The meme or memes comprising Morse code had strong positive feedback effects. Memes can replicate with impressive virulence while leaving swaths of collateral damage—patent medicines and psychic surgery, astrology and satanism, racist myths, superstitions and a special case computer viruses. Memes could travel wordlessly even before language was born.
Plain mimicry is enough to replicate knowledge—how to chip an arrowhead or start a fire. Among animals, chimpanzees and gorillas are known to acquire behaviors by imitation. Some species of songbirds learn their songs, or at least song variants, after hearing them from neighboring birds or, more recently, from ornithologists with audio players.
Birds develop song repertoires and song dialects—in short, they exhibit a birdsong culture that predates human culture by eons. These special cases notwithstanding, for most of human history memes and language have gone hand in glove.
It supersedes mere imitation, spreading knowledge by abstraction and encoding. Perhaps the analogy with disease was inevitable. Before anyone understood anything of epidemiology, its language was applied to species of information.
An emotion can be infectious, a tune catchy, a habit contagious. Ours is the age of virality: viral education, viral marketing, viral e-mail and video and networking.
Researchers studying the Internet itself as a medium—crowdsourcing, collective attention, social networking and resource allocation—employ not only the language but also the mathematical principles of epidemiology. It has leapt aboard and is now—even as you read this viral sentence—propagating itself madly throughout the ideosphere! One source of resistance—or at least unease—was the shoving of us humans toward the wings. Now humans are to be considered as vehicles for the propagation of memes, too.
No one likes to be called a puppet. Whence and how do they come? I do not know and I have nothing to do with it. It had taken on a life of its own; it was a fairly successful meme.
It is a perfect milieu for self-replicating programs to flourish. Not only did it provide memes with a nutrient-rich culture medium, it also gave wings to the idea of memes. Meme itself quickly became an Internet buzzword. Awareness of memes fostered their spread. To jump the shark means to pass a peak of quality or popularity and begin an irreversible decline.
The phrase was thought to have been used first in by a college student named Sean J. The origin of the phrase requires a certain amount of explanation without which it could not have been initially understood. The web site soon featured a list of frequently asked questions:. The site is the chicken, the egg and now a Catch Is this science?
In his column, Hofstadter proposed the obvious memetic label for such a discipline: memetics. The study of memes has attracted researchers from fields as far apart as computer science and microbiology. In bioinformatics, chain letters are an object of study. They are memes; they have evolutionary histories. The very purpose of a chain letter is replication; whatever else a chain letter may say, it embodies one message: Copy me. One student of chain-letter evolution, Daniel W.
Then carbon paper made a symbiotic partnership with another technology, the typewriter. Viral outbreaks of chain letters occurred all through the early 20th century.
Two subsequent technologies, when their use became widespread, provided orders-of-magnitude boosts in chain-letter fecundity: photocopying c. Inspired by a chance conversation on a hike in the Hong Kong mountains, information scientists Charles H. They had 33, all variants of a single letter, with mutations in the form of misspellings, omissions and transposed words and phrases.
Like a gene, their average length is about 2, characters. Like an inheritable trait, it promises benefits for you and the people you pass it on to. The algorithms were designed to take the genomes of various modern creatures and work backward, by inference and deduction, to reconstruct their phylogeny—their evolutionary trees.
If these mathematical methods worked with genes, the scientists suggested, they should work with chain letters, too. In both cases the researchers were able to verify mutation rates and relatedness measures. Popular memes are often funny, ranging from silly humor to niche humor to more pointed political humor. Kids, parenting, pets, and everyday life offer endless meme material.
Often one funny image spurs a host of memes, as with this determined-looking toddler clenching his hand into a fist. The above meme mimics our determination on New Year's Eve to finally make positive changes. The same image represents our feelings of satisfaction and winning when we receive an unexpected windfall.
Sometimes memes offer simple, funny humor most people can enjoy, such as this Pavlov joke:. Cute animals figure prominently in harmless-humor memes, such as these adorable ducklings:.
Funny memes often appeal to specific groups, such as parents:. Sibling memes are a popular meme subgroup that appeals to many people:. Other classic and famous funny memes include:. Some memes have pointed humor. These memes put forth an opinion, argue with others, take a provocative stance, or use darker subjects, such as the above meme that takes advantage of an unfortunate headline.
Other memes tackle more controversial subjects, such as the Area 51 raid plan:. Or the flat-Earth movement:. Other darker-humored memes include:. Social commentary colors many memes, touching upon subjects such as wine drinking, a hugely popular topic on the internet. Often, memes tackle different takes on societal norms, such as memes about not wanting to have kids:. More social commentary memes include:. In some cases, a meme achieves notoriety as a conversational expression.
As in the above example, the phrase "Meanwhile in Another conversational meme tackles the challenge to "Change My Mind":. Other conversational memes include:. World events provide endless meme fodder, with humor that's sometimes pointed, sometimes silly, and sometimes painful. As in the above meme, social isolation periods generate thousands of memes, capitalizing on the dark humor of a shared experience.
The brief murder hornet scare is another example:. Brexit was a rich source of memes:. Superbowls provide endless meme fodder, as this Adam Levine halftime show meme shows:. Other current topic memes:. Our favorite TV shows provide tons of meme material, such as the above example from Game of Thrones. Other meme-TV show favorites include The Office :.
More TV shows that generate memes include:. There's an endless variety of memes, ranging from mundane, everyday topics to critical life and world events. More are created and shared every day, and new material is constantly available. If you are inspired by an image or video you come across, make your own meme and see if it resonates with others. Visit Know Your Meme to research a meme or get inspiration. Actively scan device characteristics for identification.
This website documents internet memes and serves as a knowledge hub about their origins. You can browse the most popular memes and check out common uses of each one. Wondering how to create a meme by yourself? Meme generators are scattered all over the web like flyers on the sidewalk, just next to the guy who hands them out. No need to waste time on choosing a font or trying to center the text — all of these preferences are already set. Supports different languages, offers convenient sharing options and showcases a list of examples for each meme.
Straightforward and simple. By Chen Attias. Community Manager. This Blog was created with Wix Blog. Jul 20, Recent Posts See All.
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