Net » Mreža | 89 cating of sarcastic and witty quotes to the net. And memes were first named by Richard Dawkins, an English evolutionary theorist, way back in 1976. It was in his book The Selfish Gene that he defined the meme as a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission in evolution, which he compared to genetic evolution in humans. “We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. 'Mimeme' comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like 'gene'. I hope my classicist friendswill forgiveme if I abbreviatemimeme tomeme”. Still, if we stick strictly tomemes as an internet concept, they began developing in that direction in 1990. People and animals are the most common sources of inspiration for memes. Those are generally funny expressions or peculiar faces of people that illustrate a reaction, and one such childhood image of a guy originally from Serbia, David Vujanić, became a viral internet hit. “We had an end-of-year photo shoot in school. I remember going in and the photographer kept trying to make me smile. I remember just not really wanting to smile that day. This guy was like ‘give us a big smile’ and that annoyed me…” said David describing the creation of the meme known as “awkward smile”. However, David didn’t become instantly famous like, for instance, Pakistani cricket fan Muhammad SarimAkhtar,who “broke the internet”, andalsodidsowith amomentofdisappointment thatbecameameme.There is hardly any internet userwhohasn’t seenMuhammad, theman dressed in a lumberjack shirt and body warmer watchinga cricket gameand lookingdispleased.Muhammad is probably the best example in recent years that a good meme doesn’t require accompanying text, as his image alone, often in gif form, is sufficient. Internet memes are so widespread that it isn’t possible to establish which are the most popular. Most top charts include the smiling face of the character of Willy Wonka from the film Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. The film was made in 1971, while the meme emerged in 2011. It is generally used to illustrate sarcastic responses and featuresAmericanactorGeneWilder’s version of Willy Wonka, with a mocking grin and text that varies depending on the topic. There are hundreds of thousands of different versions of this ‘Condescending Wonka’ meme online. Sammy Griner has become the most famous baby on the internet thanks to the famous SuccessKidmeme. This photo of a baby with a clenched fist and a determined expression on his face became a meme back in 2007, and it is still being used today. When his mother took the photograph on a beach, he had just demolished another boy’s sandcastle, and her post read: ‘I hate sandcastles’. There is also an incredible backstory to the Sammy Griner meme, as it was actually used to save the life of Sammy’s own father, Justin, by raisingmoney for his kidney transplant. There are meme templates that are more popular in Serbia and are used here more than in other parts of the world, one of the more recognisable of which is called “Big dog small dog". This is also a slightly different style of meme, as it features parallel list options, like a kind of list of virtues and vices. Alongside caricatures of a small dog and a bodybuilder dog, meme composers list things that the big one does better than the small one, and he is often described as being braver, cleverer, better, and that is how he looks: as he has the body of a muscular man with a dog’s head. Animals are actually unrivalled in memes, and particularly cats, which have their own LOL cat universe. There’s something irresistible about the cute faces of cats depicted in some random context, complaining about some equally random situation, that defies explanation. There’s Ceiling Cat, Basement Cat, but most popular of all is Grumpy Cat, a kitten born with a miserable expression on its face, which is also how it got its name, and brought genuine wealth to its owners, even ending up as awax figure inMadame Tussauds museum! Unfortunately, Grumpy Cat is no longer among us, and when the world found out about the cat’s death in 2019, countless final farewells caused the internet to “crash” again. The faces of famous people are also often stars of meme culture, with one of the most popular being the universal darling of the internet that is Keanu Reeves. SadKeanucaught the star forlornly eating a sandwichon a New York bench. That 2010 meme template received countless versions, and proved so popular that the BBC even asked Keanu about it. The actor responded philosophically by saying something along the lines of – it is what it is! Reese Witherspoon also excelled on her Instagramprofile by illustrating the situation in 2020, that first dreadful year of the pandemic. You can compose memes about anything. The possibilities are endless, the sky’s the limit of human creativity, and laughter is the best medicine. And an internet without memes? Simply unimaginable! Mimovima ih je prvi nazvao Ričard Dokins, engleski teoretičar evolucije, još 1976. / Memes were first named by Richard Dawkins, an English evolutionary theorist, way back in 1976 FOTO: Depositphotos / Casimiro
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MzExMjc5