User:Scaryszary/Internet meme

Checklist

• Evaluate an article: Go back to your article evaluation and pull out the list of things you said you could improve on the existing article. Put that list here in the talk page and cross things off as you do them (you can also edit what I have said below and cross things off as you complete them).
• Copyedits: Move those to this sandbox, and when you do so publish each with explicit notes on what you changed from the original Wikipedia article. That way when you migrate your work to live Wikipedia you will be able to publish and explain each change as you go. Doing so is a required part of the Week 13 Wikipedia assignment.
• Bibliography: This is a good start, but now you should start summarizing and adding content to your sandbox that utilizes these sources. That way you can see if you need to do more research. There are several callouts for "citation needed" in the existing Wikipedia article, and you should see if you have sources you can cite for those.
• Citing sources: What you added from Shifman is good, but the sentence on Pepe (from the existing article) could use a citation.
• Adding media/hyperlinks: Good hyperlinks, and you should go through and see if there are things that should be hyperlinks in whatever you add and the existing article. The image you added was taken down, and as we discussed, that is a danger in posting meme images (unless it was just a photo of Pepe? Which is on the Pepe page so it would seem weird if you couldn't post it). Technically, image macros are/should be covered by fair use. You don't have to worry about this though, as posting media isn't required for the final assignment. You can keep working to see if you can find a way to post and example that will not get flagged, as that would be an interesting challenge. But, again, not required(that is, you had to do it for this assignment, but in your final Wikipedia contributions don't add it just to add it).
• Overall: You seem to be doing things week by week, but now you really need to focus on the bigger picture of what you plan to add/edit here. Is there more in the existing article that needs copyediting? More citations you can use to expand on the sections you said needed to be developed more? The more planning you can do now the easier it will be for you to chip away at those edits between now and November 22 when you need to move your final edits to live Wikipedia.

Lead Section

One hallmark of internet memes is the appropriation of a part of a broader culture, for instance by giving words and phrases intentional misspellings (such as lolcats) or using incorrect grammar (such as doge). In particular, many memes utilize popular culture (especially in image macros of other media), although this can lead to issues with copyright.

“Dank” memes have emerged as a new form of image macros, while many modern memes take on the inclusion of surreal, nonsensical, and non-sequitur themes.

Background

The word meme was coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene as an attempt to explain how ideas replicate, mutate, and evolve (memetics). Internet memes are spread through two mechanisms: mimicry and remix. Mimicry is a recreation of a meme, using another individual's interpretation/specific text.

The photoshopped image is closely related to the macro image but often is created without the use of text, mostly edited with another image.

History

The earlier forms of image-based memes include the demotivator, image macro, photoshopped image, LOLCats, advice animal, and comic.

Modern memes

This term originally meant a meme that was significantly different from the norm but is now used mainly to differentiate these modern types of memes from other, older types such as image macros

This image of a moth became popular and began to be used in memes. According to Chris Grinter, a lepidopterist from the California Academy of Sciences, these memes took off because people find moths' attraction to lamps quite strange, and this phenomenon is still not completely explained by science.

Irony and Absurdism

The increasing trend towards irony in meme culture has resulted in absurdist memes, not unlike postmodern art

Pepe memes

Main article: Pepe the Frog

Matt Furie's cartoon character Pepe the Frog became an Internet meme when its popularity steadily grew across Myspace, Gaia Online and 4chan in 2008