Forums / Discussion / Meme Research

Someone should make one.

Would the meme entry focus on how the GIF format became popularized? I think that has more to do with Compuserv's popularity, power, and influence in developing web technology in the 1980's rather than being a community-driven movement.

Sorry, image formats don't strike me as being memes.

Not even as just a parent entry?

Parent entries are generally for classification of memes. So far, we've been classifying memes mostly by the memetic hubs that they came from, or by memes that were spawned from other memes. But there are a lot of memes that are made up of GIFs, JPGs, PNGs, and various video formats.

I don't think that file formats are a meaningful way of classifying memes.

But GIFs are made popular by the internet, unlike JPEG, which is just used for looking back to photos you made, for example.

(I'm not easily satisfied :P)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF

CompuServe introduced the GIF format in 1987 to provide a color image format for their file downloading areas, replacing their earlier run-length encoding (RLE) format, which was black and white only. GIF became popular because it used LZW data compression, which was more efficient than the run-length encoding that formats such as PCX and MacPaint used, and fairly large images could therefore be downloaded in a reasonably short time, even with very slow modems.

That's just technological innovation, not cultural expression.

yeah chris summed it up. i THINK can be under a section to convey memes, like youtube, jpg, 4chan etc.