I think people just don’t know what a meme is anymore. A meme is just a image on the Internet for them.
At this point I’ve seen people use meme for something as generic as something being funny, something being bad, literally just images of tweets, etc.
To me a meme is exactly: A visually assisted joke format. Where the visual provides both the structure of the joke and carries with it some extra cultural understanding that enhances the joke if people understand it. And in order for it to be a meme and not just a comic or something, it needs to be reused to make other jokes with the same format. Optionally, the very act of reusing it can itself add shared meaning in a meta sense.
At this point I’ve seen people use meme for something as generic as something being funny, something being bad, literally just images of tweets, etc.
But that’s what a meme literally is:
A meme is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme. A meme acts as a unit for carrying ideas, symbols, or practices, that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme.
Source: Wikipedia
Your definition is describing a macro.
Sort of? I know meme was a word before the internet usage of it took off, but what I described is how it has been used in the space of internet memes for over a decade. And that usage ends up just being a more specific definition than the broader one. An internet meme is a subset of the academic concept of a meme.
It seems only recently people on the internet have started more casually using it in the way I described.
An example that’s particularly confusing to me: I play a bunch of strategy games. Sometimes people will call a particular strategy a “meme” when they just mean it’s bad. It doesn’t carry any kind of extra meaning with it. It’s not going to convey any other ideas. They’ve just swapped out one word for a word that means something else for seemingly no reason other than laziness.
idk, doesn’t really matter that much. It’s just one of those little things that rubs me the wrong way.