Memetic Analysis Of Internet Buzzwords Transmission

Meme is one of the fundamental terms in memetics. It is also a cardinal unit of information transmission in cultural evolutionary theory. Everything can be called a meme if it is copied and transmitted via imitation from person to person. In the perspective of sociolinguistics, information transmission in language is always companied with variation. Internet buzzwords are featured as newly developing language variation, which have appealing for creativity, originality and expressiveness. Therefore, Internet buzzword study becomes a pretty new and hot topic in sociolinguistics.Based on the framework of Susan Blackmore(1999)'s "selective imitation" view and Francis Heylighen (2001)'s model of "meme selection criteria", this dissertation selects hottest Chinese internet buzzwords in high-frequency usage as research subject, and tries to testify the tentative hypothesis of "internet buzzwords are meme-driven carriers for language variation and cultural information transmission". This study applies qualitative-quantitative methods and establishes a database of internet buzzwords with high frequency from famous portals such as NetEase and Sina, personal blogs and BBS, etc. Simultaneously, large quantities of new internet buzzwords are supplied into the database from the published net-language dictionaries and the State Language Resources Monitoring and Researching Center. Then, the detailed data analysis has been carried out with the help of calculating software.In this research the author classified internet buzzwords into six types: emoticons, numbers, letters, mixed words, derivatives and story words. With the careful analysis of data, we could find the following: the use of internet buzzwords is the process of meme transmission; the vitality of internet buzzwords is originated from meme-driven competitiveness; internet buzzwords not only make themselves more attractive but also fitter themselves to the current environment so as to obtain a large chance of being selected, imitated, transmitted, preserved and finally lexicalized in our language system. Meanwhile, we could be aware that internet meme selection is influenced by netizen's psychological cognition, emotive affinities and related closely to the socio-cultural value systems; internet meme imitation embodies both the creativity in word-formation and the uniqueness of e-media; the horizontal and vertical mechanisms in the process of meme transmission reflect the memes' longevity, fecundity and fidelity.Focusing on the perspective of memes, this research has made a deep research on internet memes' selection, imitation, transmission and the variation of internet buzzwords, and proposed a basic mode of internet buzzwords, which is "competitive selection—varied imitation—timely transmission". Therefore, this 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 provide us with a unique evidence to observe the rules underlying language variation and cultural development.