ZOMGRESEARCH

As best as I can remember, it all started with the Dancing Baby. Then there was Hampsterdance. By the time we got to “All Your Base Are Belong To Us” it was all over. Since the birth of the internet, people have been finding ways to use it to pass around silly jokes, pictures, rumors, and just about anything that can be consumed quickly for at least a dose of entertainment, however small it may be, or at the very least distract them from whatever they were supposed to be doing. Everyone who had an e-mail account in the 90s has undoubtedly received a chain letter with a subject line that read something like, “SEND THIS TO 10 PEOPLE IMMEDIATELY AND YOUR WILDEST DREAMS WILL COME TRUE!”, probably received links to the Dancing Baby, Hampsterdance, and/or AYBABTU, and most likely received a poorly Photoshopped, yet still hilarious photo. The more recent additions to the internet neighborhood are sure to be familiar with things like Numa Numa, LOLcats, and The Star Wars Kid. And these are all certainly just the tip of the iceberg, as it seems that every day I hear referenced some new amusing online inanity. When I first started thinking about how these things come into existence and spread, I didn't really have something to call all these internet phenomena other than “stupid things on the internet.” It wasn't until 2005 that I first heard the term “meme”, at which point everything about this topic seemed to fall into place. Wikipedia defines an internet meme to be, “a neologism used to describe a catchphrase or concept that spreads in a faddish way from person to person via the Internet.” This sounds right, but a look at the second sentence in the definition reveals it to be incomplete: “The term is a reference to the concept of memes, but is used loosely to refer to things that are not necessarily memes in a technical sense, although they may become memes when they replicate.” Clearly, something is still missing.

The term “meme” is actually almost as old as the internet itself. It was coined in 1976, in Richard Dawkins' book, “The Selfish Gene”. Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist, was looking to make the point that Darwinian evolution just requires replicators, not necessarily specific chemical genetics, like those found in humans and animals that most evolutionists point to. To this end, Dawkins applied Darwin's theories to the spread and existence of ideas and cultural phenomena. He created the term “meme” (similar to the word “gene”) as a shortened version of the word “mimeme”, which means something imitated (from the Greek “mimos”, meaning “mimic), to refer to anything that might be considered a “replicator”, and pointed out that genes are not defined by their transfer, but rather by their structure. Similarly, memes could be defined by their own definite structure and be transferred by any number of methods (though the method generally boiled down to exposure to and then replication by humans, who are efficient, but not perfect, replicators of information and behavior). Thus, a “meme” came to refer to a “unit of cultural information, such as a practice or idea, that gets transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another.” Interestingly, though Dawkins was following his own uninfluenced line of reasoning, he wasn't the first the come up with such an idea. Indeed, Richard Semon, a German evolutionary biologist had spoken of “mnemes” (“memories” in Greek) in a 1904 work dealing with memories relation to actual events, and the word “mneme” appeared in English in a 1921 translation of Semon's “The Mneme”.

Dawkins most likely didn’t realize the impact his simple analogy for evolution would have. Indeed, an entire field of study, memetics, has sprung up to study and explain the creation, spread, and significance of memes, though it’s acceptance as an actual science remains controversial. Still, one cannot argue that there’s a lot to be studied with regards to memes. This is particularly evident with regards to the internet.

Initially, the only method of communicating memes was literally by word of mouth, from person to person. Then, written word greatly facilitated the process by allowing communication over distances without physical presences. From there, two ways of spreading memes arose. The first was continued innovation in the field of one to one communication: the telegraph, Morse code, telephones. The other was one to many or many to many communication: books, the printing press, radio, film, television. The former allowed memes to spread as they always had, people simply telling one another about them. The latter, however, created a new dynamic. Many memes were created in these formats, and due to their high distribution, many people were exposed to them at once, jumpstarting the whole process. However, these mediums would also pass memes along to each other (how many times have you seen the Star Wars “I am your father” scene referenced or parodied in various forms?). Through this manner, certain memes would “rise to the top”, Dawkins’ evolution analogy proving valid, and through iteration and re-iteration become almost universally known.

The internet, however, combined these two vectors of memetic transmission. The internet seems to be the pinnacle of human communication (for now, at least), as it can be used to communicate one to one, one to many, or many to many, and each in multiple ways. The internet’s speed and ease of use increased the ability to create and spread memes exponentially. Since memes are transmitted by communication, they are therefore limited the by the nature of that communication. Television and radio, for example, has the handicaps of not allowing for random access of their information; one can only watch or listen to what is currently being transmitted. The internet, on the other hand, simply stores information for anyone to access at their leisure. Similarly, the internet does not suffer from writing’s lack of speed or telephony’s limits on number of users. Also important is that the internet is free from the high production costs of most of these mediums. All this makes the internet the ultimate environment for the creation and spreading of memes.

A web page with memetic information can be put up with minimal effort and negligible cost, and then quickly communicated to a wide audience through e-mail, instant messaging, chat rooms, forums, blogs, social networking sites, and a plethora of other venues. The same page can then be accessed at any time with no effort on the part of the creator. Furthermore, people who don’t know about the page can find it through the use of search engines or from links on other pages. These are two features totally unique to the internet that make it significantly more powerful that other media for meme transmission. The index of a book is limited to the information contained in that book and library catalogues are huge, hard to use, and not necessarily even accurate. A search engine gives almost instantaneous access to most of the information available on the internet based on search terms that the user defines. These search engines also have the advantage of being to search not only published information, but also public communication by search things like forums or publicly available e-mail archives. Similarly, books, movies, tv shows, etc, can reference one another, but can only indirectly provide their audience with the means to obtain the information being referenced. Internet links allow a direct connection to the source material.

A point of interest is that the internet (or rather it’s users) seems to have become self aware of this propensity for memetic creation and transmission, and has begun to developing even more and better methods of dealing with memes. Relatively recently, many internet based tools to either spread or track memes have sprung up. Digg allows users to submit sites, pages, news stories, etc, and then vote on which ones they find most interesting, moving the highest rated ones into more publicly visible areas of the site (this should sound familiar, it’s an evolutionary concept). Similar mechanics drive sites like Reddit and Tailrank, though they have more specific applications, news stories and blog topics respectively. These “memetrackers” essentially epitomize the memetic process. They create a central location for memes to reside (more or less) and simplify the evolutionary process by which memes popularize themselves. More importantly, they put emphasis on the participatory nature of memes. Memes are unique in that they require active, conscious human involvement to spread; this is precisely what makes the internet such a great home for them.

The internet is the ultimate bastion of the participatory culture that drives memes, so it seems only logical that the two would thrive together. It’s a point of irony that the internet, or at least the idea of it, is itself a meme. Actually, at this point, it’s become hard to distinguish what is and isn’t a meme. Ex-presidential candidate Mike Gravel is not a meme, but the campaign video of him staring into the camera for an extended period of time and then throwing a rock into a lake is. Posting photos of cats is not a meme, but reposting the same photos with humorous captions that have poor spelling and grammar is. The distinction really comes in what part of the idea needs participation, or what part gets passed along. People weren’t really sending each other links to Mike Gravel, but they were to his video. Similarly, most people weren’t interested in generic cat pictures, but usually find the captioned ones funny.

Though usually only the most popular get noticed and identified as memes, memes are everywhere because of the high speed of modern human communication. Memes will continue to evolve as communication and society do as well, but as long as communication exists, so will memes, be they as simple amusements or revolutionary ideas that change the course of history forever. The best part is that just like with the initial coining of the term, and like many things dealing with human society, it’s hard to predict what will catch on, in what form, and what it’ll lead to. It should quite interesting to see what happens in this area in the decades to come.