How Memes Become Viral: Project Report 2

As more memes are creates, more memes become viral everyday but how does a meme become viral?? An example of a meme that became an instant hit was the picture of a grump cat that was posted on Reddit in 2013.

The girl who pasted the picture of her cat had no idea that it would become such a sensation.

People than began to add text to the image to make it relatable and humourous to those outisde of Reddit and posted it on other forms of social media such as Twitter and Facebook.

But how or why poeple compelled to edit, share and repeat certain images much like the grumpy cat when there are multiple pictures of cats on the internet for sharing. Looking back at Richard Dawkins work with memes, he related them to human genes calling it “memetics”. His theory of “memetics” was in relation to how cultural information evolves and is transmitted from person to person.

Dawkins stated that when one person imitates another, a meme is passing to the imitator, similar to how eye color or hair color is passed from parents to children through genes.

For a meme to become viral it has to be replicable, where various people other than the creator has the ability to do it or recreate it, wheather it be in real life or a digital file. An example of this is the Ice Bucket Challenge, which went viral in 2014.

This challenge was both online and in real life, when recreating the challenge there was a type of script that the participant would say, thus making it easily replicable.

Dawkins also states that memes have the ability to stay alive and have longevity. This has to do with memes mostly living in the digital world, where on the internet nothing really dies because original copies of them wil always exist somewhere.