/lit/ - Literature

>is there any literature, non-fiction, or public intellectual that you know of that discusses memes?
Do you even Dawkins?

>>6906882
Dawkins' memes as units of culture that spread from mind to mind are quite different from the dank kind

>>6906880
not that i know of

"memes" as an internet form of communication, is really just taking inside jokes that only devout members of communities would understand, like how "eaten by a grue" would be understood by the zork community, and turning it into an outside joke, something everyone could understand

tl:dr
its just the internet form of observational stand-up comedy

>>6906892
How are they not the same thing? The only difference is that people in this culture purposely try to invent nice dankys.

>>6906913
Your difference is one ("artificial" selection by meme-makers instead of natural selection by forgetting etc.), others:

- internet memes are spread via technology, not from "mind to mind"
- Dawkins' memes encompass much more than text on a picture or a video, they are ideas, modes of thought, perceptions of reality
- Dawkins also saw "bigger" ideas as memes (such as communism), not short-lived fads on facebook

>>6906894

Why explains the longevity of certain memes? Pepe and Wojak have been endearing elements of 4chan culture for *years* now. However, Pepe's already a dead meme among the public.

My theory is that the emotional sincerity that often accompany Pepe/Wojak memes increases their longevity. On twitter, facebook, and other public social media memes that have any kind of emotional connotation just don't exist because you aren't anonymous, and normal people usually don't like sharing their feelings to everybody else online.

I'm just writing what comes to mind here, but perhaps the idea of emotional sincerity with wojak/pepe memes is more complex. On 4chan, those memes are usually accompanied by a greentext of some sort, and the archetype we establish of them is some raw, painful/awkward/cringeworthy/funny-in-a-sad-way experience. The authenticity of these experiences keeps the memes themselves fresh, as opposed to just pure, dumb memespouting with other memes like Spiderman or "Yo, dawg".

Additionally, the longevity of baneposting interests me. It seems like the community surrounding it survives off of some self-awareness of how tired the meme is, and the fact they're squeezing every last drop from plane scene that they possibly can. The mere fact they're still around baneposting is, in a way, what justifies their zeal (I know on dubschan they're drawing the entire plane scene frame by frame).

>>6906922
wojak & pepe = st. george and the dragon

the hero and monster always lurking inside of us incarnate in myriad ways thruought the epochs, each one even more fully realized. now the monster—and even more miraculously, the hero—has become human. But they still hold that racial emnity in their hearts (that's why monster P is always tormenting hero W in scatalogical ways.. there's no heroism today. one's first born and then bathed in shit)

a meme's medium is the internet (the left<) is what you get when you rip memes into rl

>>6906919
But pictures with text on them are memes because they are examples of some greater pun or comedic "idea" of some sort. A random picture with random text on it, is not a meme.

>>6906961

meme
mēm

noun

an element of a culture or system of behavior that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by nongenetic means, especially imitation.

Get off my lawn you punk

As someone said memes are inside jokes, the joke is very specific.

When the joke leaves the small circle it gets used in different ways, the original group doesn't think the new use is funny (because it lacks the emotional connection of the inside joke) thus killing the meme.

See Pepe, how pepe is used on Facebook and its decay on 4chan. Same with trollface, etc.

Metal Gear Rising

it depends on memes euphoria inducing potential