Welcome to our blog! We are the Brave
of Seven, a group of students on a course called Communicating in the Digital
World, at the University of Vaasa.
Why did we chose
this name for our group? Well, obviously there is seven of us. At the first
lecture of the course we were taught to step out of our comfort zone. We
decided to be brave and defeat this course. That’s why we are called the Brave
of Seven.
We also had to
choose a theme to our blog. We had little difficulties to come up with a theme
that is interesting to all of us. Anyway, the theme is now is tv-series and
movies. It means that our blog posts are always somehow related to this theme.
After coming up
with the name, theme and creating a blog we started working on our first
assignment. What we had to do, was to decide an interesting
phenomenon of digital communication which does not yet have a name and
give a name for it and write the name and description in Urban Dictionary.
At first it seemed
difficult to imagine a phenomenon that doesn’t have a name yet. Quite soon one
of us came up with an idea: to define the phenomenon of using memes as the main
way of communicating in the social media. The rest of us thought the idea was
very good, we didn’t have to argue about it. We don’t have a word for that kind
of communication even though it is very common. It was also quite easy to
create a word for the phenomenon. There was already an existing word meme so what we had to do was to adapt the
word to our needs. To create a verb out of it. We decided to combine the words meme and communicate.
Writing the
official definition wasn't as easy as we thought: we had to post and edit the
definiton three times before our new word was accepted to be part of the
vocabulary of Urban Dictionary. It is actually very difficult to define a new
word so that everyone can understand it.
So, nowadays we
have a word for this phenomenon. The phenomenon can be called to memecate. The official
definition is to use memes as
the way of communication in the social media, to describe and comment events
and facts on social media by using memes, usually in a humorous
way. Usually used by heavy Internet users (Geeks). There is a
pre-knowledge of memecating or memes needed, to use memes in the right context.
You can find the
definition also on the Urban Dictionary when you click here.
The first
assignment was very interesting. Time will show if our new word will actually
be used in general. Anyway, it was interesting to notice that this is how the
process actually works: someone is in a need of a word for an unnamed
phenomenon and comes up with an idea. He/she starts to use the word and if
other people find it good enough, it becomes part of people’s daily vocabulary.
In conclusion, let
me memecate a little by using the favorite memes of our group!
| https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQglTs5mCLvdrV2i5wWD3WdnNbTwh4HMpKkh6xrjyVLy-YFRwZrOw |
 |
| http://www.digitallydanielle.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Blog-meme-2.0.png |
 |
| http://cdn.crushable.com/files/2012/04/Offensive-Forrest-Gump-1.jpg |
 |
| https://scontent-b-ams.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xpf1/v/t1.0-9/10522094_10203620098772785_7755325129432332811_n.jpg?oh=1efee317d1e30205ed1af51ca43cc8d1&oe=556918E2 |
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http://www.quickmeme.com/img/a9/a99abdac727ddfc3646fe9b55d8b0f10c943f8e813bd1d84b9102d0c48c09519.jpg
|
Stay tuned! :)
H-L S.
