Our media is filled with viruses. Celebrities, famous personalities, the internet, are all media viruses.
Everyone around us is a product of these. We live in a modern society where we can share and change ideas, beliefs and values however we see fit, wherever we may be.
These ideas then turn into cultures and traditions which defines a community.
People within those communities carry these ideas on from person to person which then spread along accordingly, like a virus.
The way biological viruses work is that they have a protein shell, that contains genetic material.
It then latches on to a healthy cell, injects it’s genetic code until it gains complete control over the cell. Once is has control of the cell’s functions, it then reproduces. Making the cell a factory, causing it to replicate and so on.
This is the exact same way that media viruses work. Media is the factory and memes are the virus cells. The word meme has recently been associated with just videos and images that create a kind of inside joke on social media.
But memes have been around since the beginning of modern civilizations, we just came up with a name for it in the 70’s. The word meme was first coined by scientist Richard Dawkins that explained that memes are a cultural replicator that can be copied and spread with variation.
TVs, social media, websites, movies, advertisements, books, video games, communities and so on need people. They need people to absorb what it is that they are trying to show you. What they are trying to tell you.
They need your mind. To help create more copies, and to spread further.
Once they have your mind, replication happens. You become another cell for the virus, the meme, to spread.
What could be a call to action, could lead to a movement. What could be a simple act of imitation, become a culture.
No matter what you do, the viruses will come find you and this isn’t a bad thing. We learn our beliefs from our parents. We have social media because of our friends. We have our interests from our TVs. We become products of our environment.
The idea that we are molded from what we see and hear, helps us understand how to pick and choose what it is that defines us as consumers of media.
It is our interests that keep the memes alive and the viruses spreading. If more people were aware of this, of what they were doing, maybe society would be more different being that we control the content we see and share.
Or maybe it will stay just as it is now, with media making us want to fall into these categories that it creates. Who knows, but one thing will never change and that’s the spread of the media viruses in our world
Song used A Walk Into Space by Topher Mohr and Alex Elena
All videos were used for educational purposes and all belong to their respective owners
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