Second blog post and here I am again, ready to talk about digital revolution and, one of its consequences, the magnificent world of memes. First things first, so we are going to give priority to the most important topic of those two and I’m going to start talking about memes.
This week we had a laboratory where we learned what memes are and we even made some of them. I made 2, but memes in in «image + caption» format are not my thing, so I think they are not worth to share. To compensate the lack of memes, I’ll talk about something I thought about when we were at the laboratory.
At the end of the class, I realized we only touched the surface, the tip of the iceberg of memes. As you might know, Internet is big, like, really big. And so are memes.
The word «meme» was first said in 1972 by Richard Dawkings and defined as «culture packages» that people use to make references. Years later, with the invention of the email, memes started to become viral as people sent to their contacts things that they found funny, making those things memes. But it wasn’t until around 2008 when memes became a worldwide phenomenom. With memes like the Yao Ming meme or Me Gusta meme, this images became a main part of the contents you can find in the internet.
Example of 2008s meme
From then, memes have evolved to the point where you can find new famous and used memes every week. And most of them are surprisingly funny.
But memes are not always laughs and fun. Sometimes they become problematic, as happened with Pepe the Frog. Pepe the Frog was an innocent meme that became famouse at 4chan, and, as you might know, 4chan is not as innocent as Pepe, so it degenerated to some weird and creepy derivates of Pepe the Frog. This has caused this meme to be seen as a symbol of hate for some people.
Pepe being controversial
Another example of memes getting serious has happened in my home country, Spain. A lot of people has used the most powerful weapon of disapproval of our time, the Twitter + memes combo, to show their discontent with the actual government. And it seems the government hasn’t liked it too much, because some of this people have gone to jail for making memes and they even proposed memes to be illegal (yes, you’ve read well).
Memes can be complicated sometimes it seems.
Changing the topic, let’s talk about the other thing I said at the beginning of this post, digital revolution. And you will probably be asking yourself «what is digital revolution?» while you’re sitting in front of your computer reading a blog. Well, you’re right now being part of the digital revolution. Actually most of the people in the world are part of this revolution and it has affected almost every aspect of our lives.
ERA 1101, one of the first computers. 1Mbit.
At the beginning, digital devices were mostly very complex room-size machines which only could storage some information and do mathematical operations. Years passed, and now we have mobile phones of the size of our hand, millions of times more powerful than those old computers.
This evolution has allowed us to make a lot of new things. Our life has become easier and now we can do things we could only dream of 30 years ago. This revolution has affected almost every aspect of our lives, and it has affected art too.
With the digital revolution, new types of art have emerged, from electronic music to electronic literature. People can now develop more their creativity and make real their thoughts. It has not only affected how people create art, it has also affected how people distribute and consume art.
Digital revolution has been one of the most important revolutions in human history, and right now it’s in its first years of life. Surely, the next years we will see things we can’t even imagine nowadays.
Looks exciting, huh?
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