Table of Contents
What is a meme
The term meme got coined in 1976 by biologist Richard Dawkins to note the cultural spread of an issue. Dawkins framed memes as a selfish gene that self-replicated. As the internet spread users started to create gifs and images that often satired or made fun of internet culture, sports, media, and politics. Dawkins concepts of a meme got applied to this definition.
History of memes
While the word got coined in 1976 the idea of memes far predates the definition and the web. Kilroy was here was a meme that spread during WWII. This may have been based on the British version of “Chad” which would complain about rations.
Many of the types of memes we saw today also existed in print as political cartoons. However due to limitations at the time these could not be remixed and spread, a necessary component to memes.
Types of Memes
Memes come in many forms and like pornography you can't define it but know when you see a meme. Often these utilize an image, and sparse jokes to tell a story.
* Classic Memes-These are memes that transcend a category and can get recognized by people who do not spend way too much time on the Internet. Think “Most Interesting Man,” “Crying Jordan,” “Deal with It,” an d“Bad luck Brian.”
* Expectation vs Reality memes. These two frame memes show what a person expects to happen and then a gross exaggeration of reality.
* Quote memes take a quote and then put it over an exaggerated image or an incongruous image.
* Exaggeration- These memes satire by taking a fact and blowing it out of proportion
* Incongruous- These memes take a situation and place it an unlikely context. Such as taking Putin and making him a dog walker.
Semiotics and Memes
Semiotics is the study of signs. While phonemes, the smallest units of sound get mapped to graphemes, letters to encode meaning in morphemes signals beyond the four corners of a text get sent.
These signs matter.
Memes often have additional signifiers for their audience. This can often come in the form of insider knowledge. For example Pepe the frog may signal membership in specific groups. Efforts to free this poor frog in another. The majority of the world sanely has no idea what those two sentences mean.
By creating specialized knowledge and language,the word BASED, for example, memes work to other people and signify membership to the “in-group.”
Certain characters, symbols, or jokes may get used. This creates both feelings of membership and a “only the collk kids allowed at this table” vibe.
In semiotics, much like literary criticism, you may examine the design choices and focal points of different images in the memes. Through the use of design elements you can signify the source and target of the metaphor used. You can also layer on different meanings and significance through the use of different designs and metaphors.
How to Make a Meme
The following tutorials are written for a web based image editor called Pixlr but they will work for other software such as GIMP and Photoshop.
Learn the basics of layers as you remix a classic meme.
Learn how to cut out faces of images and replace faces.
Replace objects in images by stacking and erasing repeating layers.