What the hell is a meme?
The term meme was coined in 1979 by Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene. He defined the term as something that determines the behavior of an organism, either taught to or learned through experiences. Overtime the term meme has taken more of a turn towards the internet, and the definition of the word meme is a lot less black and white. Although you may define an internet meme as “a piece of culture, typically a joke, which gains influence through online transmission” (Davidson. 122), it is hard to define what a meme actually means, and it is almost impossible to define each meme itself.
Each meme in itself can be short and straight to the point or it can be so completely complicated that no average person can understand it. There can be memes about anything and everything, and there is. The formats of a meme are absolutely endless and when one meme begins to die out another one quickly takes its place in the realm of memes. The reason why memes are so popular, and spread so much is because of their format. Most memes are based off of an image. Sometimes these images have text and sometimes they don’t. When I first began to use the internet, and would come across memes I noticed that there was not a lot of formats. I remember specifically there was a pondering dinosaur, Bad Luck Brian, Crazy girlfriend and a couple more that were used over and over. The reason why these were so popular, and so consistently used is because you could write anything you wanted, and as long as it was relevant to the character in the meme, and to the person viewing the meme it would get liked and shared. Another reason why they were so popular is because they could create shared exclusivity. If you are a senior Chemistry major at the University of New Hampshire you can create and share a meme that links to that part of your life and the only people who would understand it would be the people who are also Chemistry majors at UNH. Same thing goes for anyone. Memes generate “inside jokes” for people to share with their friends who would understand them as well. Nowadays there are new meme formats every day. Some of the memes that come from Reddit, and even Instagram can be so absurdly random, yet they will be the most popular memes or meme formats for days and weeks.
Recently an image of Bob Odenkirk, who plays Saul in the TV series Better Call Saul, began to become a huge hit in the meme world. For what reason? Who knows. The image shows him standing in a courtroom, as he plays a lawyer on his TV show. The memes would include text that imply that “Saul” was talking to the judge. However, the text would be so random, and hard to explain to anyone who isn’t “in on the joke”. This is why I think it’s difficult to define an internet meme. Like I had mentioned before, memes as a whole can be defined, but memes as a singular image are so radical that they cannot be explained, they just have to be understood.
