Ever since the debut of the smart phone, digital entertainment has replaced magazines when it comes to spending time on the toilet, and memes are a large reason for that. Teens and young adults have created a new cultural movement in the form of the “meme” (pronounced /mēm/ for those who have yet to fully immerse yourselves in modern art). The new comedic art form of the up-and-coming generation can be summed up as jokes told over photographs or cartoons, occasionally (or more often) in poor taste. This cultural “meme-ent,” if you will, has confused our parents and theirs, begging the question why.
It's not the spread or virility of a pure, unaltered idea. In fact, the whole point is that it's altered, taken out of context to convey something more amusing than before. Arguably, each alteration results in something less original and even more derivative before, calling into question its legitimacy. Even though this may be the case, it seems to be this unoriginal quality and universality that make memes so appealing to people.
The term “meme” comes from evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. For Dawkins, cultural ideas were no different than genes—concepts that had to
spread themselves from brain to brain as quickly as they could, replicating and mutating as they went. He called those artifacts memes, bits of cultural DNA that encoded society’s shared experiences while also constantly evolving. Dawkins coined the term in 1976,
in his book The Selfish Gene, long before the modern internet, before
memes morphed into what they are now. Back then, Dawkins was talking about passing along culture—song melodies, art styles, whatever. Today, denizens of the internet think of memes as jokes passed across social media in the form of image macros (those pictures of babies or cats or whatever with bold black-and-white words on them), hashtags (the thing you amended to what you just wrote on Twitter), GIFs (usually of a celebrity, reality star, or drag queen reacting to what you just wrote on Twitter), or videos (that
Rick Astley video people used to send you).
Although not always decorous or remarkably innovative, these instances of virality are a pretty appropriate modern adaptation of the 1970s namesake, encompassing the cyber-spread of only the most popular and universally appealing ideas. Some may despair at calling this an artform or even decry the meme as a cultural component, but the reality is that it's a fairly accurate representation of popular media and daily issues. It's so deeply entrenched in millennial circles that I'm confident memes will continue to hold their own in terms of popularity.
In the early days, memes started slowly and stuck around longer. (Seriously, Nyan Cat was around for literally years.) But the speed of social media meant memes could blow up and be over in the span of a week, if not a day. Overall, memes are about more that just LOLs. They’ve picked up two new purposes: to pledge allegiance to your in-group and to make you lots of money. Memes used to appeal to humanity’s fundamentals—everyone feels awkward sometimes, everyone likes watching a kitten acting a fool. But now people flash political memes like gang signs. Modern-day American memes are about political correctness or the Second Amendment, about the emptiness of offering thoughts and prayers to shooting victims or the satisfying inclusiveness of Black Panther. These memes are seen as a public declaration of your political positions and cultural identity, and, increasingly, an invitation for people with opposing viewpoints to come sass (or harass) you in the comments. Is this casual yet hostile behavior a symptom of how contentious and polarized the internet has become? Most definitely. Memes are just snapshots of culture. Does it seem likely to stop anytime soon? Definitely not.
