Letting everyone enjoy their own jokes in peace doesn’t sound so bad, and to a point, it wouldn’t be. So did participating in video memes like making one’s own “Harlem Shake” clip. Videos Video memes go back to the early days of sending around clips like badday.mpg, but after the advent of YouTube in 2005, sending around videos like Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” (Rickrolling) or “Nyan Cat” became wildly popular. Examples: #OlympicsFail, #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo Sometimes they’re as simple as attaching #fail to a post about a stupid mistake other times they call attention to causes and events in the news. They eventually became memes and movements in themselves. Hashtags In the early 2000s, hashtags became a quick way to group conversations on social media. Example: Pretty much any GIF from RuPaul’s Drag Race ever. (Remember those waving American flags that populated every website in the 1990s?) Today, reaction GIFs-typically taken from film, TV, or a popular web video-have become a shorthand for showing how one feels about a particular statement or event. GIFs/Reaction GIFs GIFs have been on the internet for a long time. Image Macros Pretty much any image with witty text or some kind of catchphrase imposed over it, usually in black-and-white Impact bold font. Typically, other image macros-like the infamous “I Can Has Cheezburger?” or the ones created using the catchphrase “All your base are belong to us”-just had a single caption. The LOLcat eventually came to exemplify the image macro: a simple image captioned with bold Impact font at the top and bottom-the top sets up the joke, the bottom pays it off. Soon photographs of kittehs with captions written in their own special grammar, which eventually became known as LOLcats, were a thing, largely thanks to sites like the wildly popular imageboard 4chan. As the internet moved from dial-up to DSL, and meme-swapping destinations like eBaum’s World gained traction, things got more sophisticated. Back in the early days, pixelated images of dancing babies or hamsters was all it took to get meme famous. ![]() Memes as people understand them today didn’t really take off until the mid-1990s, when now small-seeming groups of average folk began gathering on the internet and populating its message boards and Usenet groups with things the group(s) found funny. Today, denizens of the internet think of memes as jokes passed across social media in the form of image macros (those pictures of babies or cats or whatever with bold black-and-white words on them), hashtags (the thing you amended to what you just wrote on Twitter), GIFs (usually of a celebrity, reality star, or drag queen reacting to what you just wrote on Twitter), or videos (that Rick Astley video people used to send you). Back then, Dawkins was talking about passing along culture-song melodies, art styles, whatever. He called those artifacts memes, bits of cultural DNA that encoded society’s shared experiences while also constantly evolving.īut Dawkins coined the term in 1976, in his book The Selfish Gene, long before the modern internet, before memes morphed into what they are now. For Dawkins, cultural ideas were no different than genes-concepts that had to spread themselves from brain to brain as quickly as they could, replicating and mutating as they went. ![]() The term “meme” comes from evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. And, friends, the web hive mind is a weird (often funny, sometimes dangerous) place. They are the shorthand of a hyper-connected group thinking in unison. ![]() Not because they’re digital visual communication (though of course, they are that), but because they are the product of a hive mind. Memes and the internet-they're made for each other.
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