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It all started with a tweet from the user Jamie Loftus who recently asked people: “Who are the internet main characters of the day you still think about? Good, bad, indifferent, who's stuck with you. Can be any era.” And, as it often happens, the post got covered by a real avalanche of witty responses. As of today, there are 4.7K quotes and over 45.3M views. After all, a meme is perhaps the main creative form of modern culture.
If you don't remember, let us remind you that the very concept of ‘meme’ was introduced in 1976 by the famous English biologist and popularizer of science Richard Dawkins. In his bestselling book The Selfish Gene, the scientist defined a meme as a unit of cultural information, similar to a gene in biology. Like a gene, according to the scientist, a meme can be copied, transmitted from carrier to carrier, and undergo evolution.
However, even such an outstanding scientific mind as Richard Dawkins could hardly have imagined the evolutionary direction that memes have acquired in recent decades...
The great artist Andy Warhol once said that ‘everyone will get their 15 minutes of fame.’ I don't know about everyone, but the ubiquity of the internet and the Share button have actually done their job. Literally any of us can become famous all over the world - and not necessarily in a good way. One viral tweet or video on TikTok is pretty much enough.
Over the past decade and a half, there have been hundreds of folks and stuff that the whole world has literally talked about - only to forget about them a couple of days later. The specificity of modern thinking - another dose of fast dopamine has been received, you can move on to looking for the next one!
So now just meet the white and gold (or black and blue) dress, 30 or 50 feral hogs, that poor giant container ship that blocked the Suez Canal a couple of years ago - and dozens of other memes that actually fulfilled their main function - they made us smile. After all, it’s not that easy to smile in such a wild and difficult contemporary world!
