
Which Celebrity Brain Meme Is Best?
The most popular memes of the past year may not be the ones you’ll recognize on Instagram, Twitter or Facebook.
Instead, they may be a product of the technology we’ve adopted to help us find them, according to a new report.
The study, which tracked nearly 500,000 images from the Instagram Stories app, found that people have been using their social media accounts to capture the most viral and captivating memes for more than a year, according for the study, released Thursday.
“When you combine that with the popularity of Instagram and Facebook, it really means that it’s become a platform for the generation that are creating memes,” Dr. Chris Kresser, an associate professor at the NYU School of Medicine and lead author of the report, told The Huffington Post.
“And it’s also very lucrative.”
The study, called The Meme Explosion, looked at images posted to more than 2.5 million Instagram Stories accounts in May, June and July 2017.
It analyzed more than 4.2 billion images from each account and found that more than half the images posted were from people who were in their late teens or early 20s.
That meant that they were in the throes of a meme frenzy that’s only getting more frenetic.
“I think it’s a little ironic that this generation is the one that’s been more influenced by social media in terms of its popularity,” said Dr. Kressen, who was not involved in the study.
“I mean, the memes of that era were pretty bad.
But today we have so many things on the social media platform, that people are just going to take the best memes and use them for their own purposes.”
According to the study’s data, the average image posted in May was a 7.7 percent “selfie,” which meant a person uploaded a photo of themselves without captioning.
That number fell to 6.7% for June and 6.1% for July, the researchers said.
“So, the meme explosion seems to be happening on a pretty steady and consistent pace.”
The study’s results aren’t conclusive because of the small sample size.
But the findings are suggestive, said Dr Kress.
“The meme explosion may be more prevalent in the late-to-late teens to early 20-somethings than the millennials and older generations who are still using social media to create memes,” Kress said.
“There’s a lot of evidence that we’re not seeing a clear correlation between the amount of time that people spend on social media and their level of meme creation, but there’s a pretty strong correlation,” he added.
The study focused on images posted between May and July because of their popularity, but the data also included images posted by people with different ages.
The researchers found that the more time people spend online, the more they post.
“In terms of people who are in their early 20’s, the youngest generation, they’re using social networking to share their creations,” Dr Kressed said.
“[But] there’s also a younger generation who are on Instagram.
And there’s some evidence that younger generations tend to be more engaged in social media than older generations, and they tend to post a lot more memes.”