(Newswire.net — November 28, 2020) — While scrolling through your social media feed, you must have surely come across a meme that you have wanted to share with your friends and you have gone ahead and shared it with them. The person you shared it with commented back on it or sent another meme on the same topic. Thus, continued a series of interactions between two people where no words were exchanged but emojis and memes kept the conversation going. If you are a frequent social media user then you have definitely had this kind of an interaction at least once. In this case, a meme was a conversation starter and a number of memes kept the conversation going.
This kind of an interaction on a social media website was not possible a decade ago. This easy flow of conversation and exchange of ideas is made possible because of memes. You might ask what they are, read on to find out.
Memes – a definition
The Merriam Webster dictionary describes memes as an idea, behaviour, style or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture. Structurally, a meme contains two parts – one is the graphic part which is generally a funny image or a funny video which may be captured in real life or taken from a movie or music video. The other part is the text which is generally very short and is used to establish the context of the meme. Memes become adaptable if the text can be changed to suit various scenarios. Changing the text is how memes travel from one culture or group to another. With slight modifications in the text, a meme becomes relevant across cultures and backgrounds and can be enjoyed by more people.
The internet provides various modes to enjoy memes. You can either find them on the numerous meme pages on social media websites or on specialised websites like putput.net which run only to share memes with their users. You can create an account on both of these websites and share memes created by others with your friends or you can even make your own memes and upload them here for others to enjoy.
Cute animals, babies, political happenings and even disasters can be turned into memes. Someone just needs to be thinking out of the box to make memes out of ordinary everyday scenarios. For example, popstar Rihanna wore a cape-like yellow dress at an event in 2015 and the internet was quick to make memes out of the extravagant dress. From an omlette to a pizza, Rihanna’s dress was turned into many edible goods for the sheer entertainment of her fans and she herself was sporting enough to share a few of the memes herself and laugh along with her fans. Some fans claimed to have seen more memes of her dress than actual footage of her appearance at the event. This meme-ing of mundane things is not just restricted to celebrities and there are many regular folk who owe their popularity to just being featured as memes. Overly Attached Girlfriend, Bad Luck Brian and Success Kid are just some people who are famous because they became memes.
To Conclude
Memes are mostly funny but now they are being used to convey common sentiments that are universally felt. So, they are very relatable and make people laugh out loud. Memes also help people maintain their interpersonal relationships in a light-hearted way over social media. Millions of new memes are churned out daily to enjoy the millions of others which already exist on the internet. But social media users do not seem to be tiring of them.