SIDAM Collection of Memes
The selection of memes for the Still Image Digital Archive of Memes (SIDAM) is one, surprisingly, based in memetics and evolutionary Darwinism. To explain internet memes, we use the ideology of the replication of genes. Like genes, internet memes begin as imitations of an original, spreading through our culture by use of the Internet. These ideas, instructions, etc., in American culture are replicated, modified, and passed from one individual to another, acting as individual units of cultural phenomena. Each unit must encompass some part of what the American people deem essential, entertaining, or culturally significant enough to be passed to the next user on the internet.
What is a Meme?
A successful meme, as explained by Susan Blackmore in The Meme Machine, will
“…have their ‘spread me’ effect for good biological and psychological reasons. Perhaps they tap into needs for sex, social cohesion, excitement, or avoiding danger. Perhaps people pass them on in order to conform, to be better liked, to enjoy the other person’s surprise or laughter. Perhaps the information will be genuinely useful to the other person…The point is you are less likely to want to pass on some boring thing your heard about the health of your neighbour’s rose bushes than a rumour about what your neighbour was doing behind them. Such ‘say me’ memes will therefore spread better than other memes and many people will get infected with them.” (Blackmore 84)
It is the mission of the Still Image Digital Archive of Memes to capture these successful memes as they are popularized by the American public, and provide the appropriate context and image associated with this idea. Because memes can be any format born on the web, as defined above, we regulate our collection to only still image memes that are replicated and shared with accompanying text as created by a new user/creator. For our purposes, image memes selected for this archive will have a single image stored and appropriate context explained with cultural significance. We will provide the most popular examples of each, as specified by user sites on the web, to better display how users understand and continually reference an idea encompassed in a single image meme. Examples of such meme user sites include Reddit, 9gag, Buzzfeed, Facebook, Twitter, and Memegenerator.net.
What types of Memes are a part of SIDAM?
Sources
- Blackmore, Susan. (2000). The meme machine. New York: Oxford University Press Inc.
- Dawkins, Richard. (1976). The selfish gene. New York: Oxford University Press Inc.
- Heylighen, F., & Chielens, K. (2009). Evolution of culture, memetics. In R. Meyers (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Complexity and Systems Science (Vol. 1, pp. 3205-3220). New York: Springer New York. Retrieved from http://download.springer.com/static/pdf/871/prt%3A978-0-387-30440-3%2F5.pdf?auth66=1355034141_6b142f95966857681ef825aae60d9376&ext=.pdf
