It’s hard to imagine a world without memes. They’re ubiquitous in the online experience, with everyone from your friends and mother to news outlets sharing them, talking about them, and finding connections with them.
But memes existed long before the internet and computers, with experts believing they’ve influenced our cultural experience for centuries. Of course, a century ago, memes looked vastly different from the ones we know and share today.
What Are Memes and Where Did They Come From?
If memes have been around for centuries, you may wonder what a meme is since most of us picture a meme in a digital format.
The term “meme” was originally developed by the biologist Richard Dawkins in 1976. He developed it to refer to an idea that took hold within a small group or an entire culture and was repeated, copied, or replicated from person to person. Examples could include a new fashion trend, a popular saying, or even an inside joke among friends.
Today, if you were to look it up in a dictionary or (and this is much more likely) Google it, the definition of meme has grown to have more than one meaning. This expanded definition includes singling out internet memes from general social or cultural memes discussed by Dawkins.
More often than not, however, when we talk about memes, we’re talking about internet memes. These can come in many forms, including photos, images, videos, and audio. Usually, memes are paired with short text and are meant to be funny. Online memes have this impressive capability to become overnight viral sensations, making trends like wanting to explore RTP slots on casinos.com or scrolling through TikTok seem slow-moving in comparison.
The nature of memes makes them hard to trace, but one of the earliest documented jokes that could be considered a meme is in a mosaic found by archaeologists that was created in 3 BC. As you look at more widely documented periods of history, memes can be seen in fashion, mannerisms, arts, and, most recently, digital formats.
How Did Internet Memes Grow to Global Levels?
Memes are now widely used worldwide, with Instagram stating that over a million are shared daily. To better understand how memes managed to achieve their explosive popularity, we can point to a few of their general qualities.
Humour and Relatability
Memes are usually relatable and funny. They frequently relay feelings we experience day in and out, giving us a laugh about daily life. Whether it’s pointing out the struggle of not getting enough sleep with a photo of a grumpy-looking cat or relaying the disappointment of finishing a TV series without realising you just watched the last episode with an image of an upset baby, memes take these feelings, give them a funny twist, and show us that we all frequently face them. Humour and relatability are powerful elements that influence popularity and win over audiences.
Leaning Into Cultural Moments and Trends
Beyond helping us laugh at the frustrating moments or eye-roll-worthy situations we encounter each day, memes also lean into the huge cultural events and trends at the top of our minds. During the pandemic, memes helped people find light-hearted jokes amidst the doom and gloom.
But it’s more than just major news or moments that memes can capture; trends make their way to meme culture, too (and sometimes they even add to the excitement of hype of trends). For example, when a new Netflix series is topping streaming charts, it inevitably becomes meme fodder for the show’s fans, haters, or even those indifferent to the whole thing. We saw this shortly after The Witcher was released, with Jaskier’s song becoming more than a catchy earworm but also a popular meme theme.
Fostering Connection and Community
Many memes are considered to hold universal appeal, but many others are niche-specific, reaching and engaging certain communities by showcasing shared experiences. These shared experiences can be from our hobbies or interests to our experiences with more complex elements of the human experience, such as being members of underrepresented or marginalised communities.
A notable example of this took place in 2015 after Nobel Prize winner Tim Hunt made sexist remarks about women in science. These comments led to viral memes of women in sciences pointing out the problematic remarks, showing camaraderie and support for each other in a male-dominated field.
As such, memes have a powerful ability to help foster a sense of connection, community, and support.
Simple Impactful, Communication
Memes and their influence on our culture have been carefully studied and examined, with experts like political theorist Paolo Gerbaudo of London’s King’s College considering memes to be a sort of language that can be used to convey emotions and meaning visually to speak to people in a simpler way across language or other divides.
The simple way memes communicate ideas can help share big ideas in bite-sized portions and has even influenced activism and actions in the real world. In some cases, this is celebrated, like with the #MeToo movement. However, in other cases, this has also led to concerns and criticisms of online meme culture, which can be used to spread misinformation and propaganda or to mask hateful, discriminatory messages.
Conclusion
Memes may not be a new phenomenon in our cultures and societies, but the online sphere has created new ways for them to spread and shape our experiences. This new way of sharing memes has become a global phenomenon that shows how powerful an idea and simple communication tools can be.
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