Memes

Background

Internet users of today might think of memes as references spread online through images, videos, and audio clips. But the merger between memes and the internet didn't happen until the 1980s and 1990s, years after the term meme was first coined to describe a different phenomenon.

The 1976 book "The Selfish Gene" by author and biologist Richard Dawkins proposed units of culture could be replicated, passed on, and evolve as they were transmitted, similar to human genes. He called this unit a "meme," to be pronounced like "cream."

History

This unit of cultural transmission or imitation includes any concept that spreads similarly to genes, with mutations arising at random as memes pass between users and newer iterations possibly outliving their ancestors. (Watch Dawkins discuss his original proposal here).

Such intentional reshaping of communication transmissions dates back at least hundreds of years to the advent of the chain letter, a type of message that asks readers to create their own copy or at least forward it to others. (Read a folklorist’s dive into chain letter evolution here).

Since it was first proposed nearly half a century ago, the idea of the meme itself has already mutated, its changes hurried along by the arrival of the internet in 1983. Shifting from a proposed cultural evolutionary concept, the meme is now largely considered to be content—ranging from emoticons and LOLcats to autotuned TV news interviews, GIFs, and TikTok sounds—spread between and intentionally iterated upon by netizens. (Hear Dawkins’ take on internet memes here).

Copypasta—text, images, or video clips copied and pasted across forums and comment sections ad nauseam—is an internet-age iteration of this age-old practice that's mutated into others, such as creepypasta, a genre of online collaborative horror.

Impact

One measure of a meme’s success may be its virality or ability to spread, a characteristic influenced by countless others, including relatability and relevance. The consequences of virality vary, especially as the people featured in memes tend not to be the same people creating or, sometimes, financially benefiting from them.

That's not to say that memes limited in shareability, whether by their niche target audience or non-humorous tone, such as those about depression or war, aren't also "successful." Memes can be validating and cathartic, contributing to the development of social groups and identity formation, however fleeting, such as in the case of Area 51 raiders.

Memes have become their own language, transcending translation troubles and, sometimes, censorship to establish a shared online consciousness. This level of influence naturally means memes can also be used as vehicles of misinformation and propaganda, influencing politics and public opinion.