In the digital era where men, women, and even children are surrounded by devices that can connect with the internet and each other it should be no surprise that this age harbors and brings about strange new social epidemics. Of these new epidemics it seems the world is most at risk to the meme epidemic. You may ask what a meme is, well the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines it as “an amusing or interesting item (such as a captioned picture or video) or genre of items that is spread widely online especially through social media” ("Meme."). In short a meme is an item and or items that can be easily and quickly spread throughout the internet because of its entertainment to viewers of it. This is not only the perfect example of a social epidemic, but also one that could spread others such as in recent times memes helped spread dabbing a previously rarely known marijuana culture reference now popularized and diluted from its origin so much that almost anyone of any age understands when you dab, but not exactly where it came from and originally meant ("What is dabbing?"). So not only is the social epidemic able to spread like wildfire it’s also able to spread others just the same into everyone’s household.
The theory of memes came about thanks to Richard Dawkins who in 1976 coined the term and theory that they are a “cultural analgen of genes in order to explain how rumors, catch-
phrases, melodies, or fashion trends replicate through a population” ("Insights into Internet Memes."). Although memes have been around for decades, it was not until internet memes were created that forced their popularity and influence to spread. The cause of this epidemic is a number of things, such as the rising popularity of smartphones and other internet connected devices which each can receive, make, and even spread memes to others and their devices Along with this social media outlets such as 4chan, Reddit, Ifunny, Facebook and many others serve as a breeding ground for internet meme lovers and creators ("Insights into Internet Memes."). The supplies to create memes are endless, and meme creators on the internet can use almost anything like “commentary, imitations, or parodies, or even through related news in other media” ("Insights into Internet Memes."), so this gives a large variety and nearly endless supply of resources to create them. On top of all these, so far, memes are very unpredictable, it is unknown what will be popularized, how long it will stay that way, or even how to control its popularity and spread, due to the way in which they are spread as entertainment between person to person.
“Time series of activities related to the "salad fingers" meme and two approximations” ("Insights into Internet Memes.")
Memes can affect whole societies, countries and even the world due to their nature of spreading. For example, in 2016, Dr. Phil hosted a young woman and her mother to discuss her behavior issues. During the show’s conference the audience began laughing to which the young teenage girl challenged any of them to fight her with “catch me outside, how about that”, although with a heavy accent and slurring of the words made it sound quite peculiar ("EXCLUSIVE: ‘Cash me outside’ teen’s father breaks silence."). Within days of the show’s airing, meme creators took a liking to the phrase and popularized and joked about the incident with new internet memes quoting the girl, video edits of the words into a rap, and many others. The meme spread so quickly, in fact, that today it’s rare to find anyone who would not understand if you said “cash me outside how bout dah”. So much so because it’s infected not only social media but also everyday life such as cloths branding the phrase, people repeating it as a joke, and much more. Memes spread this event so quickly that society and the world is changed because of the powerful abilities that this social epidemic wields.
Another example of how memes can have an effect in our society is how people see politicians, celebrities or even the average everyday Joe. A good instance is during the recent presidential election multiple memes were created and spread about candidates, such as Republican senator Ted Cruz was the unfortunate target of meme creators who christened his likeness to wanted posters of the notorious zodiac killer (who had never been caught or identified) and seemingly overnight jokes about Cruz being the zodiac killer began to spread, even though he was a child at the killers career height ("Heidi Cruz says her husband isn’t the Zodiac Killer. But we disproved that a long time ago."). During the election politicians and candidates were not the only ones targeted by meme creators, even regular citizens such as
Kenneth Bone were targeted. Bone had appeared in one of the presidential debates between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton asking a question for the candidates to answer and within hours after the debates end memes of Bone had spread like wildfire, although its believed because of Bones name that creators of the memes chose him because it was easy to make puns out of his name ("Ken Bone: The real presidential debate winner."). The truth is memes have no preference or bias to whom or what they are created from, but simply the need to spread and be recreated much like a virus that takes a host to spread itself to more hosts.
Throughout the years research has been done on memes and their ability to spread, but no matter how hard researchers tried they could not successfully predict or create a formula to determine how rapidly and viral a meme would become, until recently “With the availability of large-scale, digitized data on social communication, the study of diffusion of memes (units of transmissible information) has become feasible recently…” ("Virality Prediction and Community Structure in Social Networks."). This is because of the attention awarded to memes from many professions, such as marketers who would love to know the science behind them in order to recreate it to their benefit. Still, it is not known exactly what makes a meme become popular, but it has been found that “communities allow us to estimate how much the spreading pattern of a meme …viral memes tend to spread like epidemics…predict the virality of memes based on early spreading patterns in terms of community structure…popularity of a meme as an indicator of its virality; viral memes appear in a large number of messages and are adopted by many people” ("Virality Prediction and Community Structure in Social Networks."). Meaning that communities where the memes spread affect how fast they spread to people, how viral they will become because of this, and that the more a meme is seen by viewers the more likely they themselves will begin to accept and spread it.
In another study researchers created an experiment to look at whether or not memes that stirred emotions in participants would increase the chances of the viewer to forward/pass on the meme to someone else to see as well, as well as if a certain emotion stirring video would be more likely to be passed on than others (“Computers in Human Behavior”). The experiments conducted by the researchers consisted of multiple types of videos, “stimulus videos from youtube.com. Eight of the videos were selected to represent one of four emotional categories: ‘‘disgusting’’… ‘‘cute’ …‘‘funny’’…and ‘‘anger-inducing’’…included two neutral videos to serve as controls…used 10 videos in Study 1 with 2 representing each category” (“Computers in Human Behavior”). The results were surprising, emotion stirring videos were significantly more likely to be shared with others, rather than neutral ones. And “a significant preference for forwarding positively valenced videos over all other videos, as well as a preference for negatively valenced videos over the nonemotional control videos” (“Computers in Human Behavior”). Showing viewers are more likely to share the positive emotion stimulating videos with other people than negative stimulating, yet they are still more likely to share negative emotion videos than neutral. The results of the experiment shows a large reason memes are spread is because humans are social creatures, so we tend to spread content that incites and stirs our emotions rather than other content.
One can ask how we cure the social epidemic of memes; unfortunately there are only a few solutions available, none of which are quite viable for use. Due to the scientific studies shown, memes tend to spread through social platforms, social networks, email, instant messaging and many other forms of communication, and the reason for making memes is to spread a joke, concept or idea, which spreads because of the emotions it invokes in humans who then send it to others (“Computers in Human Behavior”). To solve this problem society, can ignore memes being sent to them like many people do with spam mail filling their emails, junk mail in their inboxes and so forth, and refuse to adopt and spread the meme to others. Another solution is to cut down on social media, the main highway of transport for memes, by limiting the use of it.
Meme traffic in turn will slow exponentially because it will have lost its main form of transfer among people. Unfortunately, these solutions are nearly impossible due to how memes have been ingrained into everyday life, and the internet which almost everyone uses on a daily basis.
Albert Camus was a firm believer in absurdism, the belief that humans exist in a meaningless universe while searching for purpose. This relates in some aspects to the social epidemic of memes, such as in Camus’s novel The Plague. The main character Dr. Rieux who, works endlessly to care for the people of Oran falling ill to the plague while it is in the end that the plague simply chose to recede on its own that ends the epidemic not his own efforts to do so, much like how certain memes die off by choice rather than our own actions. Camus would most likely think of the social epidemic of memes as much like the plague in his own work, because of how quickly and rapidly it spreads among people and can strike at anyone at any time much like the plague in his novel. Camus would most likely see the results of social epidemic of memes as a tool for both good and evil, like its ability to spread humor and enjoyment to people, but also its ability to incite anger and hate.
The seriousness of this epidemic of memes is due to the technologically advanced age that we live in that allows us to adopt and spread the pictures and videos to our friends, family, and acquaintances easily through the use of social media and its platforms. Also, because memes carry other social epidemics to everyone that comes in contact with them, like a rat carries fleas holding the bubonic plague waiting to spread to others at any second and become an outbreak of epic proportions at any second. People may not realize it but memes have infiltrated almost
everyone’s lives, just think have you ever not shared a meme or have ever seen one, because the odds are that you have simply due to how often they are seen and made in a day to day basis. In reality, we have the chance to slow the progress of memes or even wipe them out by making hard choices for ourselves and others through ignoring social media and memes sent to us, but in reality very few people will do this due to its inherit difficulty, and it is absurd in the end, because ironically memes will die out not as a result of our actions but because they simply choose to do so much like the plague in Camus’s novel.
Works Cited:
Ahmed, Saeed. "Ken Bone: The real presidential debate winner." CNN. Cable News Network, 10 Oct. 2016. Web. May 2017. <http://www.cnn.com/2016/10/10/politics/debate-ken-bone-staring-man-trnd/>.
Bauckhage, Christian. "Insights into Internet Memes." AAI. Fraunhofer IAIS, n.d. Web. Apr. 2017. <https://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ICWSM11/paper/viewFile/2757/3304>.
Bump, Philip. "Heidi Cruz says her husband isn’t the Zodiac Killer. But we disproved that a long time ago." The Washington Post. WP Company, 02 May 2016. Web. May 2017. <https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/02/25/the-definitive-debunking-ted-cruz-is-not-the-zodiac-killer/?utm_term=.6c5e5806f0f9>.
Liz Balmaseda Palm Beach Post Staff Writer 5:00 a.m. Friday, Feb. 10, 2017 Southern Palm Beach County. "EXCLUSIVE: ‘Cash me outside’ teen’s father breaks silence." Palmbeachpost. N.p., n.d. Web. Apr. 2017. <http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/exclusive-cash-outside-teen-father-breaks-silence/EgSHJhh35HZfXQXBtp18NM/>.
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Rosanna E. Guadagno, Daniel M. Rempala, Shannon Murphy, and Bradley M. Okdie. "Computers in Human Behavior." Elsevier (n.d.): n. pag. Web. <https://www.journals.elsevier.com/computers-in-human-behavior>.
Weng, Lilian, Filippo Menczer, and Yong-Yeol Ahn. "Virality Prediction and Community Structure in Social Networks." [1306.0158] Virality Prediction and Community Structure in Social Networks. N.p., 11 Nov. 2013. Web. May 2017. <https://arxiv.org/abs/1306.0158>.
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