To many people, perhaps most often more elderly people, a meme is a mysterious thing. A lot of people have no idea what it is or what it does. The Internet appears to have spawned a mass of memes. But they were everywhere before the internet. Most of us know about the writing on the wall: “Kilroy Was Here” with a picture of a funny person perhaps with a big nose peering over a wall or just the words. That is an example of a pre-internet meme. So what is it?
I still find it a rather intangible concept but it is basically having fun in copying in your own style an existing meme which may be an image, words or an idea. The Internet memes that I see most often concern images. There are images with words. For successful memes people in their millions repeat the image in their own style and it gradually evolves, spreading virally a bit like the growth of a living creature which brings me conveniently to the person who first dreamt up the word “meme”, Richard Dawkins, who is famous for his atheism and who wrote the book “The Selfish Gene” (a book on evolution) in which the word was first coined. The book was published in 1976.
This is a video about memes (it is a bit memeish itself):
This article is about an Internet cat meme of which there are many because the domestic cat is a favourite for Internet surfers. This is the “heavy breathing cat meme”, a complete mystery to me before I realised that some people like to search for information about it. However, I don’t think you can provide information about it other than by showing pictures because there is not a lot you can say about memes as they are rather abstract, in the minds and in the imagination of people having fun in copying and evolving the original.
Below is a large collage of the heavy breathing cat meme showing variations on it.
Here is a silly heavy breathing cat meme video which lasts for ten minutes! You might manage the first 30 seconds:
I didn’t last 5 seconds.
Not sure if I can watch 10 minutes of heavy cat breathing …… 10 seconds maybe….. heavy cat breathing mmm is that a heavy cat thats breathing or a normal cat thats breathing heavy?
The words “parallel universe” some to mind….
I think people need something better to do than wasting time on mindless stuff like this for no reason.
This is the modern world. It is for the young. The youth of today as we know live a very different life to the one we lived.
I’m not sure what it is that makes me think this is (I’m groping for a word other than stupid) trivial entertainment.
I’m not getting it really; and, I don’t think it has anything to do with a generation gap.