IFI7101 Essay: Online memes

Abstract

This essay takes a look on online memes as example of new media narratives but also as example of long inheritance of imitation. The paper explores the origins of the term, the nature of online memes and possible reasons that might explain their popularity. This is an initial sketch of an essay that is part if IMKE course “Introduction and Theoretical Foundation of New Media”.

Introduction

The concept of originality is one of the haunting questions of the mankind. A piece of work such as Mona Lisa or a creation such as wheel can be seen as unique outputs but even these inventions might be argued to be just the new types of replicas of the existing formations – the shape of a human and the sun. Social development is heavily depended on many layers of imitations: for instants activity theory (Egenström 2002) sees that all human actions are connected to a broader sphere in contrast being constructed in a vacuum.

Imitation has also been one of the vital elements of amusing, engaging and entertaining stories. Parody is a genuine genre of imitation with a twist, so as many jokes and comics. Japanese doujinshi -comic scene is a community of copycat artists who recreate exciting anime plots. Sometimes narratives are so imaginative and surreal that imitations are not obvious – but even then analogues can be found.

Narratives in new media are argued to diverge from traditional narratives because of their assembling nature. Instead of the typical dramaturgy structure they create a narrative experience, possibly with many creators and varying audience, mixed media types and uncompleted formations, interactivity and interconnectivity. (Owen 2004.)

Rockwell & Mactavish (2004) list, among others, following properties of digital media narratives: algorithm-driven operation, reactive nature, performantial aspect, multiple sensory and semiotic channel and modularity. Parker & Jordan (2002) understand narrativity as a result of “non-linear expressive form”: with new technologies narratives are assembled and recomposed in different spatial environments, formats and networks.

McLuhan’s famous citation “medium is the message” aptly condense these visions.

Despite having these distinguishing characteristics, there is still something familiar in popular online narratives called memes – the phenomena of different digital content spreading like a wildfire across networks.

Memes

Dawkins (1989) introduced the work meme in the late 80’s. He came up with monosyllable term by blending words gene and mimene – a word with Greek roots meaning ‘something imitated’. With the term Dawkins refer to any cultural entities that can be considered replicators: an idea, a tune, a trendy jacket or even a technology of building pots.

Dawkins (1989) also noted that pronunciation of the word meme reminds of a French word même, which stands for same or embodiment, and English word memory.

Latter one is too an interesting connection. In the mid 1920’s a French philosopher Halbwachs (et alt 1992) presented an idea of ‘collective memory’. Philosopher’s vision separated individual memory from memory that is constructed by the society: a concept, which might also explain existents of instincts, humanity and other innate and non-genetic means. Halbwatch (et alt 1992) wrote that many qualities “can develop only in an environment of intense social life in which the ideas of past and present join together, and in which contemporary groups and those of yesterday some into contact”.

Imitations are created in cultural context, which requires common, social understanding. An imitative narrative would have not work, if the audiences would not understand joke’s intertextuality or even the whole idea of this complaisant nature. Whether agreed or not with Halbwachses notions, it is quit clear that replication and social inheritance are remarkable parts of narratives. I tend to argue that these features are still identifiable to the digital narrative genre of online memes and can even explain their enormous popularity.

Online memes

Loituma Girl

The nature of an Internet meme

Simply described, Internet meme is an idea, which is propagated via Internet. Word meme is, sometimes wrongly, substituted with words buzz, hype, craze, fad, phenomena and Internet trend.

Commercial party can act as meme initiator, but this action is usually called a viral (Howard 2005). There are many examples of successful virals, such as the Old Spice commercial (Wianco 2010) and a movie Snakes on the plane, which created a whole movement of imitating acts on YouTube and elsewhere on the web. In this essay I will however concentrate on non-commercial memes.

Generally Internet meme refers to a temporally popular and relatively amusing content that is rolling through the web as a snowball, collecting more and more audience. The content itself can have various forms: text, image, audio, video or other mixed media types. Some of the memes have recognizable “muse”, others’ origin might be debated. Marshall (1998) presents that short and catchy memes are in premium to more complex and lengthy ones.

The spreading happens voluntarily via personal interaction – live and online – or via social networks (Meme.org 2007); with a help of connective methods such as hypertext, embedded code, taxonomy and folksonomy and devoted sites such Ffffound, Fark.org and Internet meme database Know Your Meme. Heyligen (1996) notes that “the media by which a meme is communicated – - will greatly influence its eventual spread”.

Memes seem to fit into technology adoption lifecycle: it takes time while a picture, video or an inside joke of a small circle gathers wind beneath its wings, collects massive popularity and finally fades away. Most of the memes however tend to fade away extremely rapidly. The community’s ironic and ruthless way to react on new ideas is a Internet joke itself: a meme can get “old” at farthest in the matter of days or even hours. It is quite possible that memes exampled in this post can be considerate to be due.

LolCatz and Epic Failing

Because of the alterable nature, memes are hard to categorize. Meme.org (2007) and Wikipedia (2010) presented some types listed below, with few of my personal additions.

A formally unknown person, celebrity, company or even a country can gain an infamous reputation though a content that has embarrassing, absurd or questionable nature. The context might be related to relationships, hidden video materials, bizarre news stories, defamations, comments or leaked photos. As with any meme, the content might be altered for instants by attaching a text on a picture or creating a video narrative of compilation of tv-interviews.

Forum memes evoke from funny content found on social networks. Recently popular sources are the anonymous imageboard 4chain and Lamebook -blog that collects funny updates from social network Facebook.

Urban legends, rumors, fake sale listings, implausible stories published deliberately or by mistake, unsuccessful scam frauds and non-notable pranks can be counted as hoax memes. For instants a news story (Times Live 2010) about a women who claimed the ownership of a star called Sun, had a potential to become a meme.

Film, tv, animation and music memes mine inspiration from real stories, movies and pop culture. For example Twilight movie inspired series of mocking comics, imitating online videos and song parodies. “This is Sparta!” slogan combined to a short clip from the movie 300 has been a bottomless well for inspiration for few years in a row (KnowYourMeme 2010). Another interesting example is Antoine Dodson’s interview. Dodson’s peculiar appearance on local TV-news was recomposed by The Gregory Brothers into iTunes top-selling track “Bed intruder song” and a YouTube video with over 40 million views. This track influenced others to create covers featuring music genres such as for punk, rap and techno. Eventually the song was even performed live by North Caroline University’s marching band (Wikipedia 2010b; KnowYourMeme 2010).

Cute memes are constructed around content with adorable and childish nature such as comics, pictures and videos of children, animals and romance. Some sites are even devoted to cute memes. The most widespread example is pictures of furry kittens with the attached commentary text written on broken or blabbered English.

Commentary memes are for instants pictures, videos or phrases that are applied to suitable various social interactions. These messages can be posted in their original mode or referred to as a link. An animation can be commentary too, one example being Loituma girl: a hypnotic 4-frame animation of a girl singing and twirling an onion, created by blending Japanese anime and Finnish folk song with gibberish words. A person might refer to the animation for instants when his or her counterparty is talking nonsense. Expressions such as “Epic fail”, “Ha ha!” and “Fuuuu!” can be seen as another set of examples, used not only on message boards and posts, but also in real life conversations.

What is not a meme?

There is no absolute agreement scientifically or informally on what is not an online meme. Meme.org (2007) acknowledges obscurity of the definition by presenting a broad generalization: “Internet meme is any faddish popular phenomenon on the Internet. The term may refer to the content itself, the subject of the content, or the phenomenon of its spread”.

The online part in the definition narrows the possibilities to the digital content spread online but actually I see this as an obstacle. Many online memes become so popular that society adopts them as part of the language and culture. Web technology is thus used only for the first step and might be eventually rejected.

Popularity pops up constantly when talking about memes. Studying the reasons behind popularity and triggers that actually inflame the spread of a meme might bring some light on the topic.

Online meme triggers and popularity

Craving for entertainment is a quick answer but is there any other reasons? In their study of life cycle of (traditional) memes Bjarneskans, Grønnevik and Sandberg asked a really simply question: “Why do you tell jokes? Maybe because you want to make people happy, and/or you want to be appreciated or popular”.

Bjarneskans (et alt) present that the hook for telling a joke, or in this case spreading, creating or recreating a meme, might be human altruism – selfishness. One gets motivation of a though that someone will like the imitation and become amused. Or on contrary creating or sharing a meme can be triggered by will of self-promotion or as writers put: guaranteeing a firm place in one’s ideospehere. In this case a person is encouraged by possibility of becoming famous or appreciated though spreading his or hers visions. Although Bjarneskans (et alt) were studying traditional, evolutional concepts of memes, these ideas sounds grounded also for spreading online phenomenas.

Another connection to biological metaphors might be ‘contagious’ nature of a meme. It is like a toy that a child must have, because everyone else is getting it for Christmas. Or in some cases it’s like a virus that can not be avoided: at one point there a person is bombarded with so many meme references, links and “Haven’t you heard?” questions, that the meme has to be explored.

New media technology and the speed of information sharing are surely the most crucial triggers. It takes hardly any time or monetary effort to write a text “sad Keanu” under of a digital picture of lunching Canadian actor captured from an online magazine, and post it on the blog or a message board.

Marshall (1998) notes that online memes can appear simultaneously on the different parts of the world. He incisively cites Taylor (1996) who argued that speed of sharing and countless number of memes creates an information load that makes it hard to easily distinguish between valuable and less valuable memes.

Popularity by recycling

Sometimes chain letters are seeing as early online memes. Knobel and Lankshear (2007) however note that they are not the best example. They see that meme’s vitality and popularity is correlating to two things: the ability to participate and manipulate the content.

Knobel and Lankshear (2007) explain that the ‘hook’ of engagement and making a meme popular is connected to the possibility of creating not only a clone by redistributing the content further, but also a mutation – personalized imitation. They see that the secret of the most successful memes is behind their flexibility – the content can be modified, spliced, reordered, superimposed and so one. (Williams 2009.)

In order to attract community’s attention, the meme has to have a tangible (easily comprehend, catchy) but also flexible. A popular meme is usually recyclable and detachable: it can be re-used as part of a new narrative and context.  Though Meme.org (2007) argues with usability characteristic – “in general, content that is actually notable or useful is not considered a meme, it is simply content.”– the idea can be verified with many examples.

“AYM” is an acronym from “All Your Base Are Belong To Us” – a broken English phrase originating from the Zero Cut –game’s opening cut scene. The meme gained popularity by being mentioned and attached to countless message board posts, used in imitated images and videos and modified into new content, such as t-shirt prints and AYM techno clip presented on YouTube (Squidoo 2010). Lolcatz and other broken English examples had a similar faith.

“O rly?” meme – an abbreviation of a phrase “Oh really?” was attached to a picture of a curious looking snow own in 2003. The phrase is still in common circulation, mostly in it’s textual mode, in chats and on message boards but also in comedy shows (Squidoo 2010) and live interaction, when one wants to express genuine curiosity or scorn astonishment.

“Yo dawn!” meme has roots in the Music Television program Pimp my ride. The meme was mutated into a set of black-framed, amateurish illustrations with the picture of the show host and modified versions of the core punch line: “We heard that you like x, so we put x in your x”, where x is replaced with suitable variable. The latter refers to the original show, where mechanics used to include abnormal parts such as ping-pong tables and pools in participant’s cars, depending on his or hers preferences. The meme is still used in many contexts, online and in real life. (KnowYourMeme 2010.)

Conclusions

Internet memes are a curios example of cultural development in new media settings and real life. Digital technology affects both: the content itself and it’s rapid sharing. On the other hand, online memes have characteristics that have been present for a long time. They have an imitative nature with a hint of originality – something that distinguish them from their inspirational sources and makes them mutations rather than examples of plagiarism.

Memes collect extreme popularity across the globe. Heylighen (1996) sees that “Internet’s capability to spread memes across the world both accurately and instantaneously supports a tendency towards homogeneity in world culture”. Young generation does rely heavily on online. Castell (2009) notes that “for millions of Internet users under 30, online communities have become a fundamental dimension of everyday life that keeps growing everywhere”

Though the impact might not be yet as strong as described, the effect is showing already. It is not rare to meet someone from another country or even another continent and find out that you both know a certain meme.

References

Bjarneskans, H., Grønnevik, B. and Sandberg, A. The Lifecycle of Memes. Retrieved 28.11.2010 from http://www.aleph.se/Trans/Cultural/Memetics/memecycle.html.

Castelles, Manuel. Communication power (2009), Oxford University Press.

Dawkins, Richard (1989), The Selfish Gene (2 ed.), Oxford University Press, p. 192. Retrieved 27.11.2010 from http://books.google.com/books?id=0ICKantUfvoC&pg=PA12&dq=The+Selfish+Gene+dawkins

Egenström, Y. Interview, 2002. CSALT. Retrieved 27.11.2010 from http://csalt.lancs.ac.uk/alt/engestrom/

Halbwachs/Coser (1992), On Collective Memory,University of Chicago Press. Retrieved 27.11.2010 from http://books.google.com/books?id=GPhGukFWC84C&lpg=PP1&dq=halbwachs&pg

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Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth. Oxford: Blackwell. Retrieved 8.10.2010 from http://www.digitalhumanities.org/.

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Times Live, 2010. Spanish woman claims ownership of the Sun. Retrieved 28.11.2010 from http://www.timeslive.co.za/scitech/article788533.ece/Spanish-woman-claims-ownership-of-the-Sun.

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