Internet meme

An Internet meme, commonly known simply as a meme, is an idea, behavior, style, or image that is spread via the Internet, often through social media platforms. What is considered a meme may vary across different communities on the Internet and is subject to change over time. Traditionally, the term mostly applied to images, concepts, or catchphrases, but it has since become broader and more multi-faceted, evolving to include more elaborate structures such as challenges, GIFs, videos, and viral sensations. The retronym derives from the earlier concept of a meme as any cultural idea, behavior or style that propagates through imitation.

Internet memes are considered a part of Internet culture. They can spread from person to person via social networks, blogs, email, or news sources. Instant communication on the Internet facilitates word of mouth transmission, resulting in fads and sensations that tend to grow rapidly. For example, posting a photo of someone planking online brings attention to the fad and allows it to reach many people in little time. The Internet also facilitates the rapid evolution of memes.

One hallmark of Internet memes is the appropriation of a part of broader culture. In particular, many memes use popular culture (especially in image macros of other media), which can sometimes lead to issues with copyright. Dank memes have emerged as a new form of image-macros, and many modern memes take on inclusion of surreal, nonsensical, and non-sequitur themes. Colloquially, the terms meme and Internet meme are used more loosely, having become umbrella terms for any piece of quickly-consumed comedic content that may not necessarily be intended to spread or evolve.

Characteristics
There are two central attributes of Internet memes: creative reproduction of materials and intertextuality. Creative reproduction refers to "parodies, remixes, or mashups", and includes notable examples such as "Juan José Manzanedo's Downfall Parodies", and Nyan Cat, among others. Intertextuality may be demonstrated through memes that combine different cultures.

The spread of Internet memes has been described as occurring via two mechanisms: mimicry and remix. Remix occurs when the original meme is altered in some way, while mimicry occurs when the meme is recreated in a different fashion to the original. The results in the study of Online Memes, Affinities, and Cultural Production, show that the internet directly adds some longevity in a meme's lifespan.

There is no single format that memes must follow. Photographs of people or animals, especially stock photos, can be turned into memes by superimposing text. Popular examples include Overly Attached Girlfriend, Crying Kim Kardashian, and various animal images. It is important to note that any image can be transformed into a meme. Rage comics are a subcategory of memes which depict a series of human emotions and conclude with a satirical punchline; the sources for these memes often come from webcomics. Other memes are purely viral sensations such as in Keyboard Cat.

Evolution and propagation
An Internet meme may stay the same or may evolve over time, by chance or through commentary, imitations, parody, or by incorporating news accounts about itself. Internet memes spread online through influences such as popular culture. Memes can be subjected to in-jokes within online communities such as Bleeter, Quipster, VideoShared and Reddify. In contrast, common internet memes, provide a broader cultural relevance in common text and imagery associated with memes. In utilizing affect as a visual vernacular, internet memes create a culture of unspoken referential importance.

An internet meme can rapidly become 'unfashionable', losing its humorous qualities to certain audiences, often even most prevalently by its creator(s). Internet memes usually are formed from some social interaction, pop culture reference, or situations people often find themselves in. Their rapid growth and impact has caught the attention of both researchers and industry. The phenomena of viral memes is a users-to-users experience demonstrating the participatory culture on online platforms.

Academically, researchers model how they evolve and predict which memes will survive and spread throughout the Web. Internet scripting macros evolved for meme en- and decoding, facilitating their spread. Through the spreading process, memes invokes studium and punctum memetrics. Studium is the entertaining aspect of internet memes. Punctum is the aesthetic affiliation to a piece of imagery, thus invoking a reaction. It is the affect of the image. With the combination of studium and punctum memetrics, individuals perceive and spread memes from their cultural significance to types of memes.

One empirical approach studied meme characteristics and behavior independently from the networks in which they propagated, and reached a set of conclusions concerning successful meme propagation. For example, the study asserted that Internet memes not only compete for viewer attention generally resulting in a shorter life, but also, through user creativity, memes can collaborate with each other and achieve greater survival. Also, paradoxically, an individual meme that experiences a popularity peak significantly higher than its average popularity is not generally expected to survive unless it is unique, whereas a meme with no such popularity peak keeps being used together with other memes and thus has greater survivability.

Multiple opposing studies on media psychology and communication have aimed to characterize and analyze the concept and representations in order to make it accessible for the academic research. Thus, Internet memes can be regarded as a unit of information which replicates via the Internet. This unit can replicate or mutate. This mutation instead of being generational follows more a viral pattern, giving the Internet memes generally a short life. Other theoretical problems with the Internet memes are their behavior, their type of change, and their teleology.

Internet memes have been examined by Dancygier and Vandelanotte in 2017 for aspects of cognitive linguistic and construction grammar. The authors analyzed some selective popular image macros like, 'Said no one ever', 'One does not simply', 'But that's none of my business', and 'Good Girl Gina' to draw attention to the constructionally, multimodality, viewpoint and intersubjectivity of these memes. They further argued that with the combination of text and images, the Internet memes can add to the functioning linguistic construction frame as well as create new linguistic constructions.