Meme's Potiential: Beyond Fun

By The Freaking News Reporters

Hanoi, 9/12/2021 23:00 GMT +7

We humans received and send a huge amount of information everyday and meme gradually becomes a creative way of easily transferring them in cyberspace.

What is meme?

Meme was part of oral culture like some attractive or simile sentences, a joke, or a quote. In recent days, meme is also forwarded emails, spam messages and links, and images.

A meme named "Disappointed Cricket Fan"

Source: Internet

Meme in transferring information.

In the last few years, meme has become a part of the communicational culture on the internet thanks to the rapid development of SNS like Facebook and Instagram,... Everyone uses meme as a way to raise humor and to get their thoughts across to others through it. People use meme to transfer information and messages via it since it is really short to read and easy to understand.

Source: Internet

According to Mrs. Do Thi Mai Thanh - lecturer teaching International Communication at University of Languages and International Studies, “Memes are used a lot on social networks and are communication tools that convey more meaning than a single paragraph text or lengthy explanations. It is used a lot by young people, in informal, even intimate situations, so memes do not have to be used in all interactive situations.”

By Minh Tam, reporter of The Freaking News

Meme is used to present information that is very difficult and takes a lot of time to transfer with text. Histotea is one of the most popular social networking sites using memes to get history across to viewers most of which are youngsters, and this is highly appreciated by a lot of people.

Meme in building up communities for meme player

In recent years, several meme communities have been created on Facebook for everyone. These communities are aimed to be a playground for people who have the same interest in memes and to build up connections between them. They are also places for them to show their characteristics, to share their creativity with people who can understand and appreciate their thoughts.

Facebook group Histotea for history information

Facebook group Mêm-stẻ for every kind of meme

A post in Histotea group about Vietnam’s economic-social status 1929-1933

By Minh Tam, reporter of The Freaking News

Mr. Nguyen Duc Lam, the administrator of the 2 most famous Facebook groups for language students called “Trại tâm thần đa ngôn ngữ” and “Trại tâm thần đa ngôn ngữ 2.0”, shared: “My groups are places where people can have any kind of emotion together, share tips for learning languages via memes. The members in these communities have the chance to find people learning the same languages, difficulties, and weaknesses with them and help each other. Furthermore, every news, drama or scandal all around the world is posted and transferred very quickly and very easy to understand, so everyone can reach news without difficulty. Those are positive things that my communities provide members.”

Recently, Hoa Lo Prison Relic  has launched a meme creation contest, a contest called "READ THE TEXTBOOK BY YOUR WAY" with the hashtag #SGKChallege. The contest was launched on the official Facebook fanpage of Hoa Lo Prison Relic, and it is designed to help students learn historical knowledge through creative memes. Historical knowledge is still considered an arid subject, and you mustmemorize many long writings of historic events, however, through meme creation, you will be able to approach history in a more vivid way than ever. The Hoa Lo Prison Relic also has a very attractive prize structure. If you find it interesting, drop by and unleash your meme creation!

Meme also has a negative side since it can carry lots of meaning in such a small thing like words or images. Some memes, specifically dark memes, can be designed with the aim to attack and tolerate people in a specific group’s identity. A black-racism meme from a movie can be used for fun with another concept but it still hurts black people when they see it.

Meme is a kind of property to someone and it can be shared and even sold without permission of the owner. "The people who make memes also hope that everyone respects the copyright," as the VNU admin team shared in an interview. The Facebook group “Trại tâm thần đa ngôn ngữ” and page “Chuyện trường U” were attacked and stolen by hackers for their own purposes with those communities’ reputation and a huge number of members.

Besides those things above that meme brings us, it can also be sold like goods in some NFT platforms. A girl from the US sold her original photo of a meme called "Disaster Girl" as a non-fungible token (NFT) - a digital ownership certificate this year and I worths 180 Ethereum, currently valued at over $500,000.

Meme called "Disaster Girl"