The Roots of MeME cULtRE
By Sanjana Mishra, Computer Science, 2023
Many of us have experienced scrolling through social media, pausing on a meme, smirking, double tapping, then carrying on. Memes have become ubiquitous on almost every social media site, fueled by globalization, the information age, and access to thousands of images at our fingertips. But where did “the meme” begin? How did we get here, laughing at screen grabs of Spongebob or sharing videos of Blinking Man?
In the past five years, meme accounts have become the fastest growing accounts on Instagram, proving that the power of the meme is unparalleled in today’s day and age, when information exchange is rapid and omnipresent. Memes have further evolved to take on more controversial issues through the use of multimedia and “humor,” turning pictures into mediums for hateful ideologies and political propaganda. The iconic Pepe the Frog meme was denounced as a hate symbol by the Anti-Defamation League for this reason after being adopted by the alt-right movement as a kind of ideological mascot. In terms of political propaganda, memes regarding political leaders, like Donald Trump, have become a normal part of the memescape.
Memes have further evolved to take on more controversial issues through the use of multimedia and “humor,” turning pictures into mediums for hateful ideologies and political propaganda.
Memes have become so pervasive in our culture that researchers now engage in memetics, the study of memes. Essentially, memetics is the study of going viral — researchers study how “little bits of culture spread among us,” according to a 2018 paper from the Internet Measurement Conference. In “On the Origins of Memes by Means of Fringe Web Communities,” researchers from all over the world studied memes in different “fringe communities,” such as 4chan, Reddit and Gab. They aimed to “detect and measure the propagation of memes across multiple Web communities, using a processing pipeline based on perceptual hashing and clustering techniques.” Using 160 million images taken from 2.6 billion posts on Twitter, Reddit, 4chan’s Politically Incorrect board (/pol/), and Gab over 13 months, the researchers attempted to recognize patterns across the different communities. They found that communities within the fringe communities were using memes to spread “hateful and racist content.” These same fringe communities were considered to be “influential actors in the meme ecosystem.”
Although memes are now used as vehicles of hate at times, the meme begins its story with a smile. On Sept. 19, 1982, American computer scientist Scott E. Falhman used a “ 🙂 ” text-based emoticon in a Carnegie Mellon blog, and the rest is history. Widely considered the first recorded instance of a meme, the smiley face revolutionized online communication, and became part of a family of emoticons.
Although memes are now used as vehicles of hate at times, the meme begins its story with a smile.
While the first meme was created in the 1980s, the term “meme” was coined a decade before by author Richard Dawkins. In his book, “The Selfish Gene,” Dawkins created the word “meme” to mean “a unit of cultural transmission or imitation.” The word has its roots in evolutionary biology — the Greek root of the word is “mimema,” which means “to imitate,” and was supposedly made to rhyme with “gene.” Genes are biological units that aid in the transmission of hereditary information, similar to memes, which transfer cultural information.
Human culture is based on tradition and inheritance. However, modifications and evolution also play a crucial role in our cultural phenomenon. If traditions were unchanging, many of them would die out due to lack of adaptation — much like humans if the laws of evolution didn’t exist. In this same way, memes rely on common conventions and inheritance. Essentially, the internet acts as an environment in which individuals can select cultural elements to pass on. This self-replication aspect of memes is just like the concept of genes, and the environment they exist in allows natural selection to be performed — the best memes are forwarded on to the meme hall of fame while others fall by the wayside.
Essentially, the internet acts as an environment in which individuals can select cultural elements to pass on.
True to its biological origins, the meme has evolved to include images, text and captions in order to convey meaning, employing multimodal grammar. Since then, pets, such as Grumpy Cat, and people, such as the kids in the Charlie Bit My Finger video, have become infamous. Now, ordinary people can achieve fame on social media through funny comments, videos or multimedia creations.
A prominent result of the information age we’ve all grown up in, meme culture is here to stay. Memes form an international common ground, where relatable experiences and funny stories are distributed in a humorous way. This online creativity is now fostered by millions of people around the globe, and the best part about memes is that everyone is in on the inside joke.
DOI: 10.1145/3278532.3278550
