The Influence of Meme’s
In Today’s Society
Jodi Osborne
HUMN240-H2WW
Morris Schottenstein
December 14, 2016
The Influence of
Meme’s In Today’s Society
When we dive into the popular culture
artifact of meme’s and how our society can become shaped by them we can consider
differing factors to do so. For example, we may look into the business side of
popular culture and how meme’s are interlinked with the popularity of a
product, business or organization. In this instance we will use the company
Target for our explanation. Target can be as seen as a nice, wholesome, family
store for the most part, but through the use of meme’s people are able to create
a sort of sense based on others emotional values to generate opinions, views
and popularity that particular topic. Depending on the meme creator either being
for or against a subject, such as Target, can have very differing stances,
opinions, and biased that they choose to send into the consuming society. The
way that meme makers are able to construct these feelings are generally and
most often through the use of messages, both hidden and subliminal to take
advantage of their targeted audience. For example, if a meme was to go viral,
of let’s say, a mother and a child smiling and shopping within a Target store location
with a caption, such as, we love our Target store, this could generate a large
popular following of Target stores and create feelings of credibility and popularity
with the store brand. This particular meme may create and actually cause people
in today’s society to want to visit the store with the thought in mind that
Target makes people happy and that it’s a good place to shop. People may think
this due to the caption of the people within the photo uplifting the store by
saying they love it.
Although meme’s can be used in a
business sense to strengthen the popularity of brands, memes can also be used
to destroy or tear down a business’s credibility and popularity. For example, a
meme could be made of a woman and child inside the target store with the
caption, Target is harmful to our children. This photo not only grabs your
attention, but the caption makes you want to dive deeper into the story of why
this headline is telling us that Target is harmful to our children. This type
of meme can create feelings of fear or extreme dislike due to the given
content.
Meme’s generally play on society’s emotional
values to create a sort of common ground and connection with their targeted
audience. Meme makers may ask themselves questions when generating memes, such
as, how can I connect with my audience? How can I grab the attention of others?
How can I make people laugh? How can I make people dislike this company? How
can the meme relate to others to gravitate and cause them to share, like, and
ultimately make the meme go viral? Questions such as these take on a large part
of the overall meme making process because it ultimately determines how they
are putting this information into our society and how our society will depict
the given information.
These findings help me to better understand
that society is an all to close network of weaved materials all based on popularity
and what people are easily relatable toward and how the use of memes can shape
a society’s viewpoint or standing about a particular topic, person,
organization, etc. When we take a look around at our society today, meme’s have
been able to easily influence those who choose to part take in the meme
culture. Things that your friends, family, classmates, etc., are sharing makes
you more susceptible to these images and in return you may tend to agree or
disagree with the topic, but will have been a part of that meme’s journey. I
believe that I will think of my popular culture topic differently because I am
able to see how meme’s can actually help to shape society and how they initiate
thoughts, translations, and actions based on their existence. People can take
the images portrayed as light hearted or take a different stand towards the
photo and get highly upset with what is being portrayed. The fact that people are
so easily able to share and see things via the internet opens up an entirely new
type of lifestyle in the world and everything can be grasped with the click of
a button. I believe that we also need to limit our intake of internet, advertisements,
and commercials so that we are not just a country built on the fascination of
consuming and on the opinions of others. We as a human race are easily
influenced and it is easy for me to see why people can be so susceptible when
our friends, family, etc., are showing us and liking these types of images
daily.
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