. They are just like billboards. They're annoying, but every once in a while there's one really funny and cleaver. The grammar irritates me most times.
ReplyDeleteI don't have a favourite one.
In the life of the "Demotywator" not spent as much time as the memes. Why? In "Demotywator" trying to push through the mass of content that does not comply with the de-motivating function. It is widely accepted that this site can promote something so waiting is spam profane persons this kind of media. People are trying to write some sweets and annoy me when something like that gets recognition. Memes are templates, but despite the bigger hit for me and create endless possibilities.
ReplyDelete@ Łukasz Zalewski - thanks for nice overview of memes origin :) You pointed out grat thing about memes - they can be great addition to internet forums by nailing the subject with one simple meme-comment.
ReplyDelete@ Natalia - I wouldnt be so defeatist. There are different categories of cultural accomplishments. I dont think anyone would compare memes to great literature. I am not a big fan of a modern world (or humanity as a whole for that matter), but I think we managed to create quite a few things during last 100 years... like nuclear missles or flamethrowers. There's nothing like decent flamethrower :)