On a more playful note, let's turn our attention to the real purpose of the internet: to showcase kittens, nudity and dancing babies.
The term "Internet meme" is a neologism describing a catchphrase or concept that spreads quickly from person to person via the web. Basically, they're inside jokes ... just writ large. Memes can range from a questionnaire to an art project to video clips riffing off the same theme.
The term "viral" describes ideas that spread rapidly and organically like this (not, say, through mainstream media or an advertising campaign). As Novelist Neal Stephenson explained in 1992's Snow Crash: "We are all susceptible to the pull of viral ideas. Like mass hysteria. Or a tune that gets into your head that you keep on humming all day until you spread it to someone else. Jokes. Urban legends. Crackpot religions. No matter how smart we get, there is always this deep irrational part that makes us potential hosts for self-replicating information."
Some popular Internet memes:
- Bert Is Evil
- Bonsai Kitten
- The I Kiss You! guy from Turkey
- The Star Wars Kid
- The classic All Your Base Are Belong To Us
- Black People Love Us
- The infamous Dancing Baby
- my favorite PostSecret
These phenomena spread via email, blogs, social networking sites, instant messaging, etc. And yes, they can be deeply, deeply annoying. But they're here to stay and even spawned a whole field, memetics, that explores "transmission in terms of an evolutionary model" and just had its first convention at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: 2008's ROFLCon.
Memers are very fond of citing Richard Dawkins as the term's originator. Mainly, I suspect, because they want to justify spending hours and hours animating a banana...
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