Evolution And Virality Of Memes

Cartoons have been use for many years and its modern usage refers to a typically non-realistic or semi-realistic drawing or painting intended for satire, caricature, or mock different things. John Backderf, known as Derf, is a famous and recognized cartoonist “who works out of an unheated, attic studio in his Cleveland home, grew up in a rural, small town in Ohio and went to high school with serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer” (“Bio”). He drew a cartoon in 1995 in which he presents an implicit theory about how and why things evolve to be “cool”. This paper will elaborate on explaining what Derf’s theory actually is, an interpretation of the meaning presented in the cartoon, and a fad or style that follows Derf’s theory.

Memes in today 's society are used to mock things and often are satire. For my project I choose the memes of Willy Wonka and ‘I don’t always... but when I do I’. These are used to mock morality and the triviality of the upper class and privileged respectively. These are both issues that we face in society.

The film ‘How Social Networks Predict Epidemics’ by Nicholas Christakis explores the influence of social networks on people’s lives and how it can be used to predict epidemics.Social networks are key connectors among individuals in all societies today. They are avenues through which people learn and share many new things with others. Social networks are so instrumental in determining many issues like employment and salaries, and the transmission of diseases. It is, therefore, crucial to comprehend why and how the networks influence the patterns as they do.

Memes are so called (VABEs) which is the values, assumptions, beliefs, and expectations that people develop and pass on to others over time. According to Richard Brodie, Memes are the “viruses of the mind” and they are like packets of information like genes passed on from generation to generation. Memes have to have the environment to pass it on or it can die

Successful memes facilitate humans to learn, acquire, and transmit new ideas and behaviors. In Susan Blackmore’s essay “Small Creature,” she proposes that memes are the ideas and beliefs that pass on through generation. Moreover, she believes that humans’ behaviors are greatly influenced and solely dominated by memes. But there is an important omission that left untouched in her essay. Blackmore lacks a clear explanation of what exactly contribute to the success of a meme’s transmission. However, when exploring in the Malcolm Gladwell’s “Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted,” we could find out that he suggests many valuable illustrations of how successful memes are transmitted and what ingredients contribute to the success. In his interesting piece, he regards successful memes as strong ties, while unsuccessful one as weak ties. In a strong-tie relationship, people keep frequent contact in-person and have shared personal history, whereas a weak-tie is with tenuous relationship. Furthermore, He argues that social media and online communications connect people with weak ties that do not profoundly influence real social change and justice. On the other hand, Gladwell cites Civil Rights Movement as a strong-tie phenomenon that motivates people to devote real sacrifice. To answer the question then of what makes one meme popular and another one not, even though memes can be transmitted discretionarily, personal

Memes, like everything else, begin with an idea. While every meme is an idea, not all ideas are memes. Memes are now not only created for entertainment but for both the creation and viral recognition of society’s opinions. Memes are made up of both collective and individual identities.

Comics, a medium used to express ideas via images and pictures, can be traced back to the cave period when humans communicated ideas and thoughts using paintings and pictures. However, as humans began to use words to communicate with one another, paintings and pictures as a mode of communication took a backseat. They began to be used only for visual impact whenever needed. In course of time, other than oral communication, written communication and print media were considered effective means of communication. Various genre like novels, poems, short stories, essays were all realized and accepted by scholars as resources to be used when educating children and adults. Inspite of the many famous comics – be it

This subset of memetics spreads itself via technology and invents ways to keep itself alive those self-replicating "life forms" that spread themselves via human consciousness (Blackmore, 2008). Information digitally communicated isreplicated from person to person through creative simulation. When culture evolved and information spread at a slower pace, memes most commonly traveled within the family, from parent to child. In our technologically advanced world, memes leap haphazardly from all walks of life - through social platforms, digital forums, television and radio. “Their fertility depends less and less on whether they add to the long-term welfare of the brains in question. On the Internet you can tell thousands of people about the joys of smoking crack or watching the Jerry Springer show in the brief period between adopting these memes and being ruined by them,” (Wright,

Thomas Jefferson's "Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge" did not come into full fruition because the General Assembly rejected it before voting to spend $45,000 from the Literacy Fund on a school for the poor in each country. I think we have learned from some of the obstacles our fore fathers faced, because our fore fathers had to decide on certain laws, sought to preserve the principles of Liberty, and equality for which they had to fight for. I do see some similarities between the obstacles our fore fathers faced through what we face today, because we still fight for equality, as people, in our schools, basically anywhere you go, people are fighting for equality some way or

Posters have been around for as long as we can remember. They gained popularity in the late 1920's due to five main people, Tom Eckersley, Abram Games, FHK Henrion, Josef Muller-Brockmann, and Paul Rand. These five people were all born in 1914.

Cynical, humorous, and peculiar –memes have engulfed the entirety of cyberspace. Originating from Richard Dawkins book, “The Selfish Gene,” a memes initial purpose was to delineate and elaborate how cultural information dispersed, throughout communities. However, the memes purpose has evolved over time. According to Paul Gil, author of “What is a “Meme?”, modern day memes are “often [used] to publicly ridicule human behavior.” Additionally, some memes have even been featured to contain “heavier and more philosophical content.” Memes today are now utilized solely for the means of entertainment and critical acquisitions, such as the memes presenting president Donald Trump as the former German Dictator Adolf Hitler. While the image may elicit

In the article “Makes a Meme Instead: A Concise History of Internet Memes” by Linda K. Börzsei she speaks about the influences of memes in modern society from a technological, sociological and cultural viewpoint. She also speaks about how impactful memes are in understanding the world of digital media that's used so widely around the world. She discusses the multiple genres of memes such as the All your base are belong to us, Little Fatty, Advice Animals, and The Rage Comics. She further explained the crucial role photoshopping people to different images is. She gives an example of a mad that photoshopped himself as if he took a picture right before the collapse of the World Trades Center on September 11, 2001 (pg.13).

Social media is a platform where everyone is able to express themselves however they want. A lot of the time people tend to follow famous people that they look up to, if that person in particular decides to make a random word; then he or she will having most of their followers saying it and adding it to their vocabulary. On social media it is a common thing for people to post funny videos of themselves because they want it to go viral. In some of those videos it just people creating their own words, For example, In 2014 a girl by the name Kayla Newman made this video using this word that she made up "fleek", after she made this video it went viral. People all over the struck interest in this word, they began to use this word in their everyday vocabulary (Goorwich,

In the beginning of 2004 is when social media users see Piczo, Flickr, Mixi and Facebook only in Harvard college introduced. Piczo and Flickr revolved around mainly pictures being shared and Mixi was one of Japans top social media sites. At this time, Facebook was only allowed to be used in the Harvard College where it was designed by Mark Zuckerberg. It was not until 2005 when Facebook launched a site for high school students as well. This is where the profits of advertising set in for the social media network and the way we share things online transformed and expanded drastically. In addition,during 2005, is when Youtube took off and started storing and retrieving videos for the public. Twitter was then launched in 2006 as a social networking site that let members send and receive messages called tweets. By experience with using Twitter you can only send 140 words/ characters to one another and they can be seen by anyone unless you set your controls to be a private account. However, if you add a hashtag to one of your tweets it can be seen by anyone that searches that hashtag and is related to one anothers tweets regardless of your privacy settings.

The history of the term meme is fairly recent, but from the point of view modern society