Transcript The Wonderful World of Memes!

Origin
The word meme is a shortening (modeled on gene)
of mimeme (from Ancient Greek “imitated thing“,
“to imitate“, “mime“) and it was coined by the
British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in
The Selfish Gene (1976) as a concept for discussion
of evolutionary principles in explaining the
spread of ideas and cultural phenomena.
Adapted from Wikipedia
Definition
A meme is a term employed in certain theories of
culture to refer to “an idea, behavior or style that
spreads from person to person within a culture.“
(Merriam-Webster Dictionary). A meme acts as a
unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols or
practices, which can be transmitted from one
mind to another through writing, speech,
gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena.
Supporters of the concept regard memes as
cultural analogues to genes in that they selfreplicate, mutate and respond to selective
pressures.
Adapted from Wikipedia
Today
As you can see, even though the concept of meme
has a scientific origin, what most people would
associate with the concept of meme today would
be exclusively humourous representation of
picture and text.
While a few years ago, memes were a rather
exclusive and niche part of internet culture, it has
now recently become into this mainstream
cultural monster that it is today.
Can you name a few sites where you can find memes?
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Facebook
9gag
Memebase/cheezeburger/know your meme
Memecenter
Quickmeme
Reddit
Weknowmemes
Lavalmeme/uqammeme (etc.)
And many more!
Can you name me a few memes?
No I won’t quite name the thousand or so of them here…
Know your meme is a site (and a YouTube channel) where they post memes
but also videos explaining popular memes. It is a nice way to start and discover
how certain meme works if you are not familiar with English memes.
I make the distinction here between English and French memes as English memes
work like, more often than not, inside jokes (you need to understand the context
and how the meme works for it to be funny) while French memes, which is a relatively
recent phenomenon to start with, are much more explicit (to the point where they,
in my humble opinion, remove that pleasure of trying to “work it out” in your head).
Here are two introductory video made by Know Your Meme, the first one explains
“Rage Guy/Face”, which is arguably the first humourous meme of the internet. From
this stemmed other such carricatural faces expressing different emotions. The second
one is what I would call a “second generation” meme, which is a picture with text
above and under it.
Know Your Meme: Rage Comic
Know Your Meme: Joseph Ducreux