The Raw Exponential Power of Memes

By Anthony Pilloud
Staff Writer

Internet culture has come to define our normal culture.  More often than not, the two are inexorably tied, a pop culture phenomenon using the social network to advertise or an internet phenomenon becoming a pop culture icon itself.  Whether it is Lady Gaga teaming up with the Facebook application Farmville for exclusive fan-based accessories for your digital farmstead or the now infamous Nyan Cat, who coasts through space and time on his pop-tart rainbow out of Youtube and onto t-shirts. And what internet cultural phenomenon is more widely known and influential than that of the Internet meme.  In fact, memes are essentially nearly all internet phenomena, to some degree.  Internet Memes have spread across the Word Wide Web with raw exponential power, and can be found with even the most meager of Google searches.  So what are the implications of a meme?  And what, for that matter, are they really?

The term meme was first coined by Richard Dawkins in his work “The Selfish Gene”.  It was used as an explanation for how ideas and concepts spread throughout communities and, ultimately, culture as a whole.  A meme, then, is essentially a “unit of culture”, a simplified idea that can spread easily throughout different individual minds quickly due it’s easily understood and easily augmented nature.  Since it is effectively an analogy for a gene, it is obviously only as effective as the host determines.  This effectively explains why some fads and fashions are fads and fashions, whereas some die away as soon as they are conceived.  It is in this manner that they are analogues to genes, which self-replicate and respond to selective pressures.
Internet memes, then, are any idea or concept that can and do spread quickly within the viral community.  I have already used the example of Nyan Cat, which started as simply Youtube video and has been reproduced multiple times into different forms.  The basic format (a cat with a Poptart body flying through space with a rainbow trailing behind it to the a song that’s only lyrics are “nyanana” repeated) is apparent to everyone who simply sees something that represents that format, and from there, they can change it to mean something different (such as making the video black and white and changing the singing lyrics to a piano medley that is the same tune and giving Nyan Cat a monocle). 

In fact, cats themselves have turned into a form of internet meme.  There is always the recurring joke about surfing the web simply to watch videos of cats and kittens.  And let’s be honest, there are trillions of them!  One such example of these is “lolcats”, a series of photographs of cats doing apparently humorous things with a blatantly misspelled caption that comments on the actions. 

One of the most popular formats for internet memes is a simple photo, generally a profile picture of a person or animal that has a specific title.  For example, Business Cat is a picture of a cat wearing a tie.  These forms of memes have two captions, one on top of the profile and one below.  The above one is the setup, the bottom the punch line (in typical question-answer joke format).  The picture of Business Cat is the universal meme element; so long as you know that Business Cat is Business Cat then you are in on the joke.  The setup would be something related to business, such as “Climbed to the top of the corporate ladder” with the bottom caption being something cat related, in this case “And now I can’t get down”.  The template for Business Cat is simply a cat that is in business, and as long as you know that then any internet user can change the setup and punch line accordingly.

With the assistance of the internet, memes can explode in popularity overnight, if not sooner.  The royal wedding footage of Prince William and Kate Middleton kissing shows Grace Van Cutsem, the flower girl, pouting in the corner of the scene.  Her expression has become a meme itself, and can be seen photo-shopped onto any photograph depicting something that the creator of the meme would not like to see or listen too, such as Donald Trump giving a speech (as its first credited use).  Her meme is generally known as either Royal Wedding Girl or Frowning Flower Girl.

And just like genes, memes die out and eventually become extinct.  How many of you can remember the last time you saw a joke for the Chocolate Rain Youtube video?  The popularity (and survival) of a meme is entirely dependent to its attractiveness to the viral masses, just as a gene is dependent on its relevance for survival in the Darwinian sense. 

Memes are (intentionally) universal.  In my opinion, their greatest contribution to the internet community from memes is humor.  The majority of memes (especially those using the setup/punchline format) are funny, and humor itself has the contagious quality that makes it all the harder to resist.  As the internet community and viral culture step out of virtual reality into reality, we see the evolution of new forms of communication using this brilliant new medium.

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