INDUSTRY NEWS: Don't Mock My Meme - Infoglyphs

INDUSTRY NEWS: Don’t Mock My Meme
12 February 2012 by jenn 4 Comments

From the dancing baby to pepper spraying cop, memes have breathed the winds of democracy into the world’s sense of humour so now anyone can expand on the joke.A news image, YouTube clip, cartoon or animation can all be reworked to create a totally different meaning or, in many cases, to expand on the same theme. In fact, “meme” is the French word for “same”. A meme spreads by virtual word-of-mouth. We have all received them and seen them posted on Facebook pages, etc. Sometimes they are funny, sometimes not so much.

Because the spread and mutate so organically, many great minds have been trying to understand how memes work in virtual reality compared to how genes work in the evolution of humankind.

“What lies at the heart of every living thing is not a fire, not warm breath, not a ‘spark of life.’ It is information, words, instructions,” Richard Dawkins declared in 1986. Already one of the world’s foremost evolutionary biologists, he had caught the spirit of a new age. The cells of an organism are nodes in a richly interwoven communications network, transmitting and receiving, coding and decoding. Evolution itself embodies an ongoing exchange of information between organism and environment. “If you want to understand life,” Dawkins wrote, “don’t think about vibrant, throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology.” www.smithsonianmag.com

A true meme’s mutation happens randomly when someone has received the meme and then changes the meme’s idea through text, animation, video creation or editing, photo editing, soundtrack, etc. Thus, the meme survives.

Know Your Meme tracks the spread of memes from their rise in pop culture to their eventual fall into public disfavour. Below is a recently trending meme called the Hipster Barrista.

To see the history of the Hipster Barrista meme, click here.

In 2009, Yuumei posted this fanimation of a character from Hetalia on DeviantART and it became the meme that began the Dance Dance World Revolution.

IMAGEre: Collaborative Art on the Internet

Tumblr continues to draw in artists to share and collaborate on work. This is my recent art obsession: Cinemagraphs. A cinemagraph is a still, a photograph (or gif to be exact), that incorporates slight movement adding a new dimension to the image. Click on the images below to see their movement.

INFOclicks: Links to Goodness

If you are interested in elaborating on a trending meme, check out CHEEZburger for clean templates of original memes.The GraphJam: Music and Pop Culture Graphed for your Inner Geek has some great, albeit inconsequential graphs. Really interesting article in Discover Magazine: The different dynamics of memes vs genes.
40 Examples of Stunning Cinemagraphs in Tripwire Magazine.

465 days ago by jenn in Animation, Art, Avatars, Cinemagraphs, Dance, Design, Meme | You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site

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4 comments on “INDUSTRY NEWS: Don’t Mock My Meme”

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