Dave's ESL Cafe's Student Discussion Forums

[keira]

Hi

About Twitter, what is the difference between "tweets" and "twitter meme" ??


Thanks!
keira

[Philo Kevetch]

Hllo Keira -

<<www.tweetmeme.com>>

If you already have a good idea of what 'tweets' are, this site should help you understand the difference.

Philo

p.s. - When you find out...let me know, will you?

[redset]

Basically a 'meme' is an idea or a concept that gets passed around, reused and modified while staying with the theme. Lolcats are a famous meme - if you've seen a picture of a cat with some text like "I HAZ TYPED ON UR COMPUTAR" or something similar then that's a 'lolcat', and the idea is to take a picture of a cat, type something in broken English as if that's the cat talking, and hopefully it's funny. People make their own versions, use other animals and ways of speaking and that's how the meme spreads.

Other memes can just be catchphrases and so on, like people posting comments on Youtube saying 'thumbs up if you think something or other'. We could get into a more complex discussion about how memes are fragments of ideas and cultural concepts, the same way that genes are a way of spreading pieces of biological information, but since we're on the Internet it's safe to say we're generally talking about in-jokes and so on.

So a "Twitter meme" is just a meme that gets copied around Twitter a lot. If a lot of people started tweeting what they're doing at exactly 2:36pm, that would be a Twitter meme. It's an idea that people get involved with and pass around, that happens on Twitter in this case!