Why do memes capture our attention?
What causes a meme meteoric rise to the top of internet culture at a given moment, I’ve got a few ideas. Memes have been growing in notoriety. In recent years, I’ve noticed more and more people even those who aren’t deep into internet culture, talk about a meme they saw.
When most people use the word meme today they’re referring to an image macro. These internet memes usually have two parts, an image that serves as a caricature or symbolic representation, and a recognizable layout of text used to make a joke in conjunction with the image.
But to understand a successful internet meme, we’ll need to dig a little deeper into where the word meme comes from.
A meme is a unit of cultural inheritance. It’s anything that behaves like a gene in human culture.
This is Richard Dawkins, who coined the term meme in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene. Though he coined the term before internet memes existed, the name fits. Because Dawkins idea of a meme is an almost perfect description of how an internet meme works.
A successful meme expresses a certain idea or concept more quickly than that idea could be articulated. So a good meme succeeds.
An individual meme can appeal to a small group. Sometimes they have appeal because only a small group recognizes the symbolism of a meme. Memes often act as a sort of in-group identifier, like inside jokes and TV show references. A meme is a way of discovering whom we have a common base of understanding with and their short but intense lifespans, make their signposts.
For areas of internet culture, the perfect meme often seems to be one where the image element is broad enough more engaging that many people get the symbolism. While the joke conveyed through text has a very narrow appeal.
The first mode is how the meme interacts with the viewer upon first exposure, the first time you see it, you find it funny because of the way someone modified it to make a joke, but also because the photo itself is funny. In the second mode, a meme’s ability to be remixed is crucial. This is the mode where the meme gains the most traction. A good meme has a formula that makes the application of the core archetype too many different scenarios easy.
In this mode, most of the humor is generated from seeing all the ways in which people can use the meme. In the third mode, humor and freshness are generated by the subversion of the established formula of the meme. Now that most of the possible applications are exhausted, people begin to modify the original nature of the meme and use it to express ideas that are similar or even the inverse of the original archetype.
Ultimately, a meme can enter the cultural lexicon, it can become a Tool or a sort of shorthand that we might use to refer to the archetype at the core of the mean. Most memes won’t operate within all these modes, but successful means that stick around usually operate well in multiple modes.
Types of memes existed long before the internet, but the Internet has had a big influence on memes and the way we look at them.
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