Memes: Taking the World by Storm

      It is interesting to me the way that social media has taken over everything in our daily lives. In fact, I have come to this conclusion, and even made this exact statement, a multitude of times. This particular time I was scrolling through Instagram, as I often do, and came across a meme page called Kale Salad, and it got me thinking how digitized the world of comedy has become. In its origin it is likely that jokes were told through word-of-mouth. As time has progressed this still remains true seeing as comedians still tell jokes by word-of-mouth, and many of them get paid a lot of money to do so. However, within the last twenty years a new medium of comedy has risen to the stage, and it is called a meme. By definition a meme is an image, video or piece of text that is copied (often with slight variation) and spread rapidly by internet users. Memes may contain anything from a simple joke to a hurtful image at someone's expense. Yet, they have taken over and you can find many meme pages that have millions of followers across all kinds of platforms. On top of that, the people running those pages are getting compensated for advertisements that may be placed on their page. It truly is a new form of comedy that has really never been seen before. For the most part you will find that memes typically resonate with a much younger crowd as adults don't seem to find much humor in juvenile jokes. Nonetheless, there is major space for them across all areas of social media and it will be very interesting to see what the future holds for that which has been dubbed the meme.