The World Of Memes

The World Of Memes

Memes are everywhere; they fill social networking sites with their humour and satire, and often people don’t need to know the context to be amused by them. Memes are quite a common feature on social networks, designed to bring people together for a mutual likeness and for a good laugh.

“Networks are two or more hubs linked by some kind of relationship with each other. Embedded in networks are notions of communication, exchange, community and self, reality and virtuality” (BA1001. 2016). Memes create a network within social media, a virtual network. Memes join everyone together at one point in time, through comments, likes, shares or posts. Everyone who sees it is joined to the others who have seen it. It creates a world wide network joining people who never knew another existed and allowing them to be aware of the world around them.

Self awareness comes into play with this world wide virtual social network; you can create your own posts, your own memes, and your own self. On social network you can be whomever you wish, and nobody can know or do anything about it. Its is a safe haven for those who have low self esteem and wish to be someone they are not; and thus hide behind the computer screen. It intertwines reality and virtual reality together, with the people communicating through the virtual network and altering their real self online to suit their wants.

“The digital era complicates definitions of the self and its boundaries, both dismantling and sustaining the humanist subject in practices of personal narrative, moving the “technologies of inscription” from the realm of the material world to the electronic “fundamentally alter[s] the relation of signified to signifier” (McNeill. 2012).

References:

BA1002. (2016, 08 19). Our Space: Networks, Narratives, and the Making of Place. Townsville, QLD, Australia. http://www.jcu.edu.au

McNeill, L. (2012). There is no “I” in network: social networking sites and posthuman auto/biography. Retrieved Biographical Research Centre.