BTS member Jimin/BTS Twitter account

Superstar uses Twitter to create a new meme

If anybody struggles to understand a “meme,” a word coined by English evolutionary biology and author Richard Dawkins, he or she can just visit the Twitter account of K-pop superstar BTS.

According to Wikipedia, a meme is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture. A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideals, symbols, or practices.

At first, the evolutionary terminology is pretty hard to understand, but BTS continues to create a perfect example of a meme.

Earlier this week, BTS member Jimin posted three selfies at the Twitter account of the seven-piece boy band.

Using a fun filter, he added a full-blown mustache and glasses that completely changed his look. In around 15 hours, the picture gained almost 1 million likes and more than 300,000 retweets.

His fans follow suit of the 23-year-old star whose real name is Park Ji-min to inspire a new meme.

In other words, Jimin generated a new meme, a viral phenomenon that spread through the processes of variation, mutation, competition, and inheritance, so that it propagates throughout the social networking site.

In fact, other BTS members also create a meme because they are loved and adored for every single thing they do.

For example, BTS member Jungkook was spotted wearing a modernized hanbok, Korea’s traditional dress, early this month while the idol group left Korea to Japan for its world concert tour.

A few days later, the youngest member of BTS also entered the country wearing the same attire with a black mask.

Then, BTS fans visited the website of the hanbok’s maker to purchase the same one, which caused the internet site to crash.

To the surprise of many, Jungkook’s attire is not just a modernized hanbok. It is a clerical robe for Buddhist monks – the power of a meme.

 

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