The Expanding Brain Meme serves as common ground for meme creators and viewers to come together and partake in meme sharing and collaboration. Within this space of satire, personalities of the meme community are revealed. There is a constant development that occurs once a meme has been published on the web. Users take the original meme and add their own version based on something that they believe is relatable to others within the meme community. The meme is constantly transformed by other users and as a result, the meme is exposed to the effects of collaboration. The collaboration that occurs is different from the way it can be observed in the traditional face to face form of collaboration. Within the meme community, users act according to an unspoken set of guidelines that help to shape the Expanding Brain Meme. The absence of open collaboration establishes a cooperation that allows the meme to continue to grow in accordance with the agreed upon rules that the users abide by. In a face-to-face setting, collaborators are able to meet with each other and openly discuss the ways that certain details can be changed.
Thanks to the contributions of r/dankmemes, the meme community has been able to express themselves in a new format. In fact, this meme has become so embedded in society that people have started to establish connections between this meme and everyday objects, such as MRI scans.
An influential aspect that results in the appreciation of memes is the fact that they are constantly changing and evolving. In today’s Internet environment, pictures and videos quickly go viral which causes new memes to constantly emerge. Memes today have evolved due to the use of object labeling to alter pictures or videos that have gone viral. The Expanding Brain Meme originated as a result of the word “whomst,” which went viral at the time of its creation. However, the word soon began to fade as new memes emerged and gained popularity. Yet, the Expanding Brain Meme had a revival due to the emergence of a relatable viral trend that used the Expanding Brain Meme’s format. This meme reflects the notion that different trends and relatable actions or feelings can influence which images go viral; thus these factors ultimately influence which memes gain popularity.
Expanding Brain Meme 