Evolving from basic image edits made to make people laugh into rhetorical devices capable of disseminating information to millions of people, memes have established themselves as one of the most important mediums today.
This is the evolution of the meme. According to an analysis by Smithsonian Magazine , memes can be anything something as monumental as a belief in God to catchphrases or idioms to a type of music can be a meme. The hula hoop itself is a meme vehicle. So, for that matter, is each human hula hooper—a strikingly effective meme vehicle.
Memes can be image, video, or text based, and can be reproduced, republished, or reinterpreted by others, leading to an entirely different rhetorical message.
In this first iteration, the idea was that ideas and thoughts were as self-replicating and adapting as the genes found within all forms as DNA. This adds up, given the way memes today are reimagined and reformatted. With limited content creation tools, early memes revolved around singular pictures and concepts: I Can Haz a Cheezburger cats and O Rly?
Owl are two of the earlier examples. Supplementary to top text, bottom text were Rage Comics , multipanel illustrations that would depict a frustrating, ironic, or somehow hilarious real-life situation. The minimal amount of effort required to create the comics the vast majority were constructed in Microsoft Paint helped make them more accessible , contributing to their virality and status as a commonly-understood method of communication, with each face such as the now-ubiquitous Trollface becoming recognizable regardless of language.
In , memes took on a new lifeform: videos. Looking outside of picture-based memes, the concept of Rick Rolling became a recognized phenom, and was one of the first video-based instances of humor being passed around the internet.
All of these early memes found their home on 4chan and then started to filter out onto Tumblr, where they began to reach almost-mainstream status. A lot of meme content on Tumblr was ripped directly from the aforementioned original sources, and thus reached a wider audience. Accounts dedicated solely to the posting of memes were created and accumulated mass followings, a practice that would come into play with the rise of Facebook and Twitter accounts later on.
With an audience just small enough to feel like they were the only ones in on the joke and one large enough to cater to, memes, and the creation of them, started to become more accessible. Rick Rolling opened up the door for more video-based memes, as did the creation of YouTube. With its instant-reaction format, photo-capability added in , and a new demographic in , 42 percent less teenagers were considering Facebook their most important social network , Twitter as a meme vehicle began to flourish.
According to philosopher Daniel C. Dennett :. A wagon with spoked wheels carries not only grain or freight from place to place; it carries the brilliant idea of a wagon with spoked wheels from mind to mind.
The first person whose brain transported the spoked wheel meme builds one spoke-wheeled wagon. Others will see this first wagon, replicate the same meme, and continue to build more wagons until there are hundreds, thousands, or millions of wagons with spoked wheels. In the earliest days of human existence, such a meme could replicate quickly in a universe where alternatives were few and far between.
Memetics is about more than just what makes a thing popular. The strongest memes — those that replicate in the most minds — are the ones responsible for creating human culture. Today, the internet meme what most people now just call a meme is a piece of media that is copied and quickly spread online. Godwin dubbed this the Nazi-comparison meme.
Americans spend, on average, 11 hours per day interacting with digital media. Australians spend 10 hours per day on internet-connected devices. Latin Americans spend more than 12 hours consuming some sort of media daily. Around the world, people constantly receive thousands of photos, videos and other messages. Determining which of these items captures the most attention could translate into significant advantages for digital content creators.
The internet meme and the scientific meme are not identical. The internet meme is typically deliberately altered by human ingenuity, while the scientific meme invented before the internet became a thing involves random change and accurate copying. In addition, internet memes are traceable through their presence on social media, while scientific memes are at least right now , untraceable because they have no physical form or footprint.
Dawkins, however, has stated that the internet meme and the scientific meme are clearly related and connected. What causes one meme to replicate more successfully than another? First, if a meme is genuinely useful to humans, it is more likely to spread. Spoked-wheel wagons will replicate quickly because early humans need to transport lots of freight easily.
Third, memes that answer pressing questions are likely to replicate. Peruse any bookstore aisle and you will find numerous books about finding your purpose, figuring out the meaning of life, or losing weight quickly and effectively — all topics of immense interest to many people. If there is a scientific explanation for strong replication, marketing and advertising strategies coupled with strong memes can unlock the share-and-repeat secrets of viral media.
Festival of Social Science — Aberdeen, Aberdeenshire.
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