meme

The word meme first appeared in The Selfish Gene (1976), the influential book by the British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. In its eleventh chapter, titled 'Memes: the new replicators', Dawkins argued that genes are not the only things that copy themselves and compete for survival. Human culture, he proposed, has its own replicators: tunes, ideas, catchphrases, clothes fashions, and ways of making pots or building arches. These units pass from brain to brain through imitation, and, like genes, they vary, compete for attention, and are either kept or forgotten.

The suggestion grew into a research program called memetics. The philosopher Daniel Dennett used the concept in Consciousness Explained (1991) and Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995), and the psychologist Susan Blackmore expanded it in The Meme Machine (1999). An online Journal of Memetics ran from 1997 to 2005. Critics pointed out that a meme has no clear physical form or boundary, which makes it hard to count or measure, and most scientists came to treat the idea as a useful metaphor rather than a testable theory of culture.

The word found a second life on the internet. In a 1994 article for Wired, the lawyer Mike Godwin described his famous rule about comparisons to Nazis in online arguments as a meme he had deliberately released into discussion groups. Early web favorites soon followed: the animated Dancing Baby (1996), the Hampster Dance page (1998), and the broken English line 'All your base are belong to us', taken from the 1991 video game Zero Wing and spread widely around 2001. In the mid-2000s, image macros, photos with bold white captions, flourished on forums and on the site I Can Has Cheezburger?, launched in 2007, the same year rickrolling took off.

Modern internet memes usually work as templates rather than single jokes. A stock photograph by the Spanish photographer Antonio Guillem, later known as Distracted Boyfriend, was taken in 2015 and became one of the most adapted formats of 2017, with users relabeling the three figures to comment on politics, sport, and daily life. The communication scholar Limor Shifman, in Memes in Digital Culture (2014), defined internet memes as groups of digital items that share common features, are made with awareness of one another, and are imitated and transformed by many users. Her stress on variation stays close to Dawkins's original idea of copying with change.

Memes now play a serious role in public life. Political campaigns, brands, and activist movements use them because they are cheap to make and fast to share, while researchers study how the same speed helps misinformation travel. Dawkins himself has observed that the internet meme is a mutation of his concept: online changes are made on purpose by human creativity, whereas the variations in his original theory, like genetic mutations, were largely random.