Memes And Its Influence

Student’s Names: Mauricio Cárcamo N.
María de los Ángeles Deramond M.
Teacher: Roberto Figueroa Z.
Date: September 7th, 2012.
Subject: Language & Society

Introduction and Origins

The following piece of work is aimed to recognize deeper the impact of Memes in popular culture and how it has influenced media across the years by the use of the Internet as a principal tool.
The rise ofdigital technology and especially the spread of Internet have unexpectedly conceived a new form of cultural media through the cybernetics: the Internet Meme. The word Meme (pronounced as “meem”) stands for a shortening term of mimeme (from Ancient Greek that means "something imitated" or “to imitate”) and it can be defined basically as "an idea, behavior or style that spreads from person to personwithin a culture". A Meme acts as a unit for expressing cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena (Graham, 2002). As a matter of fact, the original term was by Richard Dawkins in 1976, in order to describe the natural human spreading, replication, and modification of ideas statedin his book The Selfish Gene. Dawkins used the term to refer to any cultural entity that an observer might consider a replicator. Therefore, Memes generally replicate through exposure to humans, who have evolved as efficient copiers of information and behavior. Nevertheless, having seen the previous definition is worth mentioning that our aim in this report is to focus on the Memes that have spreadfrom technological resources as Internet represents nowadays. The Internet meme expands rapidly from person to person using this via, frequently based on email, blogs, forums, imageboards, social networking sites, instant messaging and even video streaming sites such as YouTube.
Its origins are directly related to a webpage named 4 Chan in 2005. Since then Marketing, advertising and promotionsprofessionals embrace internet Memes, because it is inexpensive and trendy; plus its unique characteristic is to spread like a virus, particularly due to its funny pictures or contagious humor which in the most of the cases is made to sympathize with people’s anecdotes/feelings, make fun of some others, use the figure of famous people to transmit any kind of messages, etc. In the imaginative worldof Internet it seems that everything is allowed.
The Power of the Internet Memes

Like a virus, the word Meme has been spread widely over the world, this term coined by Richard Dawkins in his book called The Selfish Gene (1976), was the accurate definition for this idea, despite the fact that the real term was on purpose to explain a cultural phenomenon given in the process of human evolutionas we could see before. In this way from one individual to another, this urban stream has prevailed massively on the internet culture, spreading its roots even to different kinds of media, but what is behind this powerful concept? Why is so pulling among different cultures? Or more importantly, why do people adopt it and make it part of their lives as soon as they know it? The possible answers forthat would be many taking into consideration the scope that it has globally, but in common, there should be one general phenomenon that occurs in the same way for every human being who is exposed to it and understand it.

A Meme is an idea, a behavior, a style, which is propagate in different forms by the people to the people, that does not work for one individual in particular, it is somethingthat belongs to the public domain created for fun mainly, and it is highly related to daily life issues, and in some cases, to films, music, artists, politics and else. As all these topics are connected to our humanity it is extremely easy to get involved with them, and in this particular case with memes about them, because Internet memes are usually jokes, urban legends, viral videos, funny...