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Since the early days of internet memes, circa early 2000's, internet users have used memes to express how they feel, make a joke, or just be random in the hope of someone will "lol" to their post. Although memes were accepted and quite funny back in the day, they have seriously declined in humor, and with more and more children using the internet, memes have been overused, and the phrases added to memes don't make that much sense anymore. With the use of websites that add words to meme pictures without actually doing any work, except typing and dragging some words, creating memes has been easier than ever. Now, I will try to explain why I dislike the overuse and misunderstanding of memes.
Olivia Gulin, from Know Your Meme, has shown what a meme actually is.
"The idea and word 'meme' were coined by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene. He writes about an approach to evolution that takes the gene as its most important unit, rather than groups of organisms. The gene, for Dawkins, ultimately acts in pure self-interest.
A o memeo is analogous to a o geneo as a unit of culture that replicates itself, spreads throughout culture, and mutates. He writes:
Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via ----- or ----, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passed it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain. As my colleague N.K. Humphrey neatly summed up an earlier draft of this chapter: `o ¦ memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically.(3) When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the memeo s propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. And this isno t just a way of talking -- the meme for, say, o belief in life after deatho is actually realized physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous systems of individual men the world over.o "
Now, what this means is that a meme isn't just a picture with some font added to it. It's pretty much everything you do. For example, take what you say to your friends and family. They might say what you said to others, then those others might say that to others. See? A meme is more than just a picture. It's actually anything that passes on from on thing to another, mentally and physically.
And that, my friends, is my first ever blog rant.
Olivia Gulin, from Know Your Meme, has shown what a meme actually is.
"The idea and word 'meme' were coined by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene. He writes about an approach to evolution that takes the gene as its most important unit, rather than groups of organisms. The gene, for Dawkins, ultimately acts in pure self-interest.
A o memeo is analogous to a o geneo as a unit of culture that replicates itself, spreads throughout culture, and mutates. He writes:
Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via ----- or ----, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passed it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain. As my colleague N.K. Humphrey neatly summed up an earlier draft of this chapter: `o ¦ memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically.(3) When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the memeo s propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. And this isno t just a way of talking -- the meme for, say, o belief in life after deatho is actually realized physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous systems of individual men the world over.o "
Now, what this means is that a meme isn't just a picture with some font added to it. It's pretty much everything you do. For example, take what you say to your friends and family. They might say what you said to others, then those others might say that to others. See? A meme is more than just a picture. It's actually anything that passes on from on thing to another, mentally and physically.
And that, my friends, is my first ever blog rant.
Credit | Know Your Meme |
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