HERE COME DAT BOI

The Internet Meme, and how it is shaping 21st century

discourse

Abstract
A survey of Internet Memes to determine what makes them more likely to spread across the
planet. Results were complicated due to a variety of factors, but pointed to Pop Culture memes
as being eminently popular, with their context being learnable due to the ease of access to
media from across the world almost immediately. Ease of internet access and type of device
accessed from, as well as social pressures and censorship have a significant obfuscating effect,
and a wider, more comprehensive study is warranted.

Richard Pezzella
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Richard Pezzella

Here Come Dat Boi

The Internet Meme, and how it is shaping 21st century discourse
Introduction
The internet meme is perhaps one of the most striking and bizarre fixtures of the

globalized world. The rise of the internet and parallel development of consumer internet-capable

devices has facilitated the widespread growth of several new forms of media consumption and,

within each one, the meme phenomena has taken hold. From Rick Astley’s now infamous music

video for his 1987 song “Never Gonna Give You Up” to the 2016 revelation of a simple image

of a frog riding a bicycle, with plenty of text based examples in between and beyond, memes

have become ubiquitous on the internet. Often humorous, but more frequently taking political or

intoned meanings, internet memes cover nearly any topic one could think of, and are

omnipresent on most websites with user-generated content. Indeed, the advent of consumer

social networking has undoubtedly helped contribute to this craze: things previously contained to

active-user sites, such as forums, IRC channels, and email chains are now able to be shared with

a wider, more passive audience.

The explosion of consumer internet access has changed the world in dramatic ways. The

ability to share information and ideas across the planet instantaneously has facilitated the rise of

the meme as a mechanism by which said information can be shared, and the ever-growing

population of internet users only increases the mutative effect that defines this sharing. Whether

it be over cellphone or desktop, more and more people are getting access to Facebook, YouTube,

Twitter, and many of the other easy-to-use services that arose with Web 2.0. The escalated

adoption of these services only fuels exposure to Meme content which, in turn, inspires creation
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of more of that content: a self-propagating and perpetually replicating force that, as Richard

Brodie describes, functions not unlike a “virus of the mind” (Brodie 2009), altering the very

nature of discourse as the discourse itself alters the meme. Echoing the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis’s

component of linguistic determinism, the Internet Meme embodies the rapidly shifting trends in

globalized communication. The internet is a supranational, supra-cultural exchange: it belongs to

no one people, and the communications that are facilitated by it are birthed of a wholly new

context. This context has radically altered the linguistic mechanisms of conversation, and the

Internet Meme embodies those alterations.

In a globalized world where memes are exchanged and utilized as core components of

discourse on the internet, and have even begun bleeding into offline content, a few frontiers of

understanding open for exploration. Never before could trends in discussion and language be

tracked with such accuracy as now, over the internet, and never has the birth of a whole new

mechanism of discourse been born by way of and before the eyes of the whole human race. The

rise of the Internet Meme presents an opportunity to study the merging of cultures worldwide,

and the assimilation, adaptation, and creation of a new means of communication. To that end,

this paper seeks to do so, and answer a specific duo of questions: what memes spread more

extensively, and why?

Literature Review and Background Information

Memes, in brief

The Meme concept originates with Richard Dawkins, who, in his 1976 book The Selfish

Gene, coined the term. Derived from the Greek root “Mimeme”, he settles on the word “meme”

as a “noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation”
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(Dawkins 1976, 192). His concept of a meme is a far broader one than the specific species this

paper investigates, encompassing any replicating cultural unit. As he describes it himself:

“Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions,

ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate

themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or

eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from

brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called

imitation.” (Dawkins 1976, 192)

Speaking of memes as mutative, living structures, Dawkins describes the concept as an integral

concept of culture, prevalent in any context where an idea may be present and transmitted from

one individual to another. He uses the example of God: a central idea, common in many (if not

all) cultures, that is certainly ancient, and has changed via mutation into countless iterations

throughout human history (Dawkins 1976, 192). The notion of a core idea adopted and changed

by multiple content creators over time is intrinsic to that of the internet meme: most begin with a

seed content that is then mutated in different ways, unique to each user.

Dawkins goes on to discuss the replicative factors of a meme, and what mechanisms or

features may be at play in the replication of different instances. He speaks to the process of

memetic replication as “imitation”, in that the central tenet of meme reproduction is to be

imitated in some capacity after transference (Dawkins 1976, 194). Some memes, he says, are

more readily imitable than others, and that the success of a meme will be determined by three

factors: longevity, fecundity, and copying-fidelity (Dawkins 1976, 194). This three-factor notion
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provides an interesting few considerations for Internet Memes—after all, Dawkins

conceptualized the meme concept in the 1970s, almost two decades before the nascent internet

would come into being, and over 40 years before the iPhone and Internet 2.0. As a result, aspects

of these three factors become trivialized or complicated due to the vastly different circumstances

that the internet creates.

Longevity becomes one of the least important factors when pertaining to individual

instances of a meme in Dawkins’ conceptualization: he speaks to the idea that the tune of ‘Auld

Lang Syne’ that exists within his head will only survive his lifespan, and the paper version

printed in the book he got it from will only survive as long as that paper lasts, but the tune itself

that is printed on other sheets of paper and in other books, and re-iterated from the memories of

others, and thus reprinted in the future, will live on as long as it is remembered and available for

reprinting (Dawkins 1976, 194). In the context of the Internet Meme, Longevity becomes even

less important in determining success due to the permanence afforded by the internet. Truly, a

more robust archive of human knowledge and media has never been created. With websites, for

example, like YouTube funded and maintained by some of the largest entities in human history,

content posted to it is unlikely to ever fall victim to time. Only by direct intervention can

something truly be removed from the internet: should YouTube choose to purge a video, or the

creator/poster of said video choose to remove it from their account, it will cease to exist—any

other circumstance, save for the dissolution of YouTube (precipitated by the even more unlikely

collapse of its parent company Alphabet, nee Google, now the second largest corporation on the

planet at time of this writing) is unlikely to see the video in question be removed from the

internet. To go even further, an adage applies readily to the internet: once the genie is out of the

bottle, it cannot be put back in. Any content, and especially memes posted to popular sites, are
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likely to be archived by third-party internet backup services, or saved either legitimately or

illicitly by private individuals, then reuploaded to other websites. In simple terms, Dawkins’s

conceptualization of longevity may well only apply to the internet as a whole, for it is unlikely

that any one iteration will be entirely inaccessible after creation.

Fecundity holds much more significance both to Dawkins and to the internet meme than

longevity. Dawkins uses the example of scientific research: if the research is acceptable to the

population of individual scientists, it will be republished and achieve longevity (Dawkins 1976,

194)—the same applies to all other memetic concepts, and certainly to the Internet Meme. The

more fecund a meme is, the more traction it will gain. For Internet Memes, this measure is

complicated, and partly the subject of this paper’s study. What makes a meme more effective? Is

it humor? Is it relatability? This is currently unclear, but regardless of what specific quality

creates an effective meme, it is clear that more endearing and effective ones are likely to achieve

success, whereby success means wider spread and mutation. High short-term success, however,

as Dawkins says, is not indicative of overall success, like popular songs or fashion trends

(Dawkins 1976, 194). This rule equally applies to Internet Memes. Countless unpopular or

“failed” image macros, videos, or text posts have been lost to the infinity of the internet, without

repost or mutation—forever permanently accessible on the internet, but gaining little popular

traction.

The final, third general quality as describe by Dawkins is copying-fidelity. He concedes

that such a factor is hard to attach to a concept that is inherently predicated on mutation and

change, but that if the core idea is present in some capacity, the resultant meme following a

mutation is a successful one (Dawkins 1976, 195). He contrasts this idea with genes, which

typically undergo all-or-nothing transmission, and uses the example of offspring: if there is a
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black parent and a white parent, the resultant child will be a mixture of their features, from skin

color, to height, and other genetic factors (Dawkins 1976, 195). This readily defines the

occurrence of the Internet Meme, and helps understand what may define a successful one. Seed

content that is readily mutated and given a new context will likely achieve wider spread and

popularity than one that is hard to modulate. This explains the fact that content is generally

derived from specific sources with an already recognizable context, not from random screenshots

of TV shows and video games, or random words strung together.

Also, considered is Richard Brodie’s work on memes, based off the work of Dawkins, as

well as Daniel Dennett and Henry Plotkin. Brodie derives from all three, and offers his own

interpretation of what a meme is, and what he calls a “working definition:

A meme is a unit of information in a mind whose existence influences events such that more

copies of itself get created in other minds. (Brodie 2009, 11)

Working off the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of language influencing worldview and vice-versa,

Brodie posits that memes act as if “viruses of the mind”, spreading and shaping the ways which

someone may look at the world even on a basic level. His account covers everything from

advertising to internet memes themselves, discussing how memes may be employed to spread

information or virulently spread ideas. He gives examples of certain types of memes that we are

exposed to without conscious intent: religion, observation of parents’ relationships, and even TV

shows (Brodie 2009, 19). While this work is nowhere near as influential to my research as

Dawkins, it does help understand the many ways in which memes may have altered the

landscape of discourse online, thus helping to inform my actual survey of the spread of my

selected memes.
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History of Internet Memes

The Internet Meme comes into existence with the commercial internet, and the creation

of the World Wide Web. Earlier precursors to the Internet Meme can be seen in the form of

offline macros, such as the famous “Kilroy was here” mark, spread by US soldiers during the

Second World War (Know Your Meme 2016).

Figure 1: Kilroy Was Here, at the World War 2 memorial in Washington, D.C.

Demarcations like Kilroy spread globally, and were featured frequently in literature and artwork

through the 20th century, even before the internet came into being. “Primitive” memes like

Kilroy achieved global popularity or, at the least, global presence, by way of a massive,

globalizing event: WW2 and subsequent Cold War conflicts brought US GIs all over the planet,

and where they went, Kilroy followed (Know Your Meme 2016). In addition to Kilroy and his

ilk, Dawkins and Brodie speak at length of different examples of media exhibiting memetic
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behavior: from pop music (Dawkins 1976, 193) to advertising (Brodie 2009, 11), mutable

content is not at all uncommon prior to the rise of the internet.

The first Internet Meme in a form comparable to modern ones is of much debate, but it is

widely posited that 1996’s “Dancing Baby” is the first, or one of the first, to be widely spread

and publicly recognized (Know Your Meme 2016).

Figure 2: Dancing Baby, unanimated

“Dancing Baby” was a 3D-rendered image of a baby dancing to the intro of the song “Hooked on

a Feeling” by Blue Swede, and widely circulated by email in the late 90s. This example

constitutes one of the main mechanisms of meme spread on the nascent internet: chain emails.

With no rich media formatting, weak hardware, and low internet speeds, streaming video or

displaying large file content was almost impossible for many home internet users (who already
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existed in relatively low numbers. As a result, the audience for the memes was fairly constrained,

and spread was limited to those who could be included in targeted email chains, often only

reaching different friend groups and clusters after multiple instances of email forwarding (Know

Your Meme 2016). For the same reason, text chain memes reached high levels of popularity in

the same time frame: the famous faux-Bill Gates email, circulated beginning in 1994, proclaimed

to be a message from Microsoft founder and CEO Bill Gates offering significant sums of money

to users, or otherwise (sometimes also) a ridiculous, humorous message (Know Your Meme

2012).

Meme content changes drastically with Web 2.0, and the advent of rich media content,

faster internet speeds, and more widespread adoption. Ethan Zuckerman speaks on the shift, and

concludes that the primary change was from servicing professionals to servicing consumers—in

his words.

“Web 1.0 was invented to allow physicists to share research papers. Web 2.0 was created to

allow people to share pictures of cute cats.” (Zuckerman 2008)

Web 2.0 brought a whole new horizon for content consumption. Between the years 2000 and

2010, modern social media came into being: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, and their

predecessors, Myspace, LiveJournal, and Geopages, allowed for more casual internet users to be

engaged with “meme-worthy” content. Zuckerman speaks about how this trend towards casual

use allows more active engagement, when tools designed for professional use are repurposed.

Thus, “lolcats” (an early-mid 2000s meme featuring cats with broken English captions) posted

on Something Awful (one of the larger internet forums during the late Web 1.0/early Web 2.0

era) succeeds academic pieces posted on BBS forums (one of the primary mechanisms of

communication via the internet pre-Web 2.0) (Zuckerman 2008). Most of the memes tracked in
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this paper originate in Web 2.0, and, thus, subject to the casual engagement phenomenon

Zuckerman describes.

Anatomy of an Internet Meme

In brief, an Internet Meme is asserted in this project to be comprised of two layers: Seed

Content, and Mutative Content. Seed Content is the core content or context of a meme. For

visual memes, it is the image or video that the meme is derived from; for text, it is the original

text version the mutation is based off. Mutative Content is the mutation placed over the Seed

Content. For image-based memes, this may be photoshopping or manipulation of the image, or

text additions to the original image, or even a wholly separate image that bears resemblance to an

original but differs in internal content. For video based ones, it may be any number of alterations,

from editing (ex: the full movie Shrek, but every time Shrek appears, the movie speeds up), to

audio changes (ex: Jurassic Park, but all the T. Rex roars are replaced with Samuel L. Jackson

quotes), to wholly separate spoof videos.

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In the simple example above, “Business Cat”, the original image of the cat wearing the collar and

tie, and the multicolor background for contrast, is the Seed Content. The text added at the top

and bottom is the Mutative Content, and will vary with each iteration of the meme.

Research Design and Methodology

Hypothesis

This project will test one main hypothesis: non-contextual memes will spread over a

wider, more diverse range of nations, covering at least 3 continents. This hypothesis asserts that

memes that are not derived from an original, possibly locale-specific context, will have more

appeal outside their context and, thus, a higher chance of adoption and subsequent mutation by

audiences across the planet. Non-contextual, “Absurdist” memes will more readily achieve

widespread adoption than will their contextual counterparts. The null hypothesis is that category

of meme has no bearing on ability to spread.

Variables

This project has a very simple variable set, of one independent variable and one

dependent variable.

• IV: Category/type of meme

• DV: Effectiveness of spread (distance)

Categorization of Memes

I have opted to divide the memes being surveyed into two distinct categories, with three

subcategories for further classification. The two overarching categories are Contextual and

Absurdist/Non-Contextual, and differ in that Contextual memes are derived from some
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preexisting content or reference to an event or object, while Absurdist memes do not have

contextual Seed Content: they are simply born of some underlying factor, and given meaning by

the context of their usage.

Contextual memes have been divided into the three following subcategories:

1. Political/Current Events

2. Pop Culture

3. Universal-Environmental

Political/Current Events-based memes are predicated on, as the title implies, either a matter of

politics or recent news phenomena. Recent examples include “Harambe”, a subject of this paper,

and the 2016 US elections.

Figure 3: 2016 meme using the cover of Harry Potter sequel play, "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child", as Seed Content, and
Harambe, a gorilla killed in May 2016 after a child fell into his pen at the Cincinnati Zoo, as the Mutative Content.
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Pop Culture memes use popular media implements as their Seed Content. TV shows,

videogames, movies, music, sports, and any other mass-media content is fair game for mutation.

Examples of Seed Content include “All Your Base Are Belong To Us”, taken from a 1989

Japanese arcade game, Zero Wing, that featured a very poor English translation, and recently-

popular “All Star”, centered on the hit 1999 single by Smash Mouth, featured in the movie

Shrek. This project uses the latter as one of its subjects.

Figure 4: an "All Your Base Are Belong To Us" meme, featuring Donald Trump, merging a Pop-Culture Seed Content with a
Political/Current Events Mutative Content.

Universal-Environmental memes are typically centered around concepts that are unique to the

human condition and almost universally present. These memes are comprised of Seed Content
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that is non-specific to a locale, and instead relies upon recognition of environmental features,

facial expressions, or other “universal” symbols to convey meaning.

Figure 5: a "Rage Comic" meme, featured in this project. As described, this Universal-Environmental meme relies on the viewer
associating the caricature subject's face with anger or frustration, with the Mutative Content expressing the rationale for such
feelings.

Absurdist memes, as previously mentioned, feature no recognizable context. Their Seed Content

is derived from bizarre or otherwise unclear origins, bearing no or only superficial qualities of a

contextual meme. Their Mutative Content is what typically adds context, but may not necessarily

do so, and the humor or endearing quality of the meme is often derived from the total lack of said

context or sense surrounding it.

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Figure 6: "Dat Boi", perhaps the most emblematic of the Absurdist Meme category, is a "virgin birth" meme: it has no context
whatsoever, nor any recognizable Seed Content from any media. It is simply a picture of a frog on a unicycle.

Analytical Procedure
This project measured the spread of eight memes. These memes were representative of

the four categories previously described, and met certain requirements: having had enough time

to spread, be searchable using simple terms via any search engine (for this project, Google), and

having undergone sufficient mutation. The following memes were selected for meeting this

criterion:

Contextual

• Political/Current Events

o Harambe

o Pepe the Frog

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• Pop Culture

o “All Star”

o “Rickroll”

• Universal-Environmental

o Advice Animals

o Rage Comics

Absurdist

• Dat Boi

• “Shooting Stars”

All memes had either enjoyed constant usage and mutation for a matter of years, or had recently

been introduced into general use.

The spread of the memes was assessed through Google Trends, a service Google provides

to access data on searches globally. The website allows users to look up individual search terms,

then renders geodata, search frequency, and related searches for each term. It also allows

comparison between terms. All eight memes were assessed via Google Trends, using a variety of

common search terms. The justification for this method is simple: a good way of determining the

popularity of a meme is to see if people are looking for it. It is almost impossible to track

instances of actual postings of memes around the internet due to the sheer scale of such an

endeavor, to say nothing of the significant obstacle that privacy settings cause for tracking posts

on social media websites like Twitter and Facebook. Certainly, with an advanced enough

artificial intelligence, or a committed team with code that can identify certain main visual factors
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of a meme, one could attempt such a monumental task, but I unfortunately did not have the time

nor access to the requisite technology to do so. It is believed that Google Trends data is more

reflective of the adoption of a meme into the mainstream, regardless, and therefore more useful.

Results and Analysis

Raw Data
Political/Current Events
Harambe

Figure 7: Harambe statistics (search terms: harambe, dicks out for harambe, dicks for harambe, harambe meme)
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Pepe the Frog (after adoption by Trump supporters)

Figure 8: Pepe the Frog (search terms: pepe, rare pepe, pepe meme, pepe the frog)

Universal-Environmental
Advice Animals

Figure 9: Advice Animals (search terms: advice animal meme, socially awkward penguin meme, advice dog meme)
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Rage Comics

Figure 10: rage comics (search terms: rage comic, y u no, troll face)

Pop Culture
All Star

Figure 11: All Star (search terms:all star smash mouth, somebody once told me, shrek song, all star meme)
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Never Gonna Give You Up/Rick Roll

Figure 12: Rickrolling (search terms:rick astley, never gonna give you up, rick roll)

Absurdist/Non-Contextual
Dat Boi

Figure 13: Dat Boi (search terms: here come dat boi, dat boi, frog on unicycle)
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Shooting Stars

Figure 14: Shooting Stars (search terms: shooting stars meme)

Analysis

The data collected completely proved the hypothesis wrong: contextual memes far

outstripped the spread of either non-contextual example, and by a significant margin. “Dat Boi”

only reaches maximum penetration in the Anglosphere and Northern Europe, with the only

searches outside of the Western world being in Vietnam: likely because “Dat Boi” has overlap

with unrelated Vietnamese words. “Shooting Stars”, equally, had no penetration outside of the

United States. All other contextual memes managed to at least break out of North America, with

only All Star being constrained to the New World.

There are some flaws in this style of research: most importantly, not all data necessary to

make a sweeping determination is available. Eight memes do not an exhaustive analysis make,

and, unfortunately, Google Trends was not able to render geodata for Advice Animals- even with
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an abundance of data available. The results here present a very generalized image of what

audiences may be searching for, and, due to the nature of Internet Memes (in that anything can

become one), may be reflective of the specific factors of each meme itself, and not the category

they represent. Even more obfuscatory, the meme selection was controlled within the same

period and realm of use (website or service), but could not be controlled within the language gap,

nor with intent. As a result, certain searches may have overlap with other, non-meme searches—

this is most prevalent and obvious with “Dat Boi”, but likely impacted “Advice Animals” as

well. Finally, and perhaps most problematically, comes the problem of censorship, with the

biggest offender being the distinct lack of data from China. Without the ability to gauge mass

market penetration in China, and possible blocking of Google, or access to sites where memes

may be hosted there as well as in other nations (Islamic states with blasphemy laws, for

example), it is hard to get a read on what trends may be occurring regionally.

Implications and Conclusion

With contextual memes being utterly dominant when it comes to virulence, the question

turns from what, to why. It was originally theorized that non-contextual memes would be more

popular due to their ease of adoption—anyone can look at it and find something entertaining or

endearing about the content within, and apply their own meaning that may well be universally

shared. However, this assumes that there is a universally shared meaning to be found in the Seed

Content of an Absurdist meme, and, even further, that somehow, contextual memes could not be

understood by those not within proximity of their context. Yet, the same technology that

facilitates the spread of the Internet Meme also allows for anyone, anywhere, to learn the context

of these memes instantaneously. Someone in Indonesia stumbling upon a Harambe meme could

almost certainly have seen a news article from the United States regarding the untimely demise
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of that poor gorilla. Would it not seem reasonable that perhaps a Brazilian man stumbling upon

an “All Star” meme video have seen Shrek when they were younger, and have some sort of

attachment to the song? Indeed, perhaps my hypothesis about non-contextual memes may be

misunderstanding the Seed Content that makes a meme relatable to begin with. After all, would

not a contextual meme seem to be Absurdist to someone who has never seen the media or has no

knowledge of the event that serves as its Seed Content?

I surmise that, instead, it may be more a function of the content itself that makes a meme

more endearing, but that there are also a few practical concerns to consider. Yes, a meme itself

heavily determines its ability to spread, but the users it may reach are inherently limited by

certain obstacles. Censorship, as aforementioned, means that markets for meme creation may be

blocked: the so-called Great Firewall of China blocks access to many sites that greatly facilitate

exposure to memes, all of which came with the advent of Web 2.0 in the West (Denyer 2016).

Similar censorship in other countries, as well as surveillance, and social pressures that may

influence internet browsing habits or usage, creates a barricade to transference in certain areas.

Even beyond artificial barriers, comes a simple one: lack of internet access is the ultimate

deterrent to meme consumption. Take for example the simple difference between accessing the

internet via a cellphone, and accessing it via a desktop: for the average user in the United States,

most of their daily use is likely spent on their cellphone, occasionally checking Facebook or

other social media as a form of Active Use, and responding to messages as a form of Passive

Use. Desktop or laptop usage for many is relegated wholly to the realm of work, or consumption

of non-memetic media, such as video streaming on Netflix. However, in the developing world,

smartphones are, for many, the only means of accessing the internet (Poushter 2016). On these

smartphones, depending on their internet access speed and censorship circumstances, they may
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be relegated only to social media use, or they may use the phone for a variety of internet-related

things. Due to battery concerns, ergonomics, and simple realities of life (long work hours, little

downtime, etc.), those in developing nations may not find themselves browsing Reddit for hours,

or scrolling through pictures shared by their friends on Facebook. As a result, their meme

consumption may be heavily restricted entirely, or confined to only certain categories that break

through in their immediately accessible online circles.

There are so many potential factors at play here that future research is not only warranted,

but demanded. The future of information transference is embodied in the meme. One need only

look to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, which embroiled itself in a rather large

debacle when it dubbed Pepe the Frog, one of the subjects of this project, a white supremacist

symbol, because it had been mutated by certain communities to represent white nationalist,

racist, and/or fascist ideals (Chan 2016). This critical misunderstanding of how memes work, and

the communities that adopt certain content, quickly created a debacle whereby the campaign was

the butt of many jokes and insults for their absurd insinuation that a cartoon frog had somehow

become a white supremacist icon, with broad implications for any community that readily

consumed or generated non-Trump or non-White-Nationalist Pepe memes. Indeed, as social

movements do assimilate content and mutate it, and home internet usage continues to increase at

rapid rates, it will become vital to understand how that is going to affect the state of discourse

going forward. This project is but a tip of a toe in the ocean that is the internet and the presence

of memes on it, but it does signal that there is much more to be learned, and, perhaps, that we are

underestimating the ability for communities to learn of, adapt to, and embrace, new ideas—and

make them their own.

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Glossary of terms
All definitions given are my own, in simplified terms for readers who may not be well versed in
the more technical language.

• World Wide Web: consumer, public-facing Internet. Is, for all intents and purposes, the
“real” Internet, where all social media is hosted.
• Web 1.0: the “original” internet, from creation of the World Wide Web (WWW) in the
mid-1980s to roughly 2005. Typified by slow internet access and low-resource
machinery, resulting in simple websites typically featuring text interfaces.
• Web 2.0: the Internet post-2005 and implementation of complex media standards,
allowing for the widespread sharing of videos, imagery, and large files. Coincides with
the social media explosion and rise in home internet adoption.
• Social Media: any Internet utility that facilitates or relies upon interaction between two
humans via the service.
• BBS/Forum: mainstays of Web 1.0, these simple, text-based boards allowed users to have
text exchanges. Some allowed rudimentary picture and video hosting, giving birth to the
first Internet Memes.
• Active Use: an individual consciously interacting with a service. Updating Facebook
statuses, posting videos to YouTube or pictures to Instagram, sending messages,
browsing internet forums/Reddit, etc.
• Passive Use: reactive usage of a service. Responding to messages or notifications. Does
not create content.

Works Cited
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Brideau, Kate, and Charles Berret. 2014. "A Brief Introduction to Impact: "The Meme Font"."
Journal of Visual Culture (Sage) 307-313.
Brodie, Richard. 2009. Virus of the Mind. Cornwall: Hay House.
Castillo, Tony. 2003. Understanding Memes: Arriving at a Better Definition In Terms of
Cultural Evolution. Class material, Morgantown: West Virginia University.
Chan, Elizabeth. 2016. "Donald Trump, Pepe the frog, and white supremacists: an explainer."
Hillary for America. September 16. Accessed May 5, 2016.
https://www.hillaryclinton.com/feed/donald-trump-pepe-the-frog-and-white-
supremacists-an-explainer/.
Dawkins, Richard. 1976. The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dennett, Daniel C. 1998. Memes: Myths, Misunderstandings and Misgivings. Thesis, Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina.
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