Memes: Let Me Explain

Mariselle Stofberg
Mikayla Pretorius

“Wait - what exactly is a meme?” As a teenager or young adult living in the peak of the digital age, you might have been asked this question multiple times by a parent or grandparent. Or perhaps if you were born in the previous generation, you might have been the one asking this question.

Anyone who uses the internet has most likely come across a meme, whether it was searched for or not. It has become a large part of online communities and social media platforms, and plays an important role in conveying humour on the internet. But where exactly did memes come from and how did they evolve?

What are memes?

According to Wikipedia a meme is an “idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture – often with the aim of conveying a particular phenomenon, theme, or meaning represented by the meme.” This is then divided into an “internet meme”, which we know today as an image usually paired with text, but it can also be an image or text on its own, as well as a GIF or a video, which is meant to be relatable or humorous.

The first memes

The first published use of the word “meme” was much earlier than one might expect. In 1976, Richard Dawkins wrote a book called “The Selfish Gene”, in which he tried to explain, simply put, how ideas are imitated and spread through generations. Dawkins used a word derived from Greek, called “Mimeme”, meaning “that which is imitated”. Seventeen years later, Mike Godwin proposed the idea of the internet meme in an issue of Wired in 1993.

Internet memes became popular shortly after the World Wide Web was invented in the 1990s, mostly in the form of GIFs, the earliest memes being “The Dancing Baby” and the “The Hamster Dance”, as well as other images such as “Bert is Evil” from Sesame Street. This was when memes were simple and unedited.

The progression of memes

In the 2000s, image macros, which is an image with text, started gaining popularity, and introduced a new, more creative format of memes. This time period brought viral memes such as LOLCATS, rage comics, “Bad Luck Brian” and “Overly Attached Girlfriend”. When YouTube was released in 2005, videos became more integrated in memes, and made memes easier to share, such as Rick Rolling, which was often sent through emails or text messages.

As technology started to progress and the internet became a larger part of our lives, more internet users started to pick up on trends at a faster pace. This means social media platforms are constantly flooded with new movements, viral videos, politics and, of course – new meme formats. The speed by which memes gain popularity now, is virtually the opposite of how fast memes gained popularity back then. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, memes would take time to become popular, but once it was viral, it remained so for several months. Now, a certain meme can become viral and be forgotten in all but six hours.

Judging by how long memes have been circling, they will most likely exist as long as the internet exists. So, if you have not made peace with the fact that there will constantly be new memes that you do not understand, flooding your twitter feed, now is the time.