According to the explanatory dictionary of modern terms, the meme is unit of transfer of the certain cultural information distributed in a certain environment. Today most often understand certain pictures or phrases which bear all the known sense as the meme.
The term "meme" comes from the Greek word, in translation meaning "similarity". For the first time memes as a welfare phenomenon were described in the book by Richard Dawkins "A selfish gene". It described the meme as the cultural phenomenon which extends via channels the Internet and media and causes certain socially significant consequences. This idea was picked up and developed further by sociologists Osborne Wilson, Charles Lamsden and Douglas Rashkoff.
Development of virtual environment and the Internet gave the chance to memes to extend worldwide. Internet memes extend thanks to forums, blogs, e-mail, social networks and other ways of communication. But from where memes undertake?
Any phrase, the picture or sound having any certain value can become the meme. If the meme was pleasant to people, it will quickly win popularity and will have support of a great number of supporters. In fact, the meme is a mental virus – it extends by means of any texts, jokes, scientific knowledge, movies, advertizing, etc. Gradually the meme is fixed in human culture and becomes well-known, it is used to express any feeling or the relation.
Can create the meme everyone, but learn in advance whether there will be it popular, it is impossible. In addition to memes phrases, for example, "Captain obvious", "preved, Medved", "photoshopped image", memes pictures are very popular today. Most often it is the simplest images of the person drawn in the graphics editor with different looks. As the original photos of the famous people (for example, the Chinese basketball player Yao Ming, Nicholas Cage's actors, Jackie Chan, etc.), comics or other sources can serve.
Authorship of many memes cannot be defined, but sometimes their history is quite unexpected. For example, the meme of Trollface (or Coolface) representing the malicious mug which stretched in a smile was created by the murderer pedophile Henry Li Lucas in the middle of the XX century. It left the drawing of the smiling troll on a wall of the prison cell, and in 2006 this meme thanks to the user of Whynne from the website DeviantArt became popular and began own life on the Internet.