Saturday, November 19, 2011

LOL Cats and Other Memes

            While you surf the web, you may come across many random silly pictures. Many times they are with animals making funny faces, or cats with horrible spelling or a picture of a celebrity photo shopped into random situations. These are called Internet memes. A meme is a concept or idea that spreads person to person in a culture. So that means that an Internet meme is a concept or idea that spreads from person to person in the Internet culture.
            Internet memes often parody or mock something in society. Whether it is a video game reference or just a random dumb picture, there are thousands of memes on the Internet. Memes are normally spread through email, social networking or blogs. When captions are included they are often spelled wrong (as seen in LOL cats). For example, more will be come “moar” or like will be come “leik” or the becomes “teh”.
            The source for most Internet has been from 4chan. This is because it is a message board and often people’s reactions can be in the form of pictures. Other sites like Reddit or Tumblr are also places where memes are often born.  
            Many people look at Internet memes and shake their head at the stupidity of what they have just witnessed. I will be perfectly honestly, most if not all memes are completely dumb and honestly have no point. Yet they are still hilarious. I guess you could just say that it is born from our culture on the Internet. We often use memes as inside jokes with our friends it is great! Knowing memes can even help get people into new groups of friends or interests. For example take my friend Ted. He was familiar with the “u mad, bro?” meme and he and his friend often sent pictures of it to each other. One day Ted got a picture that had a pony on it that said u mad, bro? He looked up what the pony was from and ended up getting hooked on My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (which also is huge in the meme world at the moment). 
            If you wish to find out more information about memes or memes and their origins you can visit the site Know Your Meme at here.

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