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I love memes. There are some that suck and some that do bring the fun level up far past 9000. my new favorite is grumpy cat.
What do people think of memes?
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Kilroy.
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I used to hate them with a passion. Now I find them amusing, if rarely ever actually funny. They're just a part of Internet culture that I learned to embrace, I guess. My biggest problem with them has always been that while everyone hates the friend who overuses a joke somebody made until it's been run into the ground, everyone seems to love way-overused jokes (basically what memes are) as soon as they're on the Internet. While I like memes now, I still dislike most rage comics.
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We got a new Premier, but it's still the same commies in charge.
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I just find it slightly childish when people post a meme in response to someone elses question or point and I don't find it very funny, sometimes just a little desperate.
Does the Harlem Shake count as a meme?
Does the Harlem Shake count as a meme?
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What? Like a drug? I can't say I have ever experienced an intensified conversation as a result of a meme, can you give me an example please? Thank you
Theres a thread on this board somewhere that contains something called PTK's sausage. I'm too lazy to find it but look it up. It was funnier when it happened but man I was rollin' pretty good in that thread until we got in trouble.
Right. Our entire culture and the way we learn and communicate is memetic. It's fundamentally human. Not even just human. To wonder why memes exist is like wondering why we talk. Memetics have been a part of the internet since the dawn of the technology, it's why we have the acronyms and terminology like LOL and trolls.
For anyone interested, I can share a history lesson on the more specific form, the "internet meme", for the hell of it:
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The meme was borne from a particular source that cultivated the desire for and consumption of rapidfire punchlines, to acquire uncredited attention and fame amidst a neverending flurry of anonymous competition where depth and subtlety of humor is secondary to making an impact and getting it to stick. The memes that did stick were then able to expand into the context of varying subjects and the internet-at-large, and considering they had already been vetted by the mass-attention-grabbing process, they were guaranteed some degree of success. The reason so many of today's meme attempts seem so unfunny, repetitive, or uncreative is because that process is no longer contained; it now takes place everywhere for everyone to see.
The source of all this is both very well-known and secretive at the same time. It might be more widely recognized as the origin of all of this if not for one of its intracultural memes, which admonished those who might spoil the "secret club" by sharing or revealing its identity. The secrecy has long since evaporated and the "rule" is all but meaningless, but to make a point, the fact that I haven't named the source is, itself, a meme. I'm not the only one in this thread not naming it, either.
How am I so sure of all this? The accepted format of the "internet meme", the image macro, is proof of where it came from. In most places on the internet, posting an image requires an additional process, but we now go out of our way to do it just to make a joke. Why? Because it all began on what's known as an imageboard, where the post submission form contains a straightforward upload box and threads are formatted to complement posts with the images a user may submit. On an imageboard, the text that appears in an image macro would normally go beside the image. For portability to the rest of the internet, the practice of adding the text to the image in Impact font was adopted. Now people create image macros in Impact font without really knowing why. You could consider that a meme of memes, or a meta-meme.
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This is my observation, having been a user of the internet for nearly two decades, while the "internet meme" has only developed over the past decade. Anyone else care to weigh in?
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