LOL Memes

“Forever alone.” “Bad Luck Brian.” “Philosoraptor.”

Upon hearing any of these phrases, a digital immigrant might ask, “What the hell are you talking about? What do those things even mean?” A digital native, however, would probably be on the floor laughing, or ROFL-ing. This is all due to the latest Internet fad called the meme.

To clarify meme [meem], according to Dictionary.com, is “a cultural item that is transmitted by repetition in a manner analogous to the biological transmission of genes.” Furthermore, it is also an actual sociological and cultural study, as in one can study the “memepool.” To break it down, the idea of memes come from Richard Dawkins’ 1976  book “The Selfish Gene” and basically begs the question of originality in humanity. As Brent Silby says in his article “What is a Meme?”: 

Think about all the ideas that you have in your head right now. They are all memes, and they all came from somewhere. Some of them will have come from friends and some will have come from the internet or television.

This theory, called meme theory, applies to everything in human culture, but certain aspects of memes have exploded with social media and the Internet. Many involve characters, pictures, and some have even expanded into full on comic strips (most notably Le Rage).

Example of a Le Rage comic. 

Memes are clearly a very human theory in the sense that they are born, live, evolve for a purpose and inevitably will die out or simply be replaced. Internet memes are so important and radical because unlike other cultural memes, these memes are encoded into the World Wide Web. Their cookies and code will live on forever and can always be accessed, and this fundamentally changes the meaning of a meme.

In Jonnie Hughes’ article for The Independent, his study of memes allowed him to realize the true biological comparison between memes and genes as he describes memes as “countless living ideas that skip through our seven billion brains, each one competing for space in our cerebrums and the chance to procreate through our tongue and wrist movements.” This implies longevity in the spread of memes, where it has taken time for these interactive, conversational memes to come about. For instance, almost everyone in the world understands “flipping the bird,” but they didn’t know instantly. Internet memes are so radical because they can instantly, in comparison to the spread of hand gestures, spread cultural ideas, phrases, slang, images and so many other things. Internet memes are plastered on Facebook, Twitter, used in text messages and sometimes even in everyday speech. This rapid spread of memes has become less evolutionary and more viral.

The uses of these memes are also changing. Silby predicts that memetics, or the study of memes, “will become an essential addition to a psychologist's tool kit.” Are these Internet memes also valuable to analysis of the human psyche? Since these memes tend to be very simple and immature, does it imply that humans are becoming more infantile? Or is it simply an expression popular culture?

Philosoraptor ponders the meaning of memes.

In a blog post by Alex Leavitt, he explores the idea of memes as a movement and Internet memes as a manifestation of that movement. He goes on to say that if the Internet relies on popular culture then Internet memes are memes of popular culture, in this case meaning where a general populace can gain access to the meme. 

With 2,267,233,742 Internet users as of December 31, 2011, its fair to say at least 1/3 of the world’s population has used the Internet. In North America alone, there has been a 152.6% increase in Internet users in only 11 years. Globally, there has been a 528.1% increase. With more of the world’s inhabitants having access to the Internet, it seems only fitting that Internet memes have truly exploded. Further more, out of the estimated 273,000,000 Internet users in North America, about 173,000,000 are using Facebook. I have no doubt in my mind that non-Internet memes have exploded with population growth; more people means more ideas as well as a wider spread of ideas. However, simple ideas can be lost with time and general dissatisfaction with an idea. Cultures become melded and ideas lose their original meanings as they evolve. With Internet memes, the ideas can evolve but the original can always be recalled as well.

Internet memes are created everyday, and whether they take a while to infect the various Web 2.0 users or not, they are here to stay. In fact, marriage proposals have even been preformed through memes! (See below) They have perhaps taken out the evolutionary aspect of a meme, or maybe they have furthered the evolution of a meme, causing memes to be created and die out at a rapid pace. Either way, for the first time in history we can look back on memes and know the context, as the Internet records them forever, and maybe we can still even get a laugh out of them.