Internet Meme Culture | Mackenzie Finklea | TEDxUTAustin

I like to think that I have a pretty good handle on my jokes and witticisms I did take a class about it over a year ago I took a linguistic anthropology class called speech play and verbal art it was essentially a course about jokes and how people implement them in various cultures and languages so at the end of the term so it goes I was tasked with writing a term paper pretty lengthy one and I had to figure out something that was new that we hadn't covered in class before and that I was passionate up about to write a 20-page report so at a loss in search of inspiration I texted my younger brother because 16 year olds know what's funny right so I texted him and I asked what do you and your friends find funny internet memes so if you're laughing which thank you you might already know what an internet meme is and even have personal experience creating or enjoying them but what you might not know is that there's a distinct difference between cultural memes and the internet means that many of us are familiar with to explore this let's journey back in time to before the world wide web was even in common use the Encyclopedia Britannica defines a meme as a unit of cultural information spread by imitation and in 1976 evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins coined this term meme in a novel about evolutionary genetics what do memes have to do with evolutionary genetics well meme is a word that's Richard Dawkins by the way Meem is a word which models itself after the word jean and is a shortened version of my meme the ancient Greek term for imitated thing dawkins argued that memes or cultural ideas spread throughout generations in the same way that genes do for instance a biological trait like brown hair passes from parent to child so does cultural information like my dad taught me how to ride a bike his dad taught him how to ride a bike and I will likely someday teach my own children so a meme is a cultural idea and this can be almost anything and dawkins argued that cultural ideas replicate in the same way that genes do in in imitating fashion monkey-see monkey-do and humans have a desire to belong and what better way to belong than by doing what everyone else is doing right though my mother always told me if everyone was jumping off a bridge then would you do it too and the obvious prompted answer is no but for most things yes we jump off that metaphorical bridge we imitate because we want to belong if we journey even further back in time we would see that other cultural ideas like the controlled use of fire and the development of language our memes spread throughout cultures and repurpose for their unique specific use and it's this development and evolution of language that gives us phrases on the internet like we stand a queen now when I first saw this phrase I actually had to text one of my friends and ask them what it meant because I mean I knew it was English but was it this is a emphatic way to express your support for someone it's positive stuff but let's look at another let's get this bread now the reality of you or I understanding this phrase if you're not keeping up with these evolving conversational phrases on the Internet is probably slim to none now this one's a bit easier to decipher there's no varied spelling slang shortened words and if you spend time with it in context long enough you'd figure out that it's motivational and refers to the procurement of money but that's the kicker you have to spend time with internet memes in order to understand them so now we've arrived to the present if you say the word meme today you're likely referring to the rapidly evolving and wildly popular internet memes and just like that the word meme became a meme something repurposed and appropriated through time it doesn't get more metalinguistic than this I promise so in 2013 Richard Dawkins revisited his original term meme to clarify that an internet meme is different than the meme that he once described an internet meme is a meme or a cultural idea that's been deliberately altered by human creativity so via the internet in cyber culture these things become digital artistic expressions so let's take a look at what it takes and how people make these artistic masterpieces memes are essentially comics but without a formal outlet like a newspaper the first and most popular form of internet meme was image macros and grumpy cat here's a great example it's a caption superimposed on an image rather than putting your witty comment below a photo you're putting it right on top so though they've evolved internet memes today generally follow this same format but arguably creating a successful mean today versus say six years ago requires more time a thorough knowledge of current events and even familiarity with complex design and editing software so for instance all of these things come together and you really need to be paying attention to what's happening both on the internet and outside of the internet in order to understand these memes for instance traditional schooling requires that students study classic novels as they appear in other forms of entertainment and even conversation it makes people cultured knowledge of popular internet memes functions in the same way especially among younger generations and if you're not keeping up it's really easy to fall behind and clearly I've been there and then they make means about that too so if you don't get it you're not in the loop but why do you want to be in the loop who cares right humans have a desire to be a part of something bigger than themselves and the validation you receive on the internet from a being well-done is not a commentary on the way you look or the way you dress rather it's a more personal level of validation of your cleverness intellect and worldly knowledge and as an added bonus maybe you'll leave something immortal behind another human desire that's oddly contrary to fitting in is to stand out to leave a legacy to be remembered so I had a meme go a little bit viral once STEM professors no curb no sky to God no mercy liberal arts professors that test was too hard here's a picture of a unicorn and now this was an actual email from one of my professors and the play here is on a stigma amongst university students that liberal arts students do not work as hard or do not have as rigorous of a curriculum as our business or engineering peers and as these themes regularly occur in the UT memes Facebook page I decided to post this and so people were commenting tagging sharing this and while all of these things seem small I was left feeling like I had accomplished something even though in reality I had accomplished nearly nothing but that's how it goes I mean virality is pretty rare unless you're Kylie Jenner who is the world record well runner-up world record holder for the highest number of likes on Instagram behind a picture of an egg but that's how it goes compared to the number of people on this planet and the number of things posted per day a very small number of things reach beyond your immediate followers and unless you're Kylie Jenner that following is at most a few hundred friends that might see your post so in 2013 researchers at Indiana University conducted a study to see how internet memes go viral now I hate to burst your bubble but apparently what they found is that it's a result of complete random chance once an internet meme is shared beyond the first person that posts it that exponentially increases its likelihood to be shared again by introducing it to a whole new crowd of followers and therefore exponentially increasing its likelihood to go viral on the other hand if an internet meme does not get shared it dies out quickly and everyone forgets it ever happened in this way internet memes function like a virus spreading like a contagion and dying out without a host hence the term virality so armed with this awareness anyone on the Internet has the potential to become famous anyone can create a meme and maybe go viral and be virtually free of social consequences especially if the joke that they make is a little bit offensive now on most platforms there's no authorship attached so why does it matter except on Facebook Facebook has your name your face your friends and usually your most sincere social brand not too long ago recently accepted students to Harvard University formed a Facebook page in which they shared memes to build community before their arrival to campus however university officials caught wind of this group and rescinded 10 students acceptances to the university upon the discovery of images mocking sexual assault the holocaust and the deaths of children now these examples mark extreme topics of taboo in American culture and then these are extreme examples of the social consequences of internet meme creation but most of the time no one faces any consequences people feel freer to flirt with the boundaries of the taboo and create offensive memes for what psychology professor John Sewell er calls the online disinhibition effect people behave differently online than they do in person for what professor Sulu delineates in six key contributors but I find four of these incredibly key to internet meme creation the first of these dissociative anonymity the ability to hide your true identity online allows you to remove yourself from responsibilities of your actions additionally there's invisibility and that's a lack of physical contact with other users on the Internet moreover that lack of physical contact often leads to dissociative or dehumanizing behaviors of other online users by not viewing people as actual people with real feelings this often leads to the production of especially offensive internet memes via solipsistic interjection and finally the minimization of authority the lack of an authoritative figure online feeds the production of especially offensive memes and for now there's no law against creating offensive memes a law against creating any kind of mean would be encroaching on our freedom of speech so all of these things come together all of these behaviors forming the online disinhibition effect lead to controversial creations that call into question the boundary between free speech and socially disruptive behavior but that's the point of jokes right to disrupt the audience's expectations we often laugh because we're uncomfortable think of any successful comedian you've heard some of the bits that we react the most to are the ones that have us thinking in our head did they just say that out loud or for instance tickling that's one of the most uncomfortable situations you can ever be in and don't anyone tell you otherwise but we laugh or babies let's take a look at babies they have no concept of language yet so what they're laughing at is often very natural or innate so if you're making a baby laugh and you're probably genuinely funny or you're making them uncomfortable think about what babies laugh at right peekaboo when you play peek-a-boo with a baby they don't yet understand object permanence they don't understand that when you cover your eyes that you're still there they think you've disappeared entirely so when you suddenly reappear they are shocked and they usually laugh because they don't really know what else to do and that's kind of how we react to offensive memes so why do people make memes why does this all matter to answer this question I pulled about a thousand of my Facebook friends and the results ultimately fell in these four categories for validation to make fun of your friends to make a statement political or otherwise or start a conversation or to laugh and distract from reality and daily life often via some commonality and while all of these goals are different they seem to have one thing in common they build relationships and consequently they build communities they build communities in geographic areas like States or universities or cities they build communities amongst people with similar interests like music or cats or dogs and so much more and again paying attention to these things that happen both within and outside of cyber culture is so key to understanding them for instance the kind of memes that you'll see on the UT memes page are often City of Austin happenings University news or the decades-long rivalry with Texas A&M so all of these things come together to form cyber culture all of these communities all of these individuals connecting to form cyber culture one culture in which we all participate it's rather funny to me how something so inherently silly can have such a major effect on the way we communicate with one another and not only is it connecting individuals and communities it's connecting generations as well I don't know about you guys but my parents text me names and it's so interesting I've heard generations older than myself or even older than my parents say that they're just riding off internet memes they don't need to spend time with them and they don't need to understand them they're silly internet jokes but many people felt this way about other innovations in the past the internet Facebook smartphones and even paper when paper as we know it today was gaining popularity older generations wrote it off and said that tablet riding was much more permanent and respected and that paper was an innovation that wouldn't last memes are no paper for now but meme culture will only continue to grow and there's no stopping it and it will continue to affect the way we communicate with one another in the future maybe someday internet meme creation will be a skill essential to successful relationships or even the job market maybe it already is but for now keep scrolling keep sharing and as they say on Twitter thank you for coming to my TED talk you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 29,155

Rating: 4.4126983 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Social Science, Anthropology, Comedy, Communication, Community, Culture, Meme, Psychology, Social Interaction, Social Media, Technology

Id: 9MLjFNxi9Yo

Length: 16min 22sec (982 seconds)

Published: Thu May 23 2019