meme
Most of us are familiar with memes, those images with varying text that propagate, often virally, through the internet, but where does the word meme come from?
It may be surprising to many, but the word meme was coined by biologist and famed promoter of atheism Richard Dawkins in 1976. Dawkins was trying to label those bits of culture that spread and become iconic. He considered these bits of culture to be analogous to biological genes. From his book The Selfish Gene:
The new soup is the soup of human culture. We need a name for the new replicator, a noun which conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. “Mimeme” comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like “gene.” I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme If it is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related to “memory,” or to the French word même. It should be pronounced to rhyme with “cream.”
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 sperm 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.
It wasn’t until around 1998 that meme was applied to the internet images we know today. While this is a more specific application of Dawkins’s original sense, it is true to general principles: they are cultural units; they spread, with successful ones outcompeting less prolific ones; and, like biological genes, they can mutate (the changing text that overlays the images).
Determining what was the first internet meme is an impossible task, but the first citation in this newer, more specific, sense in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is from the CNN program Science and Technology Week of 24 January 1998, in reference to the computer-generated animation of a dancing baby that had appeared on the television show Ally McBeal that month:
GREG LEFERVE, CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Who is this tyke, slashing his air guitar, dancing the boogaloo (ph) and haunting "Ally McBeal?" He's a figment of Michael Girard's imagination.
MICHAEL GIRARD, UNREAL PICTURES: The dancing baby actually goes actually goes back to an initial cha-cha motion that I created as a demo file years ago.
LEFERVE: Girard created the baby to show off his animation software. It worked. Now, zillions of the copies of the diapered dancer animate computer screens across the Internet.
JANELLE BROWN, WIRED NEWS: And the next thing you know, his friends have forwarded it on and it's become a net meme.
LEFERVE: Net meme – the Wired Style guide calls a meme a "contagious idea." Right, like the kids of the South Park Comedy Series, Japan's "Real Idol" and Max Headroom before them. Hollywood seized on the baby as a plot device in the "Ally Mcbeal" show.
The Dancing Baby was certainly a graphic image propagated over the internet, but it was not what most people mean today when they refer to a meme, that is a recognizable image with new text overlaid on top. Memes as we know them today started gaining traction in 2007 with the Lolcat “I can has cheezburger?” meme. This probably wasn’t the first meme in this format, but the explosion of this type of meme on the internet dates to its appearance and spread.
From Richard Dawkins to Ally McBeal to internet phenomenon, not a bad start for a short, little word.
Sources:
Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene (1976), Oxford: Oxford UP, 2016. 219. Archive.org.
Lefevre, Greg and Ann Kellan. “Dancing Baby on the Internet.” CNN Science and Technology Week, 24 January 1998. Nexis Uni.
Oxford English Dictionary Online, June 2001, s.v. meme, n.; March 2002, s.v. mimesis, n.
Image credits: Boromir: “One does not simply create a meme”, David Wilton, 2019, generated with imgflip.com; “I can has cheezberger?”, 11 January 2007, icanhas.cheezburger.com. Fair use of copyrighted images to illustrate the topic under discussion.