Who has never had or seen a meme on their phone? What does "meme" exactly mean?
The word comes from the Greek word “mimeme”, which means “something is
imitated”. According
to a dictionary definition, a “meme” is
a concept or behaviour that spreads from person to person
and become viral. It can include beliefs,
fashions, stories, and phrases. In short they are captioned video or photos
with short amusing or funny sentences.
The first person to use this word was
Richard Dawkins, a neo-Darwinian biologist, who coined the expression
"meme" in the 1970s. In his essay "The Selfish Gene", he
used the word meme as an "idea that
spreads from brain to brain" to explain the evolution of culture comparing
to biology. The meme passes from person to person as does the gene from an
individual to another through reproduction.
Why do they work?
Probably their success is due to the
Culture of Remix which generates infinite variations from a topic in a process
of collective creation without any author or rules about copyright. It can be
formed by scenes or lines from TVshows, photos or movies that remixed with
other content acquire new meanings in a funny ways.
A meme often helps to lighten up a
difficult situation, to ironize on our daily troubles, to create a sense of community.
The meme is becoming a new way to
communicate among people on the web or on social media. Everything can become a meme, a
GIF, a short-lived video, a movie frame, a joke, a current event, a ballet (see
TikTok), a move (Dab Dance), a challenge or an image. It’s a way for people to
express their opinions and emotions.
There are different reasons why they work:
1. They make the user feel part of a
community. Each meme works and amuses as long as the creator and the users
share the same cultural background.
2. Entertainment works. All of us want to
have fun or distract ourselves and the Internet is the place where this can
easily happen.
3. Users can choose whether to just laugh,
share, or become an active part and create a new one.
Can memes hurt anyone?
Yes, the main feature of a meme is to make
fun of anything from politics to
religion, from sport or cinema celebrities to the most common stereotypes.
Sometimes, the language used can be abusive. This is one of danger of
democratic tools like these.
They can be created easily, their messages,
simple and short, reach a large audience so they can become propaganda tools to diffuse prejudicial
attitudes against certain people or lifestyles and can help spread fake news.
Watch out!
Facebook has launched a real global
competition called “hateful memes challenge” with monetary prizes. Twitter is
working on function Bird watch where the users of the community itself can report, with
indicative and exhaustive notes, messages that they consider false, dangerous
and deceptive.
Agnese, 3sc
No comments:
Post a Comment