memes, memes, crying cat

"The Common People 6" actually came out in May, which was shocking.

How do ideas and cultures spread? How do they change in different time and space? If we put the concept of biology into human culture, we can find that vocabulary, language, thought, and even culture are all biological; and some of these phenomena can be explained by the concept of evolution.

Based on the current evidence, the evolution process of organisms can be roughly classified into four stages, namely:

1. Within the same species, there are heritable variations among individuals.
2. The species proliferates, resulting in scarcity of resources.
3. Individuals with different variations compete for resources.
4. Individuals with a competitive advantage survive, passing the variation on to offspring.

If the same concept is applied to cultural events, interesting things start to happen. First, a "meme" 1 may be widely circulated, quoted, edited, rewritten, or recreated. These offspring "born" from the original memes are different from each other; however, because of the limited means of human thought and communication, only some of the "offspring memes" can remain in society and culture for a long time. Therefore, offspring memes must compete with each other, and in the end, only the group of offspring memes that are easily accepted and spread can be circulated, thereby producing more meme babies.

If images are used as an example, words can be said to be the initial carrier in the dissemination of memes; then the emergence of instrumental music, recording and broadcasting has made sounds replace words to a certain extent. However, using images as a cultural carrier is easier for most people to understand and remember than words and sounds; the popularization of the Internet and the improvement of technology make it easier to spread images. Therefore, interesting and easy-to-remember images have appeared in large numbers in recent years, further forming the phenomenon of meme pictures; while text memes or sound memes cannot compete with images, and gradually succumbed to this round of competition.

To sum up, a large part of cultural phenomena can be explained by biological evolution, which is the "biological nature of culture". As the basic unit of culture, memes mutate, multiply, compete with each other, and then produce different ideological and social phenomena. Among them, there is no so-called "best meme", only "the most suitable meme for the current time and space", just as sound replaces text and image replaces sound.

However, memes using the film as a carrier began to slowly rise...

1 : Memes, abstract concepts used to describe cultural units, which may be ideas or symbols. Can be compared to "species" in biology, see Wikipedia, Meme: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme .