jargon

key concepts
in social
research

memes
by alice marwick
The Internet is a bastion of folk culture. mainly concerned
Insider slang, chain emails, and trendy with the propa-
videos fill inboxes and news feeds, cir- gation of genetic
culating from user to user. If someone material, Dawkins
uploads a photo of her cat, another adds briefly turned his
a poorly-spelled caption and posts it to attention to the
a message board, and months (or years) propagation of
later, someone else changes the caption, cultural mate-
this string of reappropriated words and rial. He observed
images is called a “meme,” in Internet that fashion and
parlance. The term is vague enough to customs evolve
encompass such varied digital artifacts as rapidly, resembling
Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies” music video, the ways genes

collections of funny yearbook quotes,
and animated GIFs of a dancing ham-
ster. Memes reveal much about what
communications scholar Henry Jenkins
refers to as the participatory culture of
the Internet, which is constantly in flux.
According to Patrick Davison, “an
Internet meme is a piece of culture,
typically a joke, which gains influence
through online transmission.” Limor
Schifman defines them as “cultural infor-
mation that passes along from person to
person, yet gradually scales into a shared
social phenomenon.” The availability of
social media means that any piece of
Memes propagate themselves by leaping from
brain to brain.
Internet content has the potential for an
enormous audience. Websites like Know
Your Meme chronicle popular Internet
trends almost as quickly as they emerge.
The term “meme” was coined by
evolutionary biologist (and famed atheist)
Richard Dawkins in his 1976 bestseller
The Selfish Gene. Though the book is
evolve. Curious as
to how such influ-
ential norms could
change so quickly,
Memes such as “Paula Deen’s Riding Things,” a comment on
Dawkins broke the celebrity chef’s food festival antics, draw upon pop culture
cultural products imagery, slicing and dicing them for Internet consumption.
down into units
called memes, including “tunes, ideas,
catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways
of making pots or of building arches.”
Just as genes propagate themselves by
leaping from body to body, he wrote,
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 identified three key ele-
ments of a successful genetic variant:
copy-fidelity, fecundity, and longevity.
In relation to memes, copy-fidelity is the
ability to replicate accurately; fecundity
is its speed of replication; and longevity
its stability over time. Certain memes, he
Source Unknown
said, will be more successful than others
because they fulfill a cultural need or are
uniquely suited to a specific circumstance.
moving to memetics
Dawkin’s theory laid dormant until
it was popularized in the late 1990s with
the advent of memetics. Memes were
a fitting metaphor for Internet culture,
affording exact copies of digital artifacts,
rapid person-to-person spread, and enor-
mous storage capacity—a perfect storm
of copy-fidelity, fecundity, and longevity.
Marketers, theorists, and pundits seized
upon the term as a description for Inter-
net trends that made an average person
like the “Tron Guy” or “Numa Numa
Kid” an overnight sensation.
Memetics is a contested field.
Many anthropologists and sociologists
see memetics as limited in its capacity

12 contexts.org
Source Unknown
Memes, like the omnipresent “Grumpy Cat,” encourage imitation and satire, and spawn thousands of variants.
to understand how cultural artifacts are
rooted in complex sociohistorical con-
texts. They charge that memetics sees
“culture” as a series of discrete individual
units, and that it blurs the lines between
metaphor and biology. Dawkins wrote in
1976, “When you plant a fertile meme in
my mind you literally parasitize my brain,
turning it into a vehicle for the meme’s
propagation in just the way that a virus
may parasitize the genetic mechanism of
a host cell.” While he emphasized that
memes were only a metaphor, the idea
that cultural diffusion has a biological
basis was popularized with the rise of the
terms “computer virus” and “viral market-
ing.” Seth Godin’s 2001 book Unleashing
the Ideavirus argued that marketers and
corporations could use the power of
the Internet to create “ideaviruses” that
spread from person-to-person without any
push from the creator—“word of mouth
marketing.” Thus, going beyond Dawkins’
original notion, memetics became a way
for business people to describe new forms
of marketing, particularly those tied to
the Internet.
memes today
Contemporary memes can be
roughly divided into two groups. A
study of YouTube memes by Shifman
distinguishes between “viral videos”
(for instance, the video for Korean pop
star Psy’s “Gangnam Style,” which was
a huge hit in his home country and
became a world-wide phenomenon on
Contexts, Vol. 12, No. 4, pp. 12-13. ISSN 1536-5042, electronic ISSN 1537-6052. © 2013 American
Sociological Association. http://contexts.sagepub.com. DOI 10.1177/1536504213511210
the Internet) and “memetic videos,”
which spur “extensive creative user
engagement in the form of parody,
pastiche, mash-ups or other derivative
work.” Davison calls the former “big
like McDonald’s” (something enjoyed
by many, but not co-created) vs. “big
like Emoji” the popular pictographic lan-
guage built into iPhones and used in new
When you plant a fertile meme in my mind, you
literally parasitize my brain.
and creative ways by text-aficionados. In
other words, while some memes are just
trendy pictures or videos that get passed
around verbatim, others encourage a
type of iteration, imitation, parody, and
satire that can spawn literally thousands
of variants. Memes, then, can become
raw material for creativity. Think of the
myriad “image macros” that let anyone
slap a funny caption on the same image,
or people uploading YouTube videos of
themselves enacting the latest dance
craze (the Harlem Shake, twerking, or
even elaborate, choreographed wedding
dances).
Memes harness what are really
the “key logics,” as Shifman puts it, of
online culture: sociability, replicability, and
participation. They spread, according to
Claudia Leigh, via a social, affective bond,
and circulate through everyday communi-
cation channels like Facebook or Gchat.
Source Unknown
Memes harness the participatory poten-
tial of the Internet and typify modern
popular culture.
Studying Internet chain letters, dance
crazes, catchphrases, and slideshows of
cute dogs may seem trivial, much as
studying television or pop music did a gen-
eration ago. But media scholars believe
memes typify the shift from a culture of
consumption to one of production. While
teenagers might once have spent their
free time watching television, a young
person today may get creative, using their
laptop and Wi-Fi to overlay witty text on
a photo of a cat. Though it’s not exactly
intense intellectual labor, media scholar
Clay Shirky is clear: even lolcats consti-
tute creative work. Memes are the closest
thing to a native cultural form the Internet
has, and, as such, they demonstrate the
sprawling variety of the medium.
Alice Marwick is in the communication and media
studies department at Fordham University. She is the
author of Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity and Brand-
ing in the Social Media Age.
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