TikTok Is the Latest Reason Teens Are Addicted to Their Phones
抖音成為青少年沉溺手機的最新原因
When Holly Grace, a 23-year-old part-time singer and full-time nurse in Nashville, Tenn., first started making videos for the app TikTok, she had no idea she was any good at creating memes—those viral bits of content that have been the internet’s raison detre since millions discovered a moronic website called “Hampster Dance” 20 years ago.
The word “meme” was coined by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins well before the internet was being used by anyone other than a few far-flung computer nerds. He defined it as “a unit of cultural transmission,” and intended that the word sound like “gene.”
Modern-day memes have become the lingua franca of our digital world, allowing people to communicate in an often humorous kind of shorthand. Even if you don’t know what I’m talking about, you’ve perhaps heard of Grumpy Cat, or that dress that was either blue or white, or the “Gangnam Style” video that forced YouTube to add more digits to its view counter.
All of them went viral, and then became memes as people appropriated them for their own uses, taking the picture of Grumpy Cat, for example, and adding a couple lines of text about one way or another that people are annoying.
Brad Kim, editor in chief at Know Your Meme, a website devoted to the obsessive, even academic, study of memes, says they are best understood as a cluster of ideas that people reproduce and iterate on, altering their meaning as they go.
Originally just widely shared pictures or videos, memes have become something anyone can easily create and exchange. For Generation Z and younger Millennials, they’re a way to get beyond the limits of plain text.
“One of the problems of text is you lose the tone,” says Chris Slowe, chief technology officer of Reddit. “But if the meme is well known, you get a certain kind of tone and way of reading it that either helps the joke or helps get across what you’re trying to say.”
In other words, they’re a language of sorts, often laden with coded references or sentiments that are inscrutable to anyone born before the first Bush presidency. And certainly, being in on a joke that’s lost on older generations can be part of the allure.
