A Study On The Internet Buzzwords From Memetic Perspective

Memetics, a newly emerging science, catches the attention of many scholars since its birth. Many scholars try to get some enlightenment by combining memetics with their research field. In China, memetics develops relatively slowly, and there are only a small number of people who conduct the research of memetics. This paper attempts to analyze the replication mechanism of internet memes with memetics and tries to find out the characteristics of internet buzzwords and the features of successful internet memes.Based on Verschueren's adaptation theory, and enlightened by the theory of Susan Blackmore (1999)'s selective imitation, this thesis attempts to analyze the internet buzzwords from a new angle—memetics. The general argument is that successful internet buzzwords can be regarded as meme products and the meme products are the outcome of netizens'adaptive behavior.Vast and various memes compete for survival in their living environment, and only those which have higher value in fidelity, fecundity and longevity have the chance to win out. In the memetic adaptation model, the CML gets adapted to the cyberspace mainly from three perspectives: the mental worid, the physical world, and the social world as well. Consciously or unconsciously, the netizens play an important role in the memetic survival and adaptation process in which all the changes made on the language's part such as the word choices or sentence patterns are to facilitate the meme ?infection'to the potential hosts. Firstly, the research tracks some internet buzzwords published on November 8th and 9th, 2010 by china.org.cn and we just record them. About one month later, on January 6th, 2011, china.org.cn published another list of top ten internet buzzwords of 2010. After comparing the two lists of the buzzwords, we find that changes happened. Some buzzwords published in November vanished, and some new internet buzzwords emerged. And some other buzzwords are still in use by netizens. The research shows that those internet buzzwords that are handed down, possess their own characteristics, and there are two ways of their replication--horizontal and vertical transmission. The characteristics of the Chinese internet buzzwords are as follows: firstly, the organical combination of language inheritance with creativity; secondly, the internet buzzwords show some features of grassroots culture; thirdly, the internet buzzwords possess―rheological‖characteristic of grassroots culture; finally, high-frequency occurrence on the internet is another characteristic of the internet buzzword. And the characteristics of English buzzwords are: firstly, a strong political flavor is found in the English list; secondly, closely related to news; thirdly, the way of the transmission is mainly through microblogging. Furthermore, combining with the subjects of this research, the author tries to conclude the characteristics of a successful internet meme: economy, novelty, fashionability and expressivity.We hope that our research could have a high value both in theory and application. That is, the memetic theory is effective to explain language variation, socio-cultural inheritance, and provides us with a unique evidence to observe the rules underlying language variation and cultural development.