You’ve seen them all over the internet, from Instagram to Facebook from Twitter to Plurk (remember that), they’re often just called “memes” after Richard Dawkins’ term for a self-replicating piece of knowledge analogous to a self-replicating gene in biology. But, there are a wide variety of memes from the “belief in Santa Claus”, all that #deceivedwisdom I wrote about in my book, and LOLcatz etc. There are also those allegedly inspirational or educational phrases or sayings that people share in the vain hope of changing other people’s minds and behaviours (usually you’re on a hiding to nothing in that regard). They’re often done with fancy fonts overlaid on a nice image or photo, like these first two examples I made yesterday for one reason or another…the one at the bottom was a kind of anti-aphorism.
Anyway, I don’t know if anyone has coined the term in this context before, but as of 8th January 2014, I am calling these entities graphorisms – to mean graphical aphorisms.