| In the age of information, with the rapid development of transmission instrument, the Internet, regarded as the fourth medium, is now playing an increasingly significant role in human communications and exerting great influence on every aspect of human society. Reading news on the Internet has become an indispensable part of people's daily life. However, due to the characteristics of isolation of headlines and news contents and time restriction, more often than not, people would browse the news headlines first and click on the ones they are interested in and then read the news content in more details. This kind of utilitarian and preferential reading habit and today's fast-food-type information consumption trend make the outstanding of the importance of headlines in the activity of news writing and news editing. Compared with newspaper headlines, news headlines on the Internet play a more important role because when hundreds of headlines condensed within one webpage, the good ones become crucial in attracting readers'fleeting attention. Therefore, the competition between web news is, to a great extent, the competition between web news headlines.Memetics, based on Darwin's evolution theory, is a new theory to interpret cultural evolution. Web news headline, as a special language meme, follows the same laws of the language meme's propagation and transmission. According to the selection criteria proposed by Francis Heylighen (2000) and combine the characteristics of the web news headlines, the author of the present research puts forward six selection criteria, namely, simplicity, novelty, authority, coherence, utility and publicity. Web news editors usually bond web news headlines with strong language memes to form new memes or memeplexes with a view to enhancing their infectivity and readability and thus attracting readers'attention and increasing click rate.Inspired by the explanatory power of Verschueren's adaptation theory (2000), the author of the present thesis holds that through the medium of web news, communication also occurs between web news crew and web newsreaders. However, different from instant verbal communication, to better attract readers'attention and enhance click frequency, better communication can be achieved by adapting to readers'three worlds, namely, mental world, social world and physical world. Couched within the memetic theory, the present thesis tries to classify and analyze the collected web news headlines and find that some web news headlines can easily make them strong memes because they not only share the same propagation rule as language memes but also have something to do with network technologies, Internet users'social mental state and the interactions between them.
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