Firefox Challenge Accepted
Challenge Accepted
Me Gusta
Okey Face
Stop Reading Memes
If you know what I mean
Titanic Movie Meme
What’s in a Meme?
Or perhaps we should start by explaining what IS a Meme?
Wikipedia tells us that an Internet Meme ‘may take the form of an image, link, video, picture, website… or it may just be a word or phrase’. For the purpose of this exercise we are going to focus on a specific type of Meme, the Picture Meme (with faces).
You may have discovered these satirical illustrations and musings cropping up in your Google search results, or maybe you’ve received one in an email and wondered what planet the sender was from!
Picture Memes (most often facial expressions) can be added to messages to represent a mood or opinion. Often sarcastic or used purely for fun, these little critters can range from a line-drawn cartoon character, to a celebrity photo (edited in some ‘creative’ way) or a freeze-frame from a famous movie scene.
We’ve compiled a few in a galley to give you a flavor (be warned - a Google search can result in some images that may cause offense!)
Underground mutterings or mainstream messaging?
So can this sarcastic sub-culture ever catch on in the mainstream, or perhaps even in the workplace? Well, some Memes are rather ugly, and others are just plain crude, but the obvious mainstream alternative are the more familiar ‘smilies’ used on many forms of chat messaging and forum services (such as MSN Messenger, WhatsApp and Google Talk). Smilies are, after all, the politically correct alternative of Meme faces (but certainly not as much fun!)
A good example of a company using a Meme was the recent Firefox ‘Charity Challenge Accepted’ which was a nice play on the original ‘Challenge Accepted’ Meme (also included in our gallery).
So now you know what a face Meme is, if nothing else you’ll be able to hold your own in a conversation with a teenager!
More ‘scientific’ research
Create your own Meme (to suit your mood)
