Memes are just easily reproducible signals that communicate relatable ideas. Memes come in many forms, including words, pictures, videos, gestures, or expressions. They’re ubiquitous and encompass anything we can “get” (i.e., comprehend).

That’s it. There is nothing special about memes. They are only ubiquitous for the very fact that their definition is so ambiguous and vague, they occupy an extremely large variety of signals that we consume daily. People are hesitant to call certain jokes “memes” because they want to reserve that common notion of memes to something else that was born out of the images-with-captions kind of memes, but that’s not always representative of memes as we know them. Let me give you some examples of what I think are memes.

For example, being Rick Roll’ed is one of the most classic memes on the Internet. Dramatic animals are memes. The notion of “trolling” was extremely meme-worthy since everybody experienced it, so it became quite famous and probably marked the transition to modern day memes. Dad jokes are also memes. Why not?

Some of the early memes that even preceded trolling memes—and, in fact, catalyzed their growth—are the images-with-captions kind of memes, which are simply images with funny two-liner jokes, with the second line being the punchline (and the first line being an introductory mundane line, or an intriguing title, or something like that). It’s just a joke with a punchline that you can’t tell without showing the image. It’s an image joke, sort of. The image can be reused if it vaguely describes a situation that happens a lot, or can be generic and with an absurd text (think stock photos). If you think about it, the meme can be reproduced abstractly without the image itself. Just mentioning the meme’s name in the right situation is enough.

One more complicated example is the following. Sometimes you have a friend does something very unique. Let’s say your stupid friend likes to say something cheesy like “cool beans” or “awesome sauce”. You could easily create a “meme” out of that, not in the usual sense but abstractly. You have an abstract image of the cringeworthy situation of your friend uniquely and repeatedly saying this stupid line, and perhaps accompanying it with some lame hand gesture. You know that, whenever your friend does it, everybody who’s aware would unconsciously recall that abstract “meme”, so you could just follow it with a punchline and “complete the picture”. You would have formed an abstract meme that occupy space and time! Ok skip the space and time part, I mean a meme that is delivered in a abstract, non-static form.

My point is that memes in the aforementioned sense are generalization of jokes. They encompass other complex social constructs (such as rhetoric). Memes are usually fun, or at least relatable, because you simply can’t create a boring meme. I mean, it was interesting to whoever created it at the very least. Depending on your definiton, “Stay calm and carry on”, for example, might not be a meme, but it should be.

Let me provide some characteristics of jokes that are highly in common with memes, which memes seem to cover in a more general sense:

  1. Fitness. Jokes and memes work well when they’re relevant to the consumer, so fitness can be thought of as “relevance” or “agreeability”.
    • Truthiness. It increases agreeability. Actually, if you think about it, truthiness can be seen as a special case of agreeability, so it is not necessary but quite common.
    • Absurdity. Absurdity amplifies the ‘fun factor’ and grabs attention, which increases the relevance of the meme. It’s similar to how controversial ideas often grab more attention.
  2. Reproducibility. Memes should be easily reproducible. That’s why we’re having a ton of images-with-captions in the social media era. Images became very easily reproducible, and now we’re seeing a surge of gif-able memes because gifs started to become easily reproducible as photo-editing and photo-sharing softwares became more accessible.
    • Communicability. A prerequisite for reproducibility is communicability. If you create a meme that is a 10-page long document or a 2-hour movie, then it’s going to fail and die. That also falls within the realm of rhetoric and consensus.

The interesting thing that fitness and reproducibility entail about memes is that they can behave like organisms. Yes, we can actually study the dynamics of memes by modeling them as abstract organisms with some weird survival strategies. You can model them like this: memes are ideas that continue to exist based on their fitness in their host environments (humans, basically), and can reproduce and be communicated as information in abstract media (e.g. bits, files, images, gifs in computers, and thoughts, gestures, and memory). Notice that these two variables are completely out of the memes’ control, but those who study memetics religiously will say that “Memes are everywhere!” Meh. It’s just a consequence of something being reproducible.

I remember taking a class at USC by Leonard Adleman, who is a pretty well-known computer scientist. Well, if you recognize the name, you will immediately think “Wow! I would love to be taught cryptography by the A in RSA!” Nope, the class wasn’t on cryptography, and, no, he didn’t teach us about RSA encryption. In fact, the class was about memes(!) Prof. Adleman was interested in studying a generalization of memes (-__-) and why they behave like organisms. He thought that a theory similar to Darwin’s survival theory can be hypothesized about memes. He was aiming too high, or perhaps nowhere, to be quite frank.

The idea that memes are like genes is very old. I guess it can be traced to Richard Dawkins’s influential book “The Selfish Gene”. In my humble opinion, the idea shouldn’t be revived or pursued any further, except perhaps for some mind gymnastics. Memes are simple, not grand, not omnipresent, not fundamental, and not anything of that kind. Memes are like “things”. Things are everywhere. They are the building blocks of our lives and universe, and you can’t refute this argument. Do you know why? Because a “thing” is so abstract and vague, it could possibly describe anything. Heck, it’s right there in the sentence I wrote! Of course, a thing could describe anything, what else could it describe then? In the same spirit, memes are so vague, a precise study or theory about them is not interesting because it can’t predict or explain any fundamental aspect of our world no matter how meticulous the theory is. Studying memes is like studying things. Your theory could be about anything, and it would still be correct, because anything is still a thing, right?

Look, memes are simple. And they’re vague. Don’t overcomplicate them. If you wish to study memes any further, please do so for the philosophical fun and not for anything serious. Otherwise, your endeavors will be aimless and futile. Bye.