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What are they and how do we use them?
There's never a dull moment on the internet, and that's got a whole lot to do with the fact that the material shared online is frequently altering – thanks in part to the creativity of individuals who remix, parody, or subtitle preferred images or videos to create memes. Memes can dish out dramatically more information than text. Similarly, as emojis have been used to share intricate moods or emotions, a meme can give a complicated idea, frame of mind, or shared understanding far quicker than typing out and reading a written explanation of an idea.
Punchy and also humorous, memes are the ideal straw for an internet society formed by viral sharing and creative involvement. They may seem fundamental, but from an etymological point of view, they're surprisingly advanced. Meme developers make use of “multimodal grammar” (to put it simply, captions as well as images) to express and also share concepts and also viewpoints. By tagging their friends in memes shared on social media, people add their individual touch to the content. Numerous online communities focus on creating as well as spreading memes to make an idea go viral – a process known as “attention hacking” or “weaponising”. These communities, on websites such as Reddit, 4chan, Twitter, and also others, have come to be hugely significant and influential. And yet little is known about the method memes spread or just how they create impact.
Regardless of its popularity, it's not widely known that the meme has its origins in the world of academia. The term “meme” is rooted in evolutionary biology and was created by Richard Dawkins in his popular 1976 book, The Selfish Gene. According to Dawkins, a meme is “a unit of cultural transmission or imitation”. His examples include the concept of God, nursery rhymes and jokes, catchphrases, and fashion trends. The word comes from the Greek “mimema”, suggesting imitation, which Dawkins allegedly reduced to rhyme with gene; a nod to the similarities between the survival of specific memes through the advancement of culture, and the survival of certain genes through the process of natural selection.
The very first Internet meme that went viral was the dancing baby, developed in 1996 by the graphic designer Michael Girard. He had developed a software application that demonstrated how movement can be configured and projected through computer systems. The result was the super-famous Cha-Cha-Cha baby, which later on became a GIF shared largely through forums and emails.
After this, there was no turning back. The development of memes as a means of communication grew quickly, as the internet kept progressing. Once the YouTube platform appeared, back in 2005, we began seeing video memes such as Rickrolling, Turn Down for What, or the Harlem Shake dance which spread out massively through video sharing. Sharing these “units of information” got a lot easier after social network sites such as Twitter and Facebook ended up being popular. There are now even Meme generator websites that enable users to create their memes out of existing design templates. This is providing many people the opportunity to utilise these templates, to reveal their political opinions, mental sensations, or just ordinary, plain life ideas.
Going viral
Internet memes, as we know them today, are nuggets of pop culture that are circulated, mimicked, and changed by users. Limor Shifman, a key scholar in the research study of internet memes, argues that a meme is not a single concept or image which is spread across social platforms, however a group of items that were produced with an awareness of each other. For instance, the well-known Grumpy Cat meme is not the feline himself, however the whole set of memes created with his image.
The very first meme on the internet was the sideways “smiley” – :-) – developed in 1982 by American computer scientist Scott E. Fahlman. The practice of using punctuation markers to reveal emotion was quickly picked by internet users all over the world, and numerous other expressions, such as :-( and ;-), were added to the collection of the “emoticon” memes.
In December 2012, the exuberant video “Gangnam Style” ended up being the first YouTube clip to be viewed more than one billion times. Thousands of its audiences reacted by developing and posting their variations of the video “Mitt Romney Style”, “NASA Johnson Style”, “Egyptian Style”, and lots of others. “Gangnam Style” (and its attendant parodies, replicas, and derivations) is among the most popular examples of an Internet meme.
Next-gen memes
It seems that the level of appreciation shown towards memes was much greater 25 years back than today. Memes before the period of Facebook, Reddit, 9GAG, or 4Chan stayed popular for a long time, for months and even years, since the Internet did not move forward at today's rapid rate. There were some really significant memes that showed cultural or political points of view, which had a long-lasting duration. Nowadays, memes have numerous contexts – from politics to pop culture, sarcasm, irony, or even nihilism. References are of different sorts, from movies, songs, paparazzi pictures of celebs, animals, and many others. They increase and multiply within a short period, and they go viral overnight. It is really hard to keep up, which is why they tend to disappear in a relatively short time.
Most memes have some spice or humour behind them, and the effect that they have depends completely on how individuals feel about what is being expressed through the meme. Recently, it seems that we are all facing the effects of post-modern problems, thus, there are many meme pages addressing concerns relating to commercialism, climate change, xenophobia, or political views. We can easily conclude that they're also instructional!
Beyond all that, today's memes commonly reveal the current state of mind. Which is something that needs to be highlighted. They are replacing words and texts and entering into the level of language.
New breeds of memes emerged in the second half of the nineties, alongside the expansion of pet photos shared online. Popular examples were Advice Dog, LOLCats, and Grumpy Cat. Animals with human qualities have long belonged to human culture – from ancient Egyptian gods to kids' stories such as Peter Rabbit – so it's not surprising to see them revived in the digital period as memes.
Starting from the late nineties, memes started to include celebs and ordinary people. Examples include Charlie Bit My Finger, Kanye Interrupts, Leave Britney Alone, and Cash Me Ousside/How Bah Dah. These memes all originated from a media event or a viral video, which agile internet users parodied, mimicked, remixed, and mashed up.Memes are also used by people to promote certain political concepts or ideologies. Pepe the Frog, for example, was appropriated from the comic series Boy’s Club by the alt-Right, eventually ending up being a racist symbol before being exterminated by his developer Matt Furie. Utilising sites such as Meme Generator, people can use the biting humour of memes to attempt to de-legitimise the arguments and leaders of rival political motions. This sort of activity ramped up around major political occasions such as the US and UK elections – and met with differing degrees of success.
Memes will continue evolving, in addition to the advances and changes in digital communication. One thing that stays the same is people's desire to link with one another and produce a shared culture. Trivial as they may appear, memes contribute to this shared culture by cultivating individuals' imagination, creativity, and participation in society through new media.
Last thoughts
Even if memes seem difficult to comprehend, possibilities are you've come across at least one over the years that's made sense to you. Whether you did in the Ice Bucket Challenge, or have a “Keep calm” mug on your desk office, then you've participated in a meme. You heard of it through the grapevine, you understood it, you changed its context, and you appropriated it for your usage. Those are the key components of what makes a meme a meme.
Some memes are much easier to understand than others. The easiest ones are called “image macro” memes, which usually include some sort of expressive image and some block text. They're emphatic and designed to assist communicate an emotional state in a way that's basic to understand. They acknowledge a shared experience between the developer and the viewer. Others can be a little more difficult to pin down. Something like Slender Man can seem scary or harmful. Others might be bizarrely unknown, referencing a particular episode of a television show or movie that aired decades earlier. Typically the origins of such memes can be buried in context so deep that comprehending their origins requires dedication to research.
How important, depends on why you want to understand the meme. If you simply want to use it yourself, getting the approximation of what it indicates from the latest use of it is often adequate to develop your own and be in on the joke.
(The writer is the Vice President at Isobar. He’s the highest globally and locally awarded digital planner in Sri Lanka. During the past five years, he has bagged 80-plus global and local awards. His lecturing efforts have helped over 4,000 students and business owners embrace digital marketing)