“The Rise of Meme Culture” by Joseph C.

Memes are now a bigger part of our culture than ever.  Memes have established an entertaining way to spread information, express an opinion, or even to make a product known.  While most of us know what a modern meme is, how would we define a meme.  Richard Dawkins, a famed evolutionary biologist and pioneer in what I like to call “meme theory”, defined a meme as an idea that spreads rapidly similar to how a disease would.  To Dawkins even scientific beliefs were “memes”.  Now that you know what Dawkins said a meme was, you may now wonder what this has to do with the modern representation of the meme.

Information scientists have said for years that many ideas are like organisms, they reproduce and evolve, and there is no better example than the modern meme.  The meme has diffused from a small group of people to be a major part of mainstream culture.  In recent years what was once just a fringe group of nerds on the internet has become a worldwide phenomenon.   This is due to the rise in social media use and the number of people on the internet in general.  Memes started out on early internet message boards and were used mostly by small groups of “nerds” for comedic purposes.  These “proto-memes” usually had a simple “top-text setup bottom-text punchline” set up.   Memes later spread to websites like Tumblr, and later Twitter, where they reached much larger audiences.  Google Trends shows a very similar story when one compares memes to other topics, in this case sports.  The red line is sports and while it fluctuates yearly with the changing of seasons it tends to stay in a predictable range until the end of 2014.  The blue line, on the other hand, is memes and it shows a very different story.  In the beginning very few people showed interest in memes; however, in 2012 there was an increase in the amount of people looking for memes on Google, and that number had another major jump right around 2014 and rose to its peak popularity in 2016 and stabilized below there.  This difusion from a small group of people on niche forums to worldwide recognition is astounding.  Daniel Dennet, a famous philosopher said this on the spreading of memes, “I believe that, given the right conditions, replicators automatically band together to create systems, or machines, that carry them around and work to favor their continued replication,”.  By this he means that memes are, in a way, self replicating they have a tendency to stick in our brains and spread to our friends and family through sharing, essentially a way to allow the maker of the meme to have more influence.

This graph is also interesting because it gives credence to the belief that companies should use memes for advertising.  If someone were to tell me a couple years ago that KFC would make a dating simulator or that Wendy’s would make a tabletop role playing game I would have said that you were crazy but these are very real things.  While it may be too early to tell, it definitely has people talking about the fast food places, for better and for worse, but as they say in marketing, “Any publicity is good publicity”.    When asked Elliot Kurjan, head of a popular meme page on instagram, said that, “Yes, [memes should be taught to marketers]because it’s a part of our culture so therefore whatever is part of the culture is a tool for marketing and promoting.”  In many cases, companies have been getting major exposure due to their meme marketing.  One example of this would be Wendy’s Tweets where they roast people and competing companies.  

Memes have also evolved to become something that no one would have expected while five years ago memes may have had a very simple format and style of humor today they range from a weird video, to an item you could buy, to even a video game.  This helps to prove what Dawkins said about the spread of information, it will have mutations that are in order to make sure that as many people are “infected” with the idea as possible.  The idea of a “dead meme” also shows Dawkins’ theory, similar to how a virus that infects and kills all of its hosts, a meme can die from overexposure and running out of ideas too quickly.

So, what do you think?  Is the meme’s popularity a blessing or a curse?  Will it continue or will the concept of memes itself become a “dead meme”?  And what does this mean for companies, should they use memes as a method of advertising or should they stick to more professional methods of selling their product?

Works Cited

Data source: Google Trends (https://www.google.com/trends).

Gleick, James. “What Defines a Meme?” Smithsonian.com, Smithsonian Institution, 1 May 2011, www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/what-defines-a-meme-1904778/.

Iveta. “32 Hilarious Twitter Roasts By Wendy's That Will Make You Think Twice Before Posting.” Bored Panda, Bored Panda, 17 Jan. 2019, www.boredpanda.com/funny-wendy-tweets-jokes/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=organic.

Joint, Laura. “The Rise of Meme Marketing And What It Means For PR.” Medium, PR Resolution, 5 Aug. 2019, blog.coveragebook.com/the-rise-of-meme-marketing-and-what-it-means-for-pr-3cf5ad89deaa.

Kostidakis, Perry. “The Evolution of Memes.” Complex, Complex, 13 Mar. 2019, www.complex.com/pop-culture/2019/03/evolution-of-memes.