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In 2015 Antonio Guillem takes another stock photo, just like he has thousands of times
before.
Two years later several people use this image to make jokes, but it’s soon lost in the
sea of internet memes.
Then, on August 19th, twitter user n1m161 makes this meme, joking about young people’s
affinity for socialism.
The post goes a little twitter viral, getting a few thousand retweets, and suddenly, the
collective hive-mind of the internet has decided that it’s found it’s new favorite meme.
For now.
Why do some memes capture our attention?
What causes a meme’s meteoric rise to the top of internet culture at a given moment?
I’ve got a few ideas.
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Memes have been growing in notoriety in recent years, I’ve noticed people, even those who
aren’t deep into internet culture talk about “a meme they saw”.
When most people use the word meme today they’re referring to an image macro.
These internet memes usually have two parts.
An image that serves as a caricature or symbolic representation, and a recognizable formatting
of text, used to make a joke in conjunction with the image.
But to understand a successful internet meme we’ll need to dig a little into where the
word “meme” comes from.
This is Richard Dawkins, who coined the term meme in his 1976 book “The Selfish Gene”:
Though he coined the term before internet memes existed, the name fits, because Dawkins’
idea of meme is an almost perfect description of how an internet meme works.
There’s a cultural “survival of the fittest” process that helps create and spread successful
memes.
The process selects for the appeal of the meme,
and the ability of the image and joke format to be re-applied to many topics.
Memes are chosen by a sub culture, or by a larger group, because they resonate.
But what causes the resonance?
Let’s use the recently popular “Distracted Boyfriend” meme as our guiding example.
A successful meme expresses a certain idea or concept more quickly than that idea could
be articulated.
If you look at the page for this stock photo on Shutterstock you’ll see the full title
of “Disloyal man walking with his girlfriend and looking amazed at another seductive girl.”
It takes a lot of words to describe this scenario, but when you look at this image you know immediately
what’s going on.
The characters have a past, there’s a future fallout from this moment.
But more importantly there is a core feeling that is time consuming to lay out in words,
but that is immediately evident when viewing the photo.
In this way it behaves as an archetypal image.
An Archetype is a deeply felt, instinctual pre-idea form embedded in the collective unconscious.
And while the archetype itself cannot be defined or expressed explicitly, we can recognize
it when it’s represented within an archetypal image.
The archetype embedded in this image is a complex scenario, recognized by all of us
easily, it can be described by the phrase “the grass is always greener on the other
side of the fence.”
But even using that phrase is resorting to use of symbolism to represent this scenario.
A good meme succeeds because it taps into the past experiences of the collective and
as it spreads becomes a part of the collective symbolism for those experiences.
That’s Stefan Hayden, a Shutterstock developer I spoke with who’s working on an image editing
tool that lets people quickly create their own versions of the meme.
This is why stock images tend to make great memes.
Images that end up being used in successful memes often have characters whose expressions
are exaggerated.
They appear as caricatures for the emotion or feeling they are expressing.
Those exaggerated elements make the meme stronger, it’s symbolism is more easily detected by
more people.
And the exaggerated effect is funny, we like it for the same reason we like cartoons.
This isn’t to suggest that a meme has to be gotten by everyone.
A meme can appeal to small group.
Sometimes they have appeal because only a small group recognized the symbolism of a
meme.
Memes often act as a sort of “in group” identifier, like inside jokes, and tv show
references, a meme is a way of discovering who we have a common base of understanding
with.
And their short but intense lifespans make them signposts for eras of internet culture.
The perfect meme often seems to be one where the image element is broad enough that many
people “get” the symbolism, while the joke conveyed through text has a very narrow
appeal.
Let’s examine the modes in which a meme can interact with culture.
Initial exposure.
The first mode is how the meme interacts with the viewer upon the first exposure.
With the “Distracted Boyfriend” meme, the first time you see it you find it funny
because of the way someone modified it to make a joke, but also because the photo itself
is funny.
Some memes are never replicate, and operate only in this mode.
Continued application.
In the second mode a meme’s ability to be remixed is crucial.
This is the mode where the meme gains the most traction.
A good meme has a formula that makes the application of the core archetype to a many different
scenarios easy.
In this mode most of the humor is generated from seeing all the ways in which people can
use the meme.
Subversion of the formula.
In the third mode, humor and freshness are generated by the subversion of the established
formula of the meme.
Now that most of the possible applications are exhausted, people begin to modify the
original nature of the meme and use it to express ideas that are similar, or even the
inverse of the original archetype.
Acceptance into cultural lexicon.
Ultimately a meme can enter the cultural lexicon.
It can become a tool or a short of shorthand that we might use to refer to the archetype
at the core of the meme.
Most memes won’t operate within all these modes.
But successful memes that stick around usually operate well in multiple modes.
Types of memes existed before the internet.
But the internet has had a big influence on memes
First, by increasing the number of connections and points of communication, it speeds up
the evolution of memes.
Second, the internet it makes this evolutionary process much more visible than it’s been
in the past.
Before the internet tracking little know non-image memes out in culture was extremely difficult.
Although for the most part, memes remain enigmatic, and difficult to track.
But maybe it’s worth the effort.
I think we underestimate the importance of what meme represent.
The individual meme might seem trivial, but tracking trends across many memes reveal the
deeply felt ideas in internet culture that they represent.
We can learn something about ourselves by tracking which memes survive.
At the very least, become an evolutionary force that helps shape our culture, and share
a meme.
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