Richard Dawkins coined the word "meme" way back in 1976 in his book 'The Selfish Gene', borrowing from the ancient Greek word "mimeme" and shortening it to rhyme with "cream." He used it to describe discrete bits of human culture that replicate and spread between people the way genes do, which at the time referred to melodies, catchphrases, and ideas. He had absolutely no way of knowing he was also describing a photo of Bernie Sanders in mittens that would one day raise $1.8 million for charity.
Apart from being a genre, it is also a survival tool. In 2018, when China's state censorship blocked every hashtag related to the global #MeToo movement, women found a way around it using images of rice and a bunny. Innocuous enough to dodge the algorithm, but when the words for rice and bunny are said aloud in Mandarin, they sound like "mi tu." Women used the images to share their stories and coordinate the movement inside a country that has historically been suspicious of exactly this kind of organizing. A bowl of rice and a cartoon bunny was something the censors never saw coming.
According to Paolo Gerbaudo, director of the Centre for Digital Culture at King's College London, memes are "a sort of ready-made language with many kinds of stereotypes, symbols, and situations. A palette that people can use, much like emojis, to convey a certain content." Which is a very academic way of saying that sometimes a single image of a distracted boyfriend looking at another woman communicates something that would take three paragraphs of therapy to unpack properly. By 2020, Instagram reported at least one million posts mentioning "meme" being shared every single day, telling us that the palette is being used extensively.
Not everything that spreads is technically a meme, and researcher Limor Shifman at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem wants you to know the difference. "A text that just spreads well, and a lot of people see it, is not a meme," she says. "It's viral. But if a lot of people create their own versions, then it becomes a group of texts, and then it's a meme." The meme is participatory, a is a conversation instead of a broadcast. Facebook researchers in 2014 found 121,605 different variants of a single meme posted across 1.14 million status updates. Do we just have too much time on our hands?
The best memes, according to researcher Idil Galip at the University of Edinburgh, share a few reliable qualities. They reference something recent and widely known, they appeal to the broadest possible common denominator, and they are, in her words, "fun to look at and fun to share." Studies back this up, finding that memes sparking stronger emotional responses are more likely to be shared, and that people forward funny content over cute, disgusting, or anger-inducing content. Humor is the most efficient delivery mechanism available; remember that.
Niche memes operate on an entirely different logic and are not trying to go viral at all. Galip notes that niche memes are "meant usually to create things like in-group belonging, something that kind of strengthens a sense of identity." One small study found that people with depression rated depression-related memes as more humorous, relatable, and shareable than people without, suggesting the format offers something closer to social support than entertainment. The same principle applies across marginalised communities, including the LGBTQ+ community, where memes have been found to build collective identity in ways that translate from online spaces into the real world.
