James Gleick What Defines A Meme Analysis

I am interested in the usage of memes and social media as a whole. Memes are a form of entertainment used in all cultures in a multitudes of ways. Memes on social media can be used to spread awareness of events, spread ideas, and provide comedy. I have respect for the usage of social media because it allows people to view memes and learn. Memes captivate the minds of all users of social media through many different types of comedy that may appeal to some people but not others. The use of simplistic entertainment and culture that can be spread quickly over the internet disperses information to the public eye through humor. There is an extremely wide variety of humor that memes hold, and a wide variety of ways to spread humor to anyone.

He consisted of a trillion, trillion, trillion ageless bodies, each in its place, each resting quiet and incorruptible, each cared for by perfect automatons, equally incorruptible, while the minds of all the bodies freely melted one into the other, indistinguishable.” The unification of human minds in “The Last Question” can be paralleled with how our minds come together on the Internet through social media. Although social media is beneficial in many ways, it also hinders individuality by placing barriers around the user's thinking. By only showing information from whom the individual follows and the individual only following whom they agree with or enjoy, social media creates a static view with no room for external influence. For example, tumblr, a website with over 550 million monthly users, operates by solely showing information from blogs and categories the user follows. Social media amalgamates countless individuals towards singular thought processes. A singular thought process creates unintentional arrogance and opinionation; by only having one view, an individual becomes blind to the problems encompassing that one view and issues outside of

The dictionary defines a meme as, “an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture”(“Meme”). Memes have become the way of expressing thoughts and information, which is changed and modified through out time and peoples attitudes. Ronak Patel states in his work “First World Problems: A Fair Use Analysis of Internet Memes,” a very important about internet memes and that is, “. . . it is not the meme itself that is important, but the fact that memes provide more avenues of expression, thus increasing the chance that a message can be transmitted to someone in an effective way” (Patel, 252). Internets memes have deeper and more intersexual meaning that was is just written or seen in the GIF or picture. The reader must have the skills and knowledge to really extract the true meaning. There are many different popular memes background pictures, and through out time the captions change to accommodate what the creator of the meme is thinking and what is going on in society. Specifically looking at one “Thanks, Obama” meme, the content of the meme states “She was Hannah Montana when Bush was President. Thanks Obama.” Along with the text of the meme there is a picture of Ron Swanson in the background. The humor of this meme comes from the thought that first it is true that Miley was Hannah Montanan, but second blaming Obama for something that occurred that he had absolutely nothing to do with.

"Social Media: Destroyer or Creator" is an online article published by The New York Times on February 3, 2016. The author of this article, Thomas L. Friedman, tells the story of Wael Ghonim and his experience with social media. According to the text, Wael was an Egyptian Google employee who saw a Facebook post about another Egyptian man named Khaled Said who was killed by police. The author states that since they were both Egyptian, Ghonim felt like the same thing could have happened to him. Ghonim then made a Facebook page named We are All Khaled Said were he discussed his views. The page quickly picked up stamina gaining one hundred thousand followers in just two days. According to the text, Ghonim unknowingly started the Egyptian revolution.

The culprit? Media. The media constantly and unendingly bombards crowds with information and entertainment through magazines, the news, television, and the internet that consequently affect people’s actions and thoughts. This is exemplified by the novel 1984, by George Orwell, which depicts an oppressive society ruled by a totalitarian government controlling. Orwell describes the ruler of this government, Big Brother, as having complete, despotic control over his subjects, including complete control over the media. While it is true most people are heavily influenced by the media, outright control can only be achieved over a collective consciousness, not the minds of individuals. Whoever controls the media can collectively control the minds

In Blackmore’s essay, she promotes her theory of memetics and memes which, as she defines them, are anything that can be imitated and passed on. This could be an idea, language, styles/fashion, or behavior. She argues that her theory can explain human nature better than any other theory about human behavior. Memes have to cooperate with humans in order for the meme to become popular to then compete with other memes. Fallows, Blackmore, and Berry all examine the theme of competition through humiliation, but through the participants in Win In China, the fundamentalists, and memes, they show how an aspect of cooperation is incorporated with competition in order for success to

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

A meme’s ability to reinforce norms within a group can also polarize the group’s ideas in dangerous ways. In the “It Gets Better” example, participants of the meme were seen to unintentionally replicate heteronormative ideas and hegemonic norms as they created their own versions of the original video (1700). However, in a social group that mostly consists of young White men who already benefit from hegemonic norms, memes may push their ideas to the extreme. The echoes meme is used in association with Trump not just because neo-Nazis support his xenophobic policies, but because they think that he can make their threats against the Jewish community a reality. This is seen in one tweet that states that angering Trump will cause him to “fire up the ovens” (Fleishman and Smith). Asserting the intellectual superiority of Nazis also insinuates that their targets, members of the Jewish community, are inherently less intelligent people and perhaps deserve to be destroyed for this reason. However, although memes are now used to spread dangerous ideologies, many still do not take the dangerous potential of memes seriously due to their innocuous origins. Although Fleishman and Smith do not undermine the danger of the echoes symbol, they still said that their staff “got off easy” when targeted by anti-Semites because all they received was “just a flood of memes”, indicating that they do not view memes as a dangerous form of harassment. The use of memes by

The memes I selected satirize the triviality and pettiness between privileged and high social class people and morality between family and in general. These are both issues faced everyday. Many people do not realize the privilege they have, and in some cases waste and are unappreciative. Cecily is able to use four sugar cubes and cut a big slice of cake when others were starving and not able to feed their entire family. Now, we have phones and technology at our fingertips twenty-four/ seven. We are able to access an infinite amount of knowledge in seconds, while others will never be able to learn

As the influence of memes continues to grow across varied political and social contexts it is that they must not simple be taken seriously as networked texts, but rather as networked rhetorical agents in their own right. Specifically, through their modal construction they are able to develop an ethos that is greater than sum of the iterations that make up the meme. In creating this space for the meme to dwell, memetic participants take diffuse networked fragments and aggregate them into an implied body enacting a narrative in a particular place. Simply put, once imbued with ethos memes are able to take on the role of the traditional rhetor. Consequently, as meme and other modes are studied in the future, they ought not to be

Although indivudal iterations of memes are deployed by individual rhetors, the ways that a particular iteration may be mobilized are largely controlled by the form of the meme. The control of potential iterations of a meme gives them a particular modal of agency. Grabill and Pig (2012) note that as networked texts are increasingly fragmented, remixed, and recirculated agency becomes increasingly difficult to define. When I repost a video with a new comment is the rhetorical action mine, the creator of the videos or a hybrid of the two. Moreover, many of the fragments will be anonymous in some capacity. However, the concept of the mode, combines these fragments and diffuse actors into a single assemblage. Because of this unity, as well as the creating of the conditions of contexts, Virno (2009) notes that the mode, rather than particular iterations, are not only the starting point of critical analysis, but of the force of the text as

In the article, “could you become a mean meme?” by Kristen Lewis informs readers of the advantages and disadvantages of social media, as well as how to be smart with privacy. Did you know that whatever you do on internet you are being watch in some way? Social media is good for connecting with others, but bad because you don’t have enough privacy; however, there are ways to protect yourself.

In the two articles read both authors state the advantages and disadvantages of social media. In the first article “Could you become a mean meme?” the author tells readers the pros and cons of social media. He also tells readers possible solutions to the problems social media poses. In the second article “Are you being watched” the author tells readers about cookies and how people could prevent them. In the articles “Could you become a mean meme” and “Are you being watched” both authors state the advantages and disadvantages and also how to keep your privacy online.

Humankind has always had a thirst for power; over its peers, environment and spiritual beliefs. To quench this thirst it has gone as far as genocide; but has often employed more subtle techniques, such as mind control. In today’s socio-economical and political worlds, mind control plays a key role in dictating tastes and lifestyles; as well as controlling political thoughts, views, and people’s understanding of the world. It is accomplished using various channels to condition people’s thinking. Publicity and advertisement campaigns saturate people with products, broadcasting over radio, and television which in itself is a prime example. Many religions employ mind control, conditioning their followers to obey without