The value of Memes

I'm having a hard time being fair to the memers of this platform. I am of course, like all others a result of circumstance and cultural bias, and the consciousness that I identify as me, struggles to see the effort and merit of memes. Now I must say before somebody imagines choking the life out of me, that I'm talking about the practical truth and not the hypothetical.

In theory

Internet memes are an effective tool used to communicate with the younger generations, they are studied by markets and this is not a secret to anyone who cares to google the information. In other words, memes are today's most effective vessels of communication and have long replaced any method we may attempt to label traditional.

As the word "tool" implies they are by themselves neither harmful or harmless and attempting to make a case for either position is probably counter productive. On the other hand we can attempt to make a case for the lack of understanding of the concept and for the mislabeling of memes.

You might be surprised to know that memes are not necesarily a new thing. Its a concept as old as society that has received a conceptual upgrade in recent years. I'm not a stickler for dictionary definitions, but...


I suspect the lower portion following the * is evidence of the social amendment.
So by its own definition an image with words is not a meme, a funny image with words is also not a meme, the condition that must be met is its viral like social adoption. This is also nothing new, we may not have thought about it due to it being cataloged as too obvious for consideration, but recent events have made me explore these ideas.

In practice

If worth or value can be given to a meme, it makes sense the value would be given to the originator of the meme, the mind or minds who came up with the viral idea. This however is not the case and between confusion and illusion we call people who share the memes, memers and content creators. In my book this is as silly as thanking the mailman for the letter my mom wrote me for my birthday last year.

Yes, its true we are in love with the silly images, we care not if they are viral, but that they make us and a few others laugh. Most of what we call memes are only funny to people who are in on the joke, thus making them imposible to become viral. The question becomes, what are they? Does the current definition need more revisions?

Along comes The Steem Blockchain

And in my view, it throws a monkey wrench into any ideas I may hold on "merit". As I told someone arguing for plagiarism with typical whataboutisms, we should all attempt to land both feet upon a surface of reality. My personal views on copyrights does nothing to change consensus, and if most of the world believes in intellectual property to some degree, to the point of creating a blockchain based on "proof of brain" it would be extremely hard to declare yourself consistent in your declared rebellion against it.

I will say it bluntly because I want to be clear... How hard is it to copy paste?

But, I want to be fair and accept that there is a large group of individuals that will disagree with me. Their experience on this platform is as important as mine. I'm simply asking for input, clarification and ideas that I have failed to consider.


(signature by @bembelmaniac )