English 1301: Characteristics Of Social Media

Name:
Instructor:
Course:
Date:
Making Memes
One of the defining characteristics of social media is the use of images with a comical undertone popularly referred to as memes. Memes come in many forms like images, short clips, cartoons, and animated drawings. In the digital space, memes serve a number of purposes. First, they criticize an existing dogma that does not auger well with a section of the public. An example of a meme falling under this category is a graphical representation of a teenager complaining about her parent’s restriction on the peers to keep. Secondly, memes appeal to the emotion of the viewers by depicting cases of anger, or disgust. For instance, Chris Bell argues that memes created in the social environment turn effective because they succeed in appealing to the “shared psychology” (4). In other words, many people relate with memes since almost everybody has a function in their brain that processes graphics in terms of emotions. However, the memes do not need to be truthful for them to be accepted by the general population. Bell mentions popular urban legend memes like earthworms in hamburgers which are common in social media outlets, although they hold no truth in them. Additionally, memes can be informative and educative. Besides emotional memes being popular and untruthful, some memes can be educative. This purpose explains why most people transmit memes that may not have an emotional connotation (Bell 6). Informative memes particularly pass across messages that are not explicitly relayed via the conventional media. For example, the existence of modern-day racism is not a subject in the daily news. However, there are many memes on the internet that acknowledge racism and rebuke it at the same time.
left9525The image here is an example of an informative meme. In a nutshell, the woman compares what is more dangerous between eating meat and smoking a packet of cigarettes each day, and finds it senseless for one to claim that the latter is acceptable. She is perplexed by the common cases of “preach water and drink wine (or whiskey).” She apparently disapproves the moral police who give verbal directions of what ought to be done, but do not walk the talk. Precisely, she does not understand the logic behind smoking a pack of cigarettes a day and inhibit other people from taking meat. From a health perspective, both meat and smoking are bad for normal physiology of the body. While meat contains fats that may precipitate obesity, cigarettes have nicotine and tar which causes hypertension and lung cancer. In t...