Memes are, after all, their own successful transmission of entertainment. A photo, an image that you might have seen before, comes to you with a new context. A turn of phrase, used by a politician or celebrity and in some way ridiculous or unique, comes back you in all sorts of new ways (Imma let you finish…) and ultimately gets put back into your emails, instant messages, or even back into mass media itself.
However, there are some pretty obvious questions as to what memes even are or what qualifies as a meme. Everyone has an opinion (and a meme) to back up their position.leo2
those combinations of an expressive image with big bold text, are telemarketing data memes; but it’s best to think of them as one (very prominent) kind of a whole spectrum of Meme.
Image Macros rule the roost because they’re platform independent. They slip into our lives from e-mails, texts, websites and even posted on walls and doors. The chosen image (in this example, from the Baz Luhrman directed Great Gatsby) portrays an independent idea (Here’s to you) and the text compliments or contrasts it. The smallest, atomic level of an idea. And it gets into your mind, like a piece of candy (or a piece of grit).
photofunia-1475750857It can get way more complicated, however. This 1980s “Internet Archive” logo was automatically generated by an online script which does the hard work of layout, fonts and blending for you. When news of this tool broke in September of 2016 (it had been around a long time before that), this exact template showed up everywhere, from nightclub flyers to endless tweets. Within a short time, the ideas of both “using a computer to do art” and “the 1980s” became part of the payload of this image, as well as the inevitable feeling it was even more cliche and tired as hundreds piled on to using it. The long-term prospects of this “1980s art” meme are unknown.
223798And let’s not forget that “memes” (a term coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene) themselves go back decades before the internet made its first carefully engineered cross-continental connections. Office photocopies ran rampant with passed along motivational (or de-motivational) posters, telling you that you didn’t need to be crazy to work here… but it helps! Suffering the pains of analog transfer, the endless remixing and hand touchups of these posters gave them a weathered look, as if aged by their very (relative) longevity. To many others, this whole grandparent of the internet meme had a more familiar name: Folklore.