By George Kazan
When you hear the word meme you think of the internet and the change of things in the world or even new words, such as LOL. Concerning the human culture evolution, the concept of memes is as important to cultural development as genes are to the biological evolution, for example. So, as genes are self-replicating it’s the same with memes but what they encode is not instructions for building proteins in our bodies, it is instructions for building behaviors, beliefs and emotions into our brain. Memes in a digital world are a pain and it is used to describe the spread of content material such as jokes, gossip or videos through social media and the internet from one person to the other. An online meme may spread in its original meaning, but it frequently produces consumer variations, according to this widespread belief. However, it is no coincidence that in a period exclusively defined by social communication through the internet, there’s a surge in lively popular talk about memes. Memes were created a long time ago, before the digital period, but the internet’s special properties made this spread a universal and highly visible habit. Some people say that memes explain everything revolving around us in our daily lives, however others believe that it explains nothing, but in fact, it is used as a perspective to understand certain elements of human culture without adopting the full range of issues and meanings that were set down to it over time.
In the traditional media, many fields adopted the word meme including psychology, philosophy, anthropology, folklore, and linguistics, however for the dominant part it was ignored in the field of communication. Memes were overlooked by mass communication researchers and it was considered unsuitable for exploring content that is conveyed to the public at the same time from a single source. On the other hand, this is not the case in the modern era, where there are interpersonal and mass communication that are all merging together and memes have become more significant than ever to studying communication in an era when materialistic stuff travels so quick from one medium to another.
Furthermore, three key characteristics of memes are particularly relevant to the study of current digital culture. First, memes may be thought of as cultural knowledge that spreads from one person to another but eventually grows into a widespread societal phenomena. Memes have a massive influence, despite the fact that they circulate on a micro level, thus they influence social groups’ beliefs, behaviors, and actions. Second, memes spread through various forms of replication. People are becoming aware of memes by their perceptions, digest them in their thoughts, and then “relabel” them to pass them on to others in spoken communication. People in the internet age, on the other hand, don’t have to repackage memes: they may just forward, link, or copy information as is. The name “meme” is particularly fitting for describing this slew of re-works since the concept is broad enough to include a wide variety of communication intentions and behaviors, from simple copying to contemptuous imitation. The third feature of memes that attracts researchers interested in new media is their ability to spread through competition and selection. Memes differ significantly in terms of their ability to adapt to the socio-cultural framework in which they spread. Most research has shown that memes and digital culture are a perfect match: the internet is filled with memetic activity and also allows for unparalleled exploration of it. However, certain controversy surrounding memes including the biological analysis, which has delayed the concept’s widespread adoption in digital culture research. However, behavioral-driven memetic consider memes to be actions and objects rather than concepts.
The meme is linked in behaviorist slang; beyond the events, practices, and texts in which it occurs, the meme does not exist. It is always experienced as stored information. Nevertheless, this perspective asserts that if memes were just conceptual terms, it would be difficult to distinguish them from their external expression. The empirical study of meme development and application is made possible by defining memes as concrete concepts. In addition, memes are pieces of pop culture that are transmitted, imitated, and modified by individual internet users, resulting in the creation of shared culture. When seeing internet memes as collections of content pieces that were developed with knowledge of one another and share similar qualities, rather than them being single ideas that spread quickly. Lastly, memes are units of imitation and it is beneficial to separate some dimensions of cultural objects that individuals might possibly imitate, like content, shape and posture.
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