Internet meme

• 1. Introduction

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  Internet memes are now one of the defining languages of the digital age. They move through social media platforms, message boards, and group chats at speeds that outpace almost any other form of communication. But the word meme itself predates the Internet by more than two decades. Richard Dawkins coined it in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene to describe a unit of cultural transmission, analogous to the gene in biology. He had no way of knowing that a concept born in evolutionary theory would eventually describe a photoshopped image of a moth obsessing over a lamp. So how did a word from a biology book become the vocabulary of a generation's humor, grief, politics, and protest? And what does it mean when culture moves fast enough that it can be distilled into a single image, a two-second clip, or a lone letter 'E'?

• 2. Origins of the Word

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  Richard Dawkins built the word meme from the Greek mimeme, trimming it to rhyme with gene. His argument in The Selfish Gene was that ideas, behaviors, and styles compete for survival in human minds much as genes compete in biological populations. The three qualities that made a traditional meme successful, Dawkins wrote, were fidelity, fecundity, and longevity. Fidelity meant the meme was copied accurately. Fecundity meant it spread quickly. Longevity meant it endured. These three criteria would be tested and revised when the Internet arrived.

  Mike Godwin was the first to formally attach the word to the online world. In the June 1993 issue of Wired, Godwin wrote about how memes proliferated through early online communities: message boards, Usenet groups, and email chains. The digital version of the concept had arrived, though the graphical explosion familiar today was still years away.

  By 2013, Dawkins himself weighed in on what the Internet had done to his original idea. He characterized the Internet meme as a version of his concept that was deliberately altered by human creativity, rather than spread by random mutation and accurate replication. He called it a hijacking of the original idea. That same year, researcher Limor Shifman reworked Dawkins' concept specifically for online contexts, establishing memes as a legitimate subject for academic study.

• 3. How Memes Spread

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  Scott Fahlman introduced the smiley emoticon :-) in 1982, and it is considered among the earliest Internet memes. The emoticon spread through text-based networks long before images were common online. Early memes like the Dancing Baby and Hampster Dance circulated in the mid-to-late 1990s, primarily through email and Usenet groups, and they tended to stick around far longer than the memes that would follow them.

  Research by Coscia examined what makes a meme survive versus fade. One counterintuitive finding: a meme that hits an exceptionally high peak of popularity is unlikely to endure unless it is distinctively unique. A meme without such a peak, but that coexists with other memes, tends to have greater longevity. Memes, Coscia concluded, both compete and collaborate for attention.

  The SIR model, used to track the spread of infectious diseases, maps surprisingly well onto meme propagation. Once a meme reaches a critical number of individuals, its continued spread becomes inevitable. Michele Knobel and Colin Lankshear found that the original quality of fidelity barely applies online. What matters in digital transmission is replicability: a meme can be remixed and still preserve its core message. Humor drives fecundity, as shown by the comically mistranslated video game line "All your base are belong to us". Intertextuality does too, as seen in the many pop culture-inflected versions of the "Star Wars Kid" video.

• 4. Image Macros and Video Memes

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  Lolcats emerged from the imageboard website 4chan and became the prototype of the image macro format: a photograph overlaid with large, deliberately ungrammatical text. A study by Miltner traced the lolcat meme from its origins as an in-joke within computer and gaming communities on 4chan to a broader source of humor and emotional support for general audiences. As it crossed into mainstream culture, Miltner noted, it lost favor with the original creators. When content moves through different communities, it is reinterpreted to suit each community's specific needs, often diverging from what the creator first intended.

  YouTube launched in 2005, and with it came a new category of video-based memes. Rickrolling became one of the defining pranks of that era. "Gangnam Style" by the South Korean artist Psy reached audiences far beyond dedicated meme communities. The viral sensation "Charlie Bit My Finger" illustrated a different dynamic: the mimicry mode, where different individuals replicate the same video in new settings rather than altering it.

  The "Star Wars Kid" viral video demonstrated how intertextuality multiplied a meme's reach through pop culture references layered onto a single piece of footage. Other early image-based forms included demotivators, which parodied motivational posters, photoshopped images, rage comics, and anime fan art, sometimes produced by doujin circles across multiple countries.

• 5. Dank, Surreal, and Deep-Fried

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  Around 2014, a genre called dank memes reached mainstream prominence. The term dank, borrowed from its original meaning of cold, damp places, was repurposed to describe memes with oversaturated colors, compression artifacts, crude humor, strange captions, and deliberately abrasive audio, referred to in the community as ear rape. Paradoxically, the label could also describe memes so overused and stale that they had looped back to being funny again.

  Dank memes gave rise to a subculture called the meme market. Satirizing Wall Street's vocabulary, participants on the subreddit r/MemeEconomy jokingly buy and sell shares in memes based on their predicted popularity.

  Deep-fried memes carry the visual logic of dankness further: they are run through multiple layers of lossy compression and filters until the image degrades into something barely legible. The "E" meme exemplifies the form. It places YouTuber Markiplier's face onto Lord Farquaad from the film Shrek, then inserts that composite image into a frame from Mark Zuckerberg's congressional hearing, with a lone 'E' as its caption. Elizabeth Bruenig of the Washington Post described deep-fried memes as a digital update to the surreal and absurd art genres that characterized the turbulent early twentieth century.

  Surreal memes layer irony until a piece of content becomes genuinely nonsensical. The moth meme, a close-up photograph of a moth with captions about its devotion to lamps, and the "they did surgery on a grape" video, showing a da Vinci Surgical System performing test surgery on a grape, both fit this tradition of weaponized absurdity.

• 6. Politics, Movements, and Markets

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  Among the earliest political memes was the Dean scream, a clip from a speech by Vermont governor Howard Dean that spread as a viral audio excerpt. Political memes have grown in influence since. Ted Cruz's 2016 Republican presidential bid was measurably damaged by a meme that jokingly speculated he was the Zodiac Killer. During the 2020 US presidential campaign, Michael Bloomberg sponsored Instagram accounts with a collective following of over 60 million to post memes supporting his campaign. The effort drew criticism for treating memes as a purchasable commodity.

  A study of the 2017 UK general election found that memes acted as a widely shared conduit for basic political information, reaching audiences who would not otherwise seek it out. Researchers also suggested that memes may play some role in increasing voter turnout.

  Pepe the Frog shows how a single meme can carry contradictory political meanings. The character served as a symbol for the alt-right movement and simultaneously as an emblem of the 2019-2020 Hong Kong pro-democracy protests.

  In economics, meme stocks became a recognized phenomenon when video game retailer GameStop's share price surged in 2021, driven by discussion on the subreddit r/WallStreetBets and activity on the platform Robinhood Markets. Meme cryptocurrencies followed, including Dogecoin, Shiba Inu Coin, and Pepe Coin. The Ice Bucket Challenge in 2014 raised money and awareness for Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis and Motor Neurone Disease. Fashion house Gucci launched Instagram ads built around popular memes to promote its watch collection. Wendy's social media strategy generated nearly 50 percent profit growth before a controversial Pepe meme damaged the campaign's goodwill.

• 7. Copyright and Ownership

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  Because memes draw on pre-existing images, video clips, and audio, they sit in legally uncertain territory. Getty Images demanded payment from the blog Get Digital for publishing the "Socially Awkward Penguin" meme without authorization, illustrating how copyright owners and meme producers can end up in direct conflict.

  Under US copyright law, Section 107 of the 1976 Copyright Act outlines four factors for evaluating fair use: the purpose and character of the use, the nature of the original work, the amount of the original used, and the effect on the market for the original. Many memes satisfy the first factor because they transform a piece of media, placing it in a new context for a different purpose. The second factor becomes more complicated when the source is a fictional work like a film. The third factor often favors memes because they typically use only a small fragment, such as a still image. The fourth factor tends to favor memes as well, since most circulate without any commercial transaction.

  NFTs introduced a new mechanism for meme subjects to monetize their images. Ben Lashes, a manager representing several meme subjects, stated that NFT sales of memes he represented exceeded US$2 million. Zoe Roth, the subject of the Disaster Girl meme, was photographed at age 4 in Mebane, North Carolina, in January 2005. Years after that image became one of the Internet's most recognized photographs, Roth sold it as an NFT for US$539,973 and negotiated a 10 percent share of any future resales.

• 8. Brain Rot and What Comes Next

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  In 2022, the term brain rot entered circulation to describe a perceived shift in how Internet content, particularly TikTok videos, was being produced and consumed. The label attached itself to material seen as low in quality and meaning, closely associated with slang and trends popular among Generation Alpha: words like skibidi, rizz, gyatt, sigma, and fanum tax. The name came from concern about the psychological and cognitive effects of sustained exposure to such content.

  In 2025, a community of TikTok users named SlimeTok was blamed for what some described as a meme drought. Critics used the idea of a drought to attack AI-inspired brainrot trends and deliberately meaningless content, including a phenomenon labeled 6-7. A movement calling for a Great Meme Reset on the 1st of January 2026 argued for a return to classic memes from the 2010s, citing Nyan Cat and Big Chungus as the standard to recover.

  Writing for The Washington Post in 2013, Dominic Basulto argued that the wide adoption of memes by the marketing and advertising industries had already begun to erode their original cultural value. What had once been considered lasting cultural artifacts, Basulto wrote, now often conveyed trivial rather than meaningful ideas. The debate over what memes are for, and who gets to make or monetize them, stretches from r/MemeEconomy back to Dawkins' original question about how ideas survive.