The Importance of the Meme

We've seen them everywhere.
Memes.
They frequent social network sites like flies frequent smelly corpses. Okay, maybe that's a bit of a dramatic simile, but you get the picture.

I absolutely love memes. Sometimes you have to shift through the crappy, unfunny ones, but eventually it's possible to find the perfect meme for any situation. Seriously, any situation.
Given how easy it is to make a meme, virtually anyone can make one these days. And they're even easier to find than to make. So what do memes really say about us, the digital generations?
I found a great article by Sam Leith on Financial Times about this very topic. Click here to discover the possible implications of our wide usage of memes!
Cause, obviously, they're important. And only growing more popular. I mean, even my lovely neolithic mother knows what a meme is, these days.

 

Oh, the joys of being the in-group and understanding cultural references! I'm not sure if it's a blessing or a curse. At least it makes me laugh.

Or cringe...

A Response to "Our Digital Lives" TED Talk

The TED Talk "Our Digital Lives" was very interesting to me. I had no idea that women are driving social networks! We are the ones spending the most time on sites like Facebook and Twitter (and of COURSE Pinterest). Apparantly, I may be able to get hired more easily by media companies searching to gain more money by reaching their growing female audiences. 

This is exciting! As we all know, media has an obscene power over us all; it influences how we think, act, view others, and interact in the world. 

What sort of impact could women like me have on the powerful media scene? If we put our minds to it, I know we can begin to change centuries-old gender stereotypes. Already, gender stereotypes are relaxing. Of course, Rome wasn't built in a day, and the media won't give up stereotypes before it's audiences do. However, the relationship between media and it's audience is not just one-way; maybe the members of the audience (in it's broadest term) could influence the media we are surrounded with almost every moment of our lives.

Response to Mukurtu's tweet on tech/teen relationships

Kim Christen, Twitter username @mukurtu, posted a link about myths concerning technology and its negative effect on teenagers.

 This article is a perfect example of one side of the two-sided spectrum of coverage concerning technology: on one side, there is hype, and on the other, there is extreme alarm. This article addresses 5 commonly-held alarmist ideas held by parents across America and anywhere young adults have access to the internet.

What I really like about this article is that it debunks these theories, which have no factual evidence to support them. Some of these myths include "teens are addicted to technology" and my personal favorite, "the more time teens spend behind screens, the more antisocial they become."

I wanted to see what the real "alarmist" section had to say about this, so I went scrounging around the web to find a similarly-written article. On the same website of @mukurtu's article, the Huffington Post, I found a gigantic variety of opinion pieces, including  "Here's What A Constantly Plugged-In Life Is Doing To Kids' Bodies" to "Teen Texting: The Ruin of Romance."

I was expecting to boldly disagree with the majority of these articles. However, I found myself unable to discount some of the concerns and questions raised. After all, just as I refuse to believe technology is making us all stupid, I am also equally hesitant to dismiss ideas that texting has changed young love and child development. (Side note: the word "texting" is spell-checked by the Blogger website....what?)

Clearly, the pros and cons of technology lay somewhere in the grey area between the hype-alarmist end-caps, jumbled up with the decisions we make and how we use these tools at our disposal. It would never be as simple as black and white, who are we kidding? There's always been hype and alarm, and there will always be truth somewhere in between the two, depending on the ways we use technology.