![]() Jacqui Cheng, PhD Blogger School of Hard Knocks July 23, 2007 I suppose this is a meta-tweet, about tweeting. The ironic, self-parodying culture of the internet makes it a hotbed for meta. Popular culture has also gone meta, with cartoons showing their self-awareness as cartoons or films mocking the tropes of film. ![]() It’s often used in the predicate, though, as in: that video was so meta.Įxamples of meta are often found in fine arts, with, say, paintings of paintings or photographs of photographers. It can act as a simple modifier (e.g., He made a meta comment on Facebook). True to its history, meta can be prefixed (e.g., meta-definition). Meta has gone on, in the gaming world, for anything out of the universe of the game used to affect the universe in the game-cheating, in a nutshell, and making the game less fun for more earnest players. In the late 1990s, metagaming was used in games like Dungeons & Dragons to refer to an in-game character unfairly using information gathered outside of the game world by their player. While some claim this meta is an acronym for Most Effective Tactic Available (a folk etymology), it is short for metagaming, using knowledge about the game itself to beat the “game” of mastering that game. In the 1990s–2000s, meta took special root in online gaming communities when discussing the most successful strategies, characters, or weapons. One early instance, for example, described an appearance of a real-life TV news anchor of Murphy Brown, a sitcom about a fictional anchor, as meta. Meta-, here, suggests “ transcending” or “overarching,” helping it become a synonym for self-referential by the 1980s in postmodernism and popular culture, used for creative works that alluded to their own form, genre, tropes, or other conventions. The prefix meta- is notably used in metaphysics, a form of which is recorded in the 14th century for philosophy concerned with the first principles of things, the nuts and bolts of reality and existence. Meta comes from the Greek prefix and preposition meta, which means “after” or “beyond.” When combined with words in English, meta- often signifies “change” or “alteration” as in the words metamorphic or metabolic.
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