@memehive officially released the MEME Token and is rewarding people who post with the tags #meme #meme and #memehive .
It is fun to watch a community grow from scratch; So, with my personal account @yintercept, I slapped a HIVE onto the counter and bought 2000 MEME at the price of 0.0005. There are 25 Million MEME is circulation; so this price might actually be high.
It appears that the tribe is calculating rewards with SMT instead of Scotbot. Personally, i have no idea how any of this stuff work. I am just hoping that token will have a high interest rate; so that I get back part of the HIVE I invested.
Submitting a Meme
I figured that since I bought some MEME, I should write about the tribe. To avoid the accusation of #tagspam the post needs to start with a meme, which brings up the question: What the heck is a meme?
I think that my picture with a can of meat covered in a large number of tags might be a meme.
But, I don't know. Does the picture qualify as a meme?
History of Memes
Richard Dawkins coined the term "meme" and used it in his book "The Selfish Gene." In this work Dawkins claimed that ideas share some of the same properties as genes. To Dawkins, a meme is structure that carries and perpetuates ideas.
Dawkins is famous for a deep seated hatred of the Christian tradition and is known for sniffing down from his pulpit that religion is a meme.
I used to respect Dawkins and read all of his books, but the pseudo-science that spouted from the man's lips got so tedious that I soon classified the man in the same category as the clerics that Dawkins despised.
If I still admired Dawkins, I would probably say something snipy like religion is just a container of memes.
The word seems to have some value as a device that conveys ideas. So, Aesop's Fables are devices which carried a certain set of ideas through the classical world.
I guess modern social justice warriors could say that we could engineer a just world if we destroyed all of the memes that carried classical culture and replaced the memes with new memes that convey social justice.
The idea that the ruling elite can transform society by crafting new memes seems like nonsense to me.
Internet Memes
Folks on the Internet captured the term "meme." The wikipedia article on Internet Meme says that any idea carried through the Internet or social media is a meme.
It classifies the use of emoticons as memes. I guess the common acronyms used while texting are memes.
Calling Donald Trump "The Orangeman" and grunting "Orangeman bad" is a meme.
Some people started using the term "meme" for images that transmit political or humorous text as a meme.
Another name of an image that includes humorous or political text is "cartoon."
It seems to me that the really big difference between memes and cartoons is the way that memes get transmitted from person to person.
Cartoons tend to be published through traditional publishing channels. Publishers of cartoons are very sensitive to copyright issues.
The term "meme" is often used for images which get retweeted, retumbled and reblogged millions of times.
A meme creator might create and tweet an image of Biden with a mask on backwards with the hope that the image would get retweeted thousands of times.
There Is a Point to My Essay
It seems to me that the defining character of a meme is the way that the meme gets copied.
Unlike Twitter, which has an exclusive focus on popularity, HIVE values originality.
People on HIVE do not engage in the same reblogging frenzies that are found on on Twitter and Facebook. People on HIVE often get downvoted when they copy and paste images from other sources.
I understand that some meme-artists on HIVE have been subject to some nasty downvote wars.
While, I love political cartoons and would love to see more political cartoons on HIVE, I think that there may be a culture clash between the meme community and the HIVE community.
Again, I need to repeat, a meme is not about the content of an image. A meme is about the way that ideas spread along social networks.
Memes, by their very nature, involve copyright infringement. For a meme to spread smoothly through social media, the meme artist must be willing to release the image used for the meme into the public domain.
When I hear an artist calling his cartoons "memes" I assume the artist wants people copy and share the image.
Does this argument make any senses to anyone but me?
Memes and Tag Spam
I created a picture of a can of meat covered by tags to discuss tagspam .
Interestingly, I don't think that that the meme tribe will experience tag spam in the same way as other tribes.
If @memehive is using the term "meme" to mean "cartoon;" then the tribe can judge a post by the simple question of whether or not the post contains a cartoon.
I Still Don't Know What the Term Meme Means
I think the new meme token will be very interesting, although I still have no idea what the term means. I thought Dawkins was onto something when I first read The Selfish Gene.
Most things shared as "memes" show pictures of celebrities and some wording. I might make some pictures designed to convey a meaning. I will include the tag #meme when I do.