The Meme Series: Part One - Bite-Sized Pop Culture: A Brief History of Memes

All glory to the Internet meme! 

Ah, memes. Long have they been at the very core of digital culture (if you know what I mean). They bounce from person to person in what feels like a transcendent game of Telephone, mutating as they pass from screen to screen. But they’ve become more than just an online phenomenon – they’ve also infiltrated our in-person interactions.

Memes have become the new movie or television quote. Instead of pulling out an old Seinfeld zinger, we now turn to Internet memes for a quick laugh among friends, or we use them as a point of connection with colleagues. We even think memes to ourselves. Do you know how many times I’ve said “y u no,” or how many rainy nights I’ve flipped through a catalogue and thought to myself: 

(Yes. Catalogue.)

Memes are inside jokes that only the web savvy will understand, and as they grow in popularity so do their value. 

Marketers often rely on pop culture to create brand awareness and connect with younger consumers (better known as the Millennial market). As a result, memes are evolving from mere Internet joke to powerful marketing tool. 

As we move further and further into the digital landscape, reach and shareable content become the most important points of success for brands…and memes are the epitome of shareable content. But why do memes grow so rapidly? What is it about memes that cause such a shareable sensation?

Let’s science this.

It was actually legendary scientist Richard Dawkins who first coined the term in his 1976 bestseller The Selfish Gene. He writes, “We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation.” Combining the Greek term “Mimeme” with “gene,” Dawkins gave birth to “meme.” (Only I bet he doesn’t bring it up every time you sass him at spaghetti dinner.) 

He continues, “Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool … so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.” In other words, ideas are like living things – they spread, influence and evolve. 

Thirty years later, the Internet hijacked the term for its own amusement. In contrast to Dawkins’ original definition, Internet memes are deliberately changed as they gain popularity. 

Unlike a catchphrase or a popular song, Internet memes allow anyone and everyone to unleash their creativity and infuse their own perspective. Also, Internet memes are entirely centered on humor and satire. (Humor really is the universal language. Suck it, math.)

Because of their rise in prominence, it’s only been in recent years that academics have started studying the cultural and economic impacts of Internet memes. In her paper, Memes in a Digital World: Reconciling With a Conceptual Troublemaker, Limor Shifman studies why (and how) memes have become important modes of digital communication. She also explains why shareable content is king in the digital landscape. 

She states, “the meme is a natural for studying Internet and digital culture. Memetic behavior is not novel, but its scale, scope, and global visibility in contemporary digital environments are unprecedented. In this hyper-memetic era, user-driven circulation of copies and derivatives is a prevalent logic, or as Henry Jenkins (2009) aptly puts it: “if you don't spread, you are dead.” Copies become, in this sense, more important than the “original”: They are the raison d'etre of digital communication.”

Similarly, cultural anthropologist Grant McCracken studies how to harness the economic and commercial power of pop-culture in his book Culturematic. He states, “Culturematics honor this new condition of our culture: that no one is excluded and anyone can participate at least by imagination.”

Internet memes are the culmination of all these concepts. They are the sharing of ideas as Dawkins summarizes, the raison d'etre of digital communication as Shifman suggests, and a powerful means of participation that McCracken describes. In essence, memes are bite-sized bits of culture – pop-culture to be exact…and we are a society consumed by pop-culture. 

We live in a world where people know more about Kim Kardashian’s love life than they do SpaceX’s mission to Mars. (It’s explosive.) So why is it so surprising that Internet memes have become a cultural standard? 

(A breakdown of the most popular memes of all time. Source: funnystatus.com)

When it comes down to it, memes are just fun, and they’re constantly evolving. Even a stale meme can feel fresh with a different text. Everybody wants to laugh, and everybody wants to be in on the joke. How else would a single gag be recreated over 2 million times?

They also tend get a bad rap. While some memes revel in pure absurdity, others make political, social and even economic statements in a single frame. They encapsulate a feeling, a state of being. Some memes can pack more emotional punch than entire academic articles. 

(Thanks, Dad.)

As I mentioned earlier, brands are starting to capitalize on the craze, hoping to use them to create brand awareness, gain visibility, and tap into the Millennial market. As a content writer, I am not only fascinated by this marketing strategy, I’m a champion of it.

But this approach can be a slippery slope – brands have to be careful that they don’t create content that feels forced or God forbid, unfunny. Younger consumers can tell brands are trying to appeal to their youth or take advantage of the latest cultural trends. Memes are no exception. The biggest mistake most businesses make is to assume that all Millennials think and act the same. We are a group as diverse as any other. While we’re on the topic of Millennials…