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Humanities LibreTexts

5.12: Meme

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A meme123 is any idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads between people within a culture. In other words, a meme is a fad that carries cultural ideas, symbols, or practices and that spreads through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or any other imitable phenomena. Internet memes are a subcategory of general memes. Any concept, catchphrase, or byword that spreads rapidly between users online can be considered an internet meme. This content tends to spread through internet-based communication platforms such as emailing, blogs, forums, image boards (e.g. Tumblr, Reddit, 4chan), social networking (e.g. Facebook, Twitter), instant messaging, and video-hosting services (e.g. Youtube, Vimeo). The sheer volume of users and speed of communication on the internet causes online memes to spread and evolve far more quickly than their offline counterparts, sometimes going in and out of popularity in only a matter of days.

Sybil's Saint Bernard is lying on a couch. The text over the image says: TFW you're thinking about your assignment and someone interrupts your train of thought


123"Lentis/Internet Memes." Wikibooks, The Free Textbook Project. 30 May 2021, 08:57 UTC. 30 Nov 2021, 19:45 <https://en.wikibooks.org/w/index.php?title=Lentis/Internet_Memes&oldid=3839905>.


This page titled 5.12: Meme is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Sybil Priebe (Independent Published) via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform.

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