Krsnesskli

English

Internet Memes

Sif Gararsdttir

Matthas B. Harksen

INTRODUCTION
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single person in possession of a high-speed internet connection must be in want of a LOL. Internet memes are perhaps the only plausible explanation for the global economic crisis. People that normally worked their asses off at work now just sit around surfing various humour sites such as 9gag and Memebase. Without people knowing these so called humor sites are destroying lives! In a more serious vein, if one wants to understand internet memes, one must first know what the word meme really means. The word was created by Richard Dawkins in 1976 and first used in The Selfish Gene, his book about genetic evolution. In the book Dawkins advocates viewing evolution from the perspective of the gene rather than the individual organism or the species. Then we have another problem: What are genes? A gene is NOT DNA and it is NOT a Chromosome. A gene could be said to be a page in a book and a Chromosome could be said to be an entire book. In The Selfish Gene, Dawkins proposes that the genes cause individual organisms to act selfishly or selflessly in order to protect the genes of the species. He gives examples such as how penguins push each other into unknown and possibly dangerous waters to test it for the rest of the flock. He also gives more selfless examples, such as how a kamikaze worker bee stings intruders that are trespassing and then dies a glorious death. If a gene is a unit of heredity that spreads from organism to organism then a meme is a unit of ideas, behavior and style that spreads from person to person within a culture. Dawkins took the Greek word mimeme and shortened it to make it more similar to gene. According to his book: Mimeme comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like gene. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. It should be pronounced to rhyme with cream. An internet meme is therefore a thought, an idea or some other type of cultural spreading phenomenon that travels from person to person via the World Wide Web.

THE EVOLUTION OF THE INTERNET MEME

When the internet became accessible to the common population in the 90s, the early hackers praised it for its democratic nature and said: on the internet there is no race, no gender, no bias; only bytes of data. This also meant that, on the internet, people were anonymous. There were no faces or names, just bytes of data. In the early stages of the internet, people started sharing simple texts such as jokes or catchphrases. This later developed into pictures and short movie samples. They were generally shared through email or Usenet. Those were the first internet memes, although they did not go by that name. Dancing Baby or Baby-Cha-Cha is generally believed to have been the first example of an internet phenomenon of this kind. Since some of the first users of the internet (and computers) were college or university students, these pictures became a way of expressing yourself. Since these were university and college students, some of them were familiar with Dawkins theory of genetic evolution; this also meant that they knew about memes. What happened next? The word meme became an internet meme. It spread like a firecracker, bursting through every corner of the internet and grasping at every human mind it could find. In the end almost anyone interested in funny pictures knew what a meme was. This made such programs as Adobe Photoshop rise in value since it allowed people to put texts on top of pictures and even allowed them to transform them entirely. Photoshop was a huge success for the Meme-ing community, whose members now had an opportunity to edit their pictures with little or no difficulty. On the 1st of October in 2003, a 15 year old student under the pseudonym of moot created what would perhaps become one of the most important and best known image board websites. That website was 4chan. He intended 4chan to be a place to discuss Japanese comics and anime, an American counterpart to the popular Japanese Futaba Channel ("2chan") image board. 4chan brought us many internet phenomena such as: Rick Rolling, lolcats, Pedobear and My Little Pony. But to this date perhaps one of their most well-known offspring is the anonymous hacker group Anonymous. What many people dont know about Anonymous is that the name of the group actually comes from the ability to remain anonymous on 4chan. Some members on 4chan decided to make a hacking group, with a very simple member-ship rule: being anonymous on the internet, at all times. If you reveal your identity youre out of the group. You could say the hacking group became a meme; many people joined, and the thoughts of the group passed from person to person within the hacking culture.

Anonymous has attacked many big companies, including PayPal, Visa, PlayStation and Amazon. Although these are all great and big companies, nobody panicked until they heard that Anonymous was going to hack Facebook on November 5th in 2011. This spread around like the meme it was, and soon everybody knew that Facebook was going to get hacked (DDoS or Distributed Denial-of-Service).

HOW SOCIAL WEB-SITES INTERACT WITH MEMES

I think we agree, the past is over. George Bush As we move further into the era of technology, we realize that the temptations we are offered on the internet are so good that they become personally damaging and in some cases even terminal. What could you expect with so much being offered? Torrents, Facebook, Twitter, Internet Memes, YouTube, Video Games and so on. People dont even have to leave their houses anymore to take part in modern society. Today it has perhaps never been as easy and yet so hard to gain international fame. Justin Bieber, the internet phenomenon, is a great example of that. He started posting various videos of himself singing covers of R&B songs on the video site YouTube. In 2009, he released his first single: One Time. The video became a meme. It spread in various forms, through Facebook, MySpace and, like any other meme, in conversation. Soon two groups were formed: a group that hated Justin Bieber, and a group that loved him. This actually made him even more famous. More stories can be told of memes or internet phenomena like Justin Bieber. They include: Rebecca Black, Trololo, Nyan Cat and other infectious internet abnormalities. These social web sites have now created a world where it is almost as easy to spread a meme in a mere matter of hours as it is to slice bread. People had announced the fact that there were neutrinos that could travel faster than light via Twitter, just a few minutes after the official statement came out. Everybody knew. Anyone who had a Twitter account or a Facebook account could get the news faster than the news article! To date, approximately 656 million people have watched the YouTube video Baby by Justin Bieber. That is close to 1/10 of the human population! Im even surprised it is not a higher number. So yes, I do think we can agree with George Bush that the past is over. We now live in a world where thoughts, ideas, feelings and facts can travel around the globe in a matter of seconds. We live in a world where our greatest source of information is other people, not newspapers or the news hour on TV.

POPULAR MEMES OF THE PRESENT CONTINUOUS

Memebase, 9gag, Damnlol, Knowyourmeme, Quickmeme. These are all good examples of humor sites. The motto of these websites should perhaps be: Go here once, never return to real life. This page might be called the fun page. It includes funny pictures and lolcats. This page is merely intended to give you, the reader, an insight into the world of memes. Lolcats. Everybody loves kittens, right? So why not slap on some funny text with a cute kitty face and make it a meme? Lolcats generally include bad grammar and funny kitty emotions.

Next are the Rage comics. These short comic strips with a life lesson have many different Rage faces to help the reader feel more drawn into the message (and also to make it funnier). Forever Alone Guy, Trollface, Fuck Yeah Guy and Me Gusta are the typical rage faces in a typical rage comic. You now have the most imponderable joy of guessing who is who:

Finally, we have my favorite type of meme. The template meme. The only way to describe one is to show you one. One of my favorites: Socially awkward penguin. Can you guess why it is called that?

THE FUTURE OF INTERNET MEMES

Upon hearing the word meme, viral videos, inside macros and inside jokes usually come to mind, but as Richard Dawkins defined it: A meme is an idea, a behavior that spreads from person to person within a culture. What happens when viral videos and imagery are not the memes themselves? But rather pieces to a much larger idea, an idea that is rapidly spreading. Can a meme change our nation? On July 13th 2011, Adbusters posted an article titled #OCCUPYWALLSTREET. This article called upon 20.000 people to assemble in the lower Manhattan to protest against the social and economic inequality promoted by Washington politics. These protests soon became an internet meme. They spread across various social websites, including Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook. But the main internet meme was the one that came from Tumblr. A single-topic blog named We are the 99 percent was launched to inspire people to join the protesters. The name refers to the difference in wealth and income in the U.S. between the wealthiest 1% and the rest of the population. The typical look of the posts is/was something like this:

This proves that in the future, with the help of social web sites, memes could perhaps change everything in the society. They have already started changing how big groups of people think, so why not powerful politicians? Only time will tell how the future of internet memes will pan out, but Im sure they will have a drastic impact on the future.

FINAL WORDS
How do you end an essay about Internet memes? In the most humorous way possible. Why did I write this essay? I did it for the lolz. I dont really know how to end this essay so Im just going to do it like this Scroll down

Ohh Wait?

Bibliography and References

Dawkins, Richard: The Selfish Gene. New York. Oxford University Press, 1976. http://www.cylegage.com/lulz/ http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,22988,00.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene http://www.accessexcellence.org/AE/AEPC/NIH/gene03.php http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_meme http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lolcat http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4chan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rickrolling http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Photoshop http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/dancing-baby#.TsLwecOAoXl http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_(group)

Quotes
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single person in possession of a high-speed internet connection must be in want of a LOL. (Pride and Prejudice, Page 11 + Matthas B. Harksen) A gene is NOT DNA and it is NOT a Chromosome. A gene could be said to be a page in a book and a Chromosome could be said to be an entire book. (The Selfish Gene, Page 128) Mimeme comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like gene. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. It should be pronounced to rhyme with cream. (The Selfish Gene, Page 538) on the internet there is no race, no gender, no bias; only bytes of data. (http://www.cylegage.com/lulz/) He intended 4chan to be a place to discuss Japanese comics and anime, an American counterpart to the popular Japanese Futaba Channel ("2chan") image board. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4chan) I think we agree, the past is over. George Bush Upon hearing the word meme, viral videos, inside macros and inside jokes usually come to mind, but as Richard Dawkins defined it: A meme is an idea, a behavior that spreads from person to person within a culture. What happens when viral videos and imagery are not the memes themselves? But rather pieces to a much larger idea, an idea that is rapidly spreading. Can a meme change our nation? (http://www.viddler.com/explore/knowyourmeme/videos/94/)