![]() ![]() Memes do not spread according to any preordained plan. Mycelium Growth Simulation by Rafał Szczerski, CC BY-SA 4.0 They propagate laterally, moving in a self-directed fashion. The reason that we can describe both an individual Tide Pod joke (this Tide Pod meme) and the set containing every Tide Pod joke on the internet (the Tide Pod meme) is that memes are not produced in a linear, hierarchical way. This means that it can sometimes be difficult to distinguish an individual meme from the general class of which it is an instance. The totality of any given meme is an assemblage of self-similar elements every meme is a continuously expanding collection of memes. Anyone can access a meme, in the sense that anyone can make a contribution to any given meme simply by posting a new instance of it online. THE CONSTRUCTION OF MEME-INGĪ meme is an inside joke that has been turned inside out. Unmoored from any single form, topic, or technique, the word “meme” has come full circle from when Dawkins originally described it as “a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation” in 1976. Each new addition into the meme canon introduced a greater degree of abstraction, pushing farther and farther away from the image macro format. Meme formats evolved in tandem with the social media platforms that hosted them, branching out from image macros to audio, video, and other media. According to Know Your Meme, “In the forums, users could summon a number of default image macros using simple commands like, for example, timelines, ‘Aces!’ and ‘Captain Obvious to the Rescue!’ images.” An example of an image macro.Įasy to make and share, image macros spread across the internet quickly becoming some of the earliest pieces of viral content. These top-text/bottom-text pictures grew from the protozoic slime of the Something Awful forums. Thirty-odd years later the meme of “meme” was re-appropriated to describe a much more specific unit of cultural transmission otherwise known as the image macro. ![]() The word “meme” comes from the Greek word mimema meaning “the imitated thing,” which Dawkins abbreviated because he wanted “a monosyllable that sounds a bit like ‘gene’.” According to Dawkins, examples of memes included “tunes, ideas, catchphrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches.” A BRIEF HISTORY OF MEMES A Drakepost.Įvolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins coined the word “meme” in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. It’s time take a good hard look in the mirror and ask ourselves: How can we as a culture embrace our interconnected, mutually dependent, decentralized reality? What kind of art will we make? What kind of stories will we tell?īy way of an answer to these questions, I have a modest proposal: if you want to know the character of decentralized art, you need look no further than the common meme. Well, it’s 2018 and this fantasy is on its last legs. ![]() We like to buy into the vision of the autocratic artist because it supports the fantasy upon which societies rise and fall: the belief that there is someone, somewhere, who has total control over what they are doing. Needless to say this self-image is at odds with the lived experience of pretty much everyone. So much in our culture encourages us to think of ourselves as rational and autonomous. Even when the name is plural (“The Beatles”) or a stand-in for a collective (“Homer,” according to some), we still imagine that there is one person or group of people who hold(s) the authority to make all the important artistic decisions. We associate almost every cultural work - paintings, novels, films, and whatnot - with a single name. For most of modern history, it has been supposed that a piece of art is produced by an artist.
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