MEDI 317: Meme Research

What is a meme? Basicaly an idea or a concept that spreads like wildfire through the net and becomes popular. They are sort of like inside jokes for masses. Memes can take the form of pictures, text, video etc but they all often become popular slogans, recognisable very easily by a word or a picture.

This Video by Weezer is FULL of memes:

Some Examples of memes:

Creepypasta: A scary form of Copypasta. These stories are posted over and over again on the internet. The intent is to scare the reader. Some of the most popular creepypastas are infact Pokemon ones, with possibly the most notable being the Lavender Tower Music.

Lol Cats: Probably one of the most poular memes on the net are started by or are in some way involved with Lol Cats. Some people herald lol cats as the start of a new internet subculture, which may be fairly acurate since lol cats has a following its own devoted website and lots of message boards now have subforums for it. It started with a few simple pictures with (it is believed) the so called 'cheezburger cat' being the first. The craze hit the internet like wildfire and in its wake inspired its followers to create 'Caturday' (which entails the posting of lots of cat pictures and lolcat pictures on forums and message boards on Saturdays) and has also spawned its own language known as Lolcat speak or Lolspeak. There is also a project to translate the bible into lolcat.

The lol cat craze has also started other funny animal related stuff in the same sort of format. Such as loldogs and also funny bunny pictures with Sunday being declared 'Bunday' on many forums and message boards.

The core of these memes are the same they mainly consist of a picture of an animal and then a caption typically written in 'lolspeak' to effect humour.

There are also a series of 'Face Memes' that are drawn faces tagged with a catchphrase like "Forever Alone" and "Me Gusta"

Also another popular meme on message boards is "haters gonna hate" which has and can be adapted to almost anything that a fan accepts some people may not like but of which the fan doesn't care. It is typically used to defend someone from or as a retort to 'flaming' or 'trolling' on their sites or message board posts.