At this point, most of us are familiar with what the word 'meme' means. In 1976, Richard Dawkins called it "ideas that spread from brain to brain." In today's Internet culture, that's especially apt because memes tend to spread like wildfire on different social media platforms. The more accurate description for today would perhaps be that the ideas spread from device to device.
The first example of what memes look like is an image from the Judge Magazine issue in 1921. It's the original "Expectations vs. Reality" type of picture. Yet people don't consider it to technically be a meme. Why? Because it didn't have the virality aspect. For a picture, a video, or a quote to become a meme, people have to copy it and share it.
Nowadays, what we consider to be memes is so widely known that even a non-chronically online person would know them. There probably isn't a young person who wouldn't recognize Drake gesturing 'nuh-uh' from his "Hotline Bling" video or that screenshot from an anime with the butterfly with the caption "Is this [blank]?"
Yet, it is a sort of secret language. More niche memes allow individuals with similar interests to communicate things others might not know about. One person could be well-versed in philosophy memes but know absolutely nothing when they see a Formula 1 meme.
Linguist Rebecca Garcia claims that memes are not so much a language of their own but a graphic form of speech. "Just as language and writing is a form of communication, so are memes. Even though these images incorporate only short written messages, they’re usually understood by the receiver or audience."
Memes don't represent the way we write. They're an expression of how we talk. The way we speak is more informal than how we express ourselves in writing. "We mirror our speech patterns in memes. Therefore, when we communicate with memes, we are communicating with a graphic form of speech," Garcia writes in her Public Linguist blog.
We tend to communicate through pictures on social media more than with words. We send GIFs, emojis, and, of course, memes. But with memes, it's not about the image itself. In 2015, researcher Walter Jose Castañeda concluded in his study that the meme image is what matters, not the image in the meme. "[Memes] obviate any relationship that their components may have with the image from which they originate," he wrote.
When someone sends you a meme with a tearful cat, the conversation doesn't actually have anything to do with cats. The text and the context of the conversation seemingly have nothing in common with the cat picture. But when put together, they make up a complete composition and we get its meaning.
