In the age of the internet, memes have become an integral part of our culture. From the humble beginnings of a single image, memes are now a powerful form of communication and a way to express emotion. It’s no surprise that memes have become so popular. They can be easily shared and are often humorous or relatable.
But what exactly is a meme? A meme is a captioned image or video that is shared widely on the internet. The caption usually contains a play on words, a pun, or some kind of joke. Memes can also be used to discuss current events, make a statement, share something relatable, or poke fun at celebrities.
The beauty of memes is that anything can be turned into one. All it takes is a clever caption or even just a clever image, and it can be shared with the world. This has resulted in an explosion of creativity as people use memes to express themselves in new and unique ways.
But experts of digital culture say that memes also have a serious side. These sharable visual jokes create a sense of community and belonging, something that's become rare in the increasingly alienating world.
In fact, their capacity to transcend cultures and construct collective identities between people is what makes memes not only entertaining but very relevant to our online presence and the digital world.
Paolo Gerbaudo, a reader in digital politics and director of the Centre for Digital Culture at Kings College London, argues that internet memes "are one of the clearest manifestations of the fact there is such a thing as digital culture."
Gerbaudo describes memes as a "sort of a ready-made language with many kinds of stereotypes, symbols, situations. A palette that people can use, much like emojis, in a way, to convey a certain content."
Today, memes have transformed into a tangible phenomenon that can be observed as they grow, spread, and mutate. Limor Shifman, a professor of communication at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, sees this as a huge opportunity for researchers. “It's like internet users paving the way for academics to look at memes more scientifically."
In a 2014 Facebook study, researchers found that in just one example, there were 121,605 different variants of one particular meme posted across 1.14 million status updates.
