Memes Cultural Influence

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Memes and their cultural influence
‘’The term ‘’meme’’ was coined by Richard Dawkins in 1976 to describe small units of culture that spread from person to person.’’ (Shifman, 2013) The rise and evolution of the meme is interesting to consider. A prime example of one of the first memes that really started the meme culture finds its origin in 2009 on the well-known website called ‘Reddit’. A user of this website took it upon himself to take Ducreux’s acclaimed self-portrait and use it to create a funny picture, by adding captioned text in a way that fits the style of this old portrait. Adding captioned text to a picture is called an ‘image macro’. Joseph Ducreux (1735 - 1802) was a successful French portrait painter and well known for portraying …show more content…
Memes also have the ability to make changes in society, or strong governmental institutions. A good example of this phenomenon is the ‘pepper-spray cop’ meme. This particular example is about police brutality. A group of students at the UC Davis Campus in the United States were protesting against tuition hikes and police aggression on 18th November 2011. They placed tents on the campus as a way of protesting. The chancellor of this university called in the campus police. By the time they arrived, the students had altered their protest to a sit-in on one of the pedestrian lanes on the campus. Two of these policemen used their pepper spray as a last resort to remove the students from the road. The whole thing was being recorded and put on the social news site Reddit, within a day the first photoshopped and modified pictures and videos arrived on the same website. It became a recognized and notorious deed by the police and the number of memes made showed substantial disapproval by a large amount of people. ‘’The ‘pepper-spray cop’ meme became a leading piece of news on several major national US networks, such as ABC, CNN and Fox News, resulting in a peak on 22th November.’’ (Bayerl & Stoynov, 2014) This example conveys the power of memes in this modern participatory digital culture. ‘’cultural evolution may be driven by the most successful memes.’’ (Richard
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