![]() Brad Kim, the site's editor-in-chief, shares Milner's deference toward the power of memes. To a degree, KnowYourMeme has become something of a Rosetta Stone for deciphering the propaganda shaping the modern world. While Milner hopes that, as the sites grow, they'll implement a standardization of the criteria needed for adding and amending meme entries, he acknowledges that, even in their current less-polished form, they're "effective" tools for historicizing. While on the surface, the two sites may appear redundant as they both essentially explain memes, the more clinical (and advertiser-friendly) database at KnowYourMeme complements the intentionally abstruse and problematic slang-filled Dramatica pages, just as studying Latin benefits from exposing one's self to both the formal structure of classical and the common parlance of vulgar. One solution to this problem would be for meme historians to "overload with context," according to Milner, who praised meme explanation sites, KnowYourMeme and Encyclopædia Dramatica for their part in satisfying that need. KnowYourMeme and Encyclopædia Dramatica's entries on feminism With so many important or noteworthy memes firmly rooted in antagonistic political, social, and moral posturing, future catalogers may over-compensate in their attempts to divest themselves of all bias when collecting and curating, "ignoring the truth for the sake of being painfully neutral." Milner feels genuine objectivity will be easier said than done when it comes to chronicling memes for posterity. "And from a cultural lineage standpoint, this stuff is more and more wrapped up in popular culture, people's everyday lives, and how we communicate with one another, so having the resources and ability for someone to know where something comes from will be essential going forward."īut to learn "where something comes from" isn't as cut and dry an endeavor as it used to be. "As internet memes grow in popularity, prominence, and consequence, they become a more serious endeavor," says Milner. Milner's book, The World Made Meme, was published by the MIT's university press last September and touches on the importance of cataloging this new breed of digital shibboleth. Furthermore, their research projects on the subject of memes are beginning to peek through the shroud of academia as more easily digestible content for the layman. The University of California, Santa Cruz announced it would be offering a class called Linguistics 135: Memes: When Language and Culture Go Viral as part of its 2016 winter quarter roster, while individual graduate and PhD students have been focusing on the topic for nearly a decade. ![]() ![]() Once merely a punchline in Northwestern University's satirical campus paper, the concept of the meme studies major is fast approaching reality.
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