The World of Internet Memes
Internet memes have transformed into the web’s most recent, entertaining trend. Internet users, like myself, find themselves attached to their phones or computers for hours on end searching comical Internet memes. The world of Internet memes has various, different memes that appeal to a wide range of different people. For example, my favourite kinds of Internet memes are “Troll Memes”.
Patrick Davison explains his views on Internet memes in his article, “The Language of Internet Memes”. He presents three different components of Internet memes: the manifestation, the behaviour, and the ideal. To exemplify these components, we can look at Troll Memes on a more specific level.
The Manifestation: The manifestation for Troll Memes is the visual, repetitive aspect to each meme. Therefore, the simple use of colours (mostly black and white), the constant, unchanged characters (Derp, Derpina, and Troll), and the choice of verbal conversation or writing. This is displayed when the writer uses “Le” before they speak of a noun or sometimes a verb, as well as “FUUUU” after something bad or annoying has happened to the character.
The Behaviour: The behaviour for Troll Memes is the idea that the characters and unique facial expressions can be copied and pasted or used again in a different context for additional humorous reasons. For example, Derp and Derpina always seems to look the same in all Troll Memes, as well as the parents always have the “Troll” face when others create copy-cat Troll Memes of their own.
The Ideal: The Ideal in the Troll Meme case is similar to all other memes, the concept is purely for entertainment; to create and understand real-life situations that are not particularly funny to the character that is frustrated or annoyed, but it is funny to others witnessing it.
All components above can be seen in the example below.
Aside from the three distinctive components of Internet memes that Davison mentions, I found it interesting that he paired Internet memes up with emoticons. Emoticons are small images (mostly faces) that are representations of facial expressions. Davison states that emoticons are memes that serve a number of functions in the transmission of information, which I strongly agree with, and Troll Memes are just another example to support this point. Emoticons are used for all types of different facial expressions, in the way that memes use many different facial expressions on their characters in relation to what is being stated on the full image. However, emoticons are used much more often than Internet memes are. Therefore, I see the use and entertainment of Internet memes being a fad, whereas emoticons will always be used in personal conversation because they give the user more freedom to choose their expression (where something like Troll Memes, you must use the characters that have already been created when re-posting or re-creating and these expressions are very limited).
All in all, both Internet memes and emoticons are used to describe expressions, but I believe that Internet memes are used more for entertainment, than for daily usage in everyday conversations, like emoticons are.