Concept Lesson: Memes

Before you think this is just a monologue about lolcats and mudkipz, you should know "meme" is a rather old term. Richard Dawkins, in his highly influential 1976 book The Selfish Gene, coined the term to describe cultural ideas that live and die by a critical process of selection (this itself is attached to a much larger idea of collective consciousness, which is roughly 150 years old). In short: ideas must evolve to stay relevant. However, the study of memes should be limited to the ideas, not objects or imagery. As the author James Gleick wrote, "The hula hoop is not a meme....the hula hoop is a meme vehicle." The plastic circle is not what's adapted for survival when the fad took over pop culture in the 1950's. The idea of hula-hooping, of swinging your hips to have the hoop swing around you, is the meme. For instance, as hula hoops fall out of favor with children as toys, the act of hula-hooping is being revived as a fitness tool. In the post-Jazzercize, post-Tae Bo world of Zumba, hula-hooping found its new habitat much like a species that learns to burrow underground to avoid predators.

Not just fads, however, are memes. Music is full of memes: windwheel-strumming a guitar like Pete Townshend was a meme that lived up into the hair-metal heydays of the 1980's but died out when a more subdued style of guitar playing reigned supreme. Indeed, nearly any genre of music could be described with memetics.

The way 99% of Western art depicts Jesus is a meme. In 2002, Popular Mechanics revealed what Jesus Christ of Nazareth probably looked like, and it was far from the sharp, long-haired, white look most of us are familiar with. If we are to believe the canonical Gospels (which contain no physical description of Jesus) are what most early Christians used to base Jesus on, then the Jesus we see in paintings and on crucifixes is a complete incarnation of memetics, going through thousands of years of critical selection to come to the most agreeable version, i.e. the Jesus most suited for the environment of today. Christianity itself is, like all religions, a meme. As societies have grown more tolerant and socially-liberal, religions tend to do likewise or face becoming irrelevant. That is the magic of ideas being restricted by the same rules as organisms.

There's an old adage amongst biochemists: a hen is just an egg's way of making more eggs. This is a simplification of the idea that genes exist independent from their owner. Your genes know about as much about your day-to-day life as you know about the day-to-day life of the Milky Way galaxy. As Dawkins put it, "no matter how much knowledge and wisdom you acquire during your life, not one jot will be passed on to your children by genetic means. Each new generation starts from scratch." You are not the primary concern of your genes; replicating themselves is their primary mission. Evolutionary psychologists will tell you every thing you do, whether consciously or not, is an effort to not only reproduce but sustain a habitat that will also allow your children to reproduce. This means creating and sustaining a way of life that will allow your genes to be passed along as far down the evolutionary chain as possible. While this makes free will seem more like a fluke than an attribute, it means you serve your genes for their own self-replicating purpose.

Memes are ideas that follow these same guidelines. In The Information, Gleick gives the excellent example of "jumping the shark." Representing a definitive notion ("the point in the evolution of a television show when it begins a decline in quality that is beyond recovery"), the phrase evolved to describe any serial production (novels, films, comics) and even to describe similar cultural phenomenons ("jumping the couch", "nuking the fridge"). It encapsulates everything a meme is: a self-replicating idea that evolves to further its own staying power.

However, does this mean communication is just a memes way of making more memes? Communication, after all, is defined by information theory as the transmitting of any information between two sources. Memes, translated via word-of-mouth for most of human history but now primarily done through telecommunications, are now the language of the internet. Let's look at an example:

This is advice dog.

Advice dog, like much other internet idiocy, was popularized by 4chan's /b/, a land of such depravity and ugliness it impresses only the most ardent and disobedient of 13-year-old's. The premise is simple: dog stares out from a rainbow background, uses dichotomy of top and bottom text to impart humorous wisdom. The idea evolved from a photo a user named 'TEM" posted to themushroomkindgom.com, a Super Mario fansite. The dog, named Boba Fett, was then used on /b/ for much lulz or whatever /b/ calls joy in a post-FBI raid era.

The dog and rainbow background are not the subject of study. The idea of posting top-and-bottom text to an image (in a way that was actually a more evolved form of lolcats) is now quite varied, ranging from Douchebag Steve to Socially Awkward Penguin to Rasta Professor. Like any good meme, it has evolved and spread to strengthen its own life.

What the internet does for memetics is accurately track the spread and evolution of memes in ways the fossil record accurately tracks the spread and evolution of species. It equalizes the spread of ideas  (formerly the denizens of marketers, academics, and journalists) to the extent of a teenage joke becoming a cultural phenomenon. However, this means there is now a distinction between a meme which "naturally" (through coincidence, in-jokes, and like-mindedness) comes to popularity versus a meme which is "forced". A "forced meme" is one that cannot naturally exist in the habitat it is exposed to, but persists due to the tried efforts of those seeking popularity or ratings. Planking is largely a forced meme. It serves no purpose and lacks any humorous content, so why has it persisted? It mostly lives on Twitter and morning news shows as a distraction and "Oh, those kids and their crazy internet." However forced it may be, it still fits the role and definition of a meme. The phrase "meme" speaks to no popularity level or degree of authenticity; merely to the spread of an idea. After all, what's the difference if some kid on 4chan or Buzzfeed or The Today Show pushes an idea as long as it is able to self-replicate?

The discussion between a "forced meme" and a "natural meme" represents a division between those who took to the internet (and internet culture) quickly and those who see it as a distraction. As Adrian Chen of Gawker wrote:

"First, the out-of-touch CNNs and Today Shows of the world can pick up an "internet craze" to make it seem like they're hip to what all the kids are doing on their Facebook machines. So it was with planking, which started as a little-known Facebook page before it was seized on and promoted by Australian radio stations looking for web cred. The Today Show was shameless about its social media whoring, posting a picture of Hoda and Kathy Lee's horsemaning to Tumblr with the caption, "BuzzFeed Bait.""

 So aside from the obvious generation gap, forced memes have revealed something else about the internet. If the past ten years of internet history will be remembered for one thing, it will be the monetizing of information. Facebook and Google sell certain aspects of your internet activity to micromarketing companies. Memes are likewise information that can be collected and sold. As I said before, the internet tracks the flow of memes, meaning tracking how many people are familiar with a meme is a cloudy business, but one that produces large numbers. Barack Obama, during his 2008 campaign, received such devoted press because his fans were likewise devoted and would buy any magazine with his face on it (Note: I voted for Obama in 2008 and intend to do the same in 2012). Old-world entertainment like The Today Show and Late Night With Jimmy Fallon are operating on the same level when it comes to internet memes. They see a massive following, so they hope to cash in.

In this way,  a "fad" or "internet craze" is merely a monetized meme. Meme aggregators, like I Can Haz Cheezburger, receive millions of unique page views per month by collecting the thin film off the top of the internet broth. But who is making the things they aggregate? Usually bored kids or office workers, and it is in their minds that we find the "natural meme." When an idea is filtered by the selection process of a TV show or even a website, it can tend to be lopsided and die a quick death. In the Wired interview with with ICHC founder Ben Huh,  says he watched about forty sites devoted to bad memes die (it's when people like this make $4 million that we really should start using the word "bubble").

Planking and horsemaning will either follow suit or be remembered more for their contrivance than their humor or worthiness. But natural memes, those which rise out of shared interests, humor, and way of thinking, tend to extend their staying power well past those forced for marketing reasons. It's actually quite similar to species who are forced into a habitat that is not their own. As any Boy Scout can tell you, animals should only be released into their natural habitat or they will have untold effects on the environment. Memes, once again, follow the same rules as organisms: unless bred from the ingenuity of natural communication, they exist only as eyesores on the social environment.