>tended to use meme/gifs in place of what I'd consider "real" communication
You don't consider humour a form of real communication? Are you sure you should be looking down on them
You don't consider humour a form of real communication? Are you sure you should be looking down on them
https://www.dazeddigital.com/life-culture/article/55120/1/20...
Some memes are timeless.
The real ones are difficult to spot and may completely be lost among the wannabe-meme-pictures.
By that logic, there's no such thing as a rare [joke/insult/song], because all real [jokes/insults/songs] are already popular by definition.
> The real ones are difficult to spot and may completely be lost
Hold up, that contradicts the sentence before it: Any meme that has that "certain level of distribution" shouldn't be so "difficult to spot."
A meme that fails to attain some sort of popularity doesn't meet the criteria. Like a gene that fails to propagate itself. An evolutionary dead-end.
> Not every picture with text is a meme. To become a meme it requires a certain level of distribution.
becomes
"Not every sequence of amino acids is a gene. To become a gene it requires a certain level of self-replication."
Okay, so that's still a bit shaky, but I what I'm trying to get at is that a "meme" is something that includes its popularity in the definition. It's impossible for me to make a meme that only I see. That's just a photo or whatever.
Jokes, music, and insults can be inside jokes, or a Wu-Tang album, or a dig I only share with one other person. A meme is any of those things that's also popular in the viral sense. It encapsulates a maybe-complexish idea in a simple image.
If I asked you for a meme that demonstrates "wanting what I don't have, even though I have more than enough" you might give me that classic ::guy-looking-over-his-shoulder-at-pretty-girl-walking-by-while-his-girlfriend-gives-him-dagger-eyes:: one.
A gene "self-replicates" in an "emergent property" kind of way, in that it encodes the information necessary for its own future proliferation. A viral strand of DNA/RNA does the same thing, encoding the behaviors and structure of the virus such that it'll proliferate.
You know, like a spicy meme :)
i love this article. "young people aren't rejecting capitalism entirely, they're just outcompeting everyone else at it."