Memeology: Where did memes begin? – Dailyuw

[Editors Note: Memeology is a new bi-weekly column in which Megha Goel will explore the different effects and consequences memes have on our different yet shared lives.]

When was the last time you looked at a meme? How many hours a day do you spend talking about memes or looking at them? The reality is that we live in a world full of memes; it has come to a point where we compare every aspect of our lives to memes. Rather than using words, we are more comfortable using memes to describe our mood and feelings.

I know I have spent countless hours tagging my friends in memes on Facebook, laughing at Ned Stark, Arthur, and our local favorite, This is library. The other day, I went to show my mom the This is library video filmed at Odegaard Library, and the accompanying remix that went viral, and told her it was a meme. To my surprise, she asked me to define what a meme was, and in all honesty, I didnt know how to describe it except for saying Its a funny meme.

Have you ever wondered how these little images that you relate to so well are described? Or have you wondered how they began and how they have become a cultural phenomenon? Everything that goes viral on the internet is now a meme.

In a book by Limor Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture, Shifman talks about the meme being an expression of digital culture wherein an image or video can go viral in a way that multiple iterations are created, resulting in a shared cultural experience.

The experience you have when you look at the meme of Ross from friends squealing Im fine is the same as the experience I would have. In every definition, as I scoured the internet, memes are defined by this shared experience as their foundational basis.

But while the answer to our questions is the internet in the 21st century, before the internet age, people turned to books and newspapers for this shared cultural experience. The satirical cartoons in early publications had the same effect as memes do today.

The word meme in itself can be dated to a 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins, who describes the meme as an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture.

As a matter of fact, Dawkins compares memes to Darwinian evolution, theorizing it under memetics: the evolutionary model of cultural information transfer.

With the internet, the speed at which memes travel has increased exponentially. Today the number of memes in the world is uncountable, and the way the same picture is used to convey different emotions is outstanding. One undeniable truth is the fact that memes inhabit our lives.

We use memes to communicate with one another, to spread ideas, and most importantly, to define the cultural context we live in. As memes propagate satire and comedy, we look to them as an important piece of pop culture, much in the same way we look at Drake or Meryl Streep.

Reach columnist Megha Goel at opinion@dailyuw.com. Twitter: @meghagoel97

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Memeology: Where did memes begin? - Dailyuw