I love Lemmy because I know exactly what post this thread is under
this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2024
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AAHHH! My phrastiphobia is kicking in.
They literally are!
is this a meme?
It literally is!
In fairness, the word meme has been watered down so much that it could be applied to any post whatsoever, and you'd find people willing to argue that is was valid, even if the post was text only and a dry as fuck essay about soil sampling.
It has been a relatively long time since "meme" had a real meaning in colloquial usage. When it started to be used for any text-over-image, the slide into meaninglessness was already going on.
Now, it applies to any screenshot of text, and you'll have arguments for that, despite it being essentially opposite not only the original meaning, but the early uses of the word for internet purposes.
Hell, it's been a while since templates were even mandatory to call something a meme.
Now, it's my opinion that the whole thing is stupid, and there really does need to be some degree of resistance to a word becoming meaningless in comparison to other words, but I'm one old fuck pissing into the wind with that. At this point, a meme has become any image post at all, and it's sliding further.
The word "meme" was coined by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene to allude to the concept of a unit of cultural information subject to mutation and selective pressure. The whole image-macro-overlaid-with-text interpretation is just an easily evolved exemplar which rose in popularity relatively recently.
A screenshot of a comment can effectively communicate a cultural concept. In some cases, much of the context of the concept being communicated is intrinsic to being a comment (green texts, Tumblr comment chains, etc).
Jupp. I think people forgot the word "joke". I haven't read that word in 5 years.