Internet meme
An Internet meme, or meme, is a cultural item that spreads across the Internet, now primarily through social media platforms. Internet memes manifest in a variety of formats, including images, videos, and other viral content. Key characteristics of memes include their tendency to be parodied, their use of intertextuality, their viral dissemination, and their continual evolution. The term meme was originally introduced by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene to describe the concept of cultural transmission of a singular unit, analogous to biology.
The term Internet meme was coined by Mike Godwin in 1993 in reference to the way memes proliferated through early online communities, including message boards, Usenet groups, and email. The emergence of social media platforms such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram further diversified memes and accelerated their spread. Dank and surrealist memes are some of the newer genres, with newer formats like short-form videos popularized by platforms like Vine and TikTok. Newer internet memes are often classified as brain rot.
Memes are now recognized as a significant aspect of Internet culture and are the subject of academic research. They appear across a broad spectrum of contexts, including marketing, economics, finance, politics, social movements, religion, and healthcare. While memes are often viewed as falling under fair use protection, their incorporation of material from pre-existing works can result in copyright disputes.
Characteristics
Internet memes derive from the original concept of memes as units of cultural transmission, passed from person to person. In the digital realm, this transmission occurs primarily through online platforms, such as social media. Although related, internet memes differ from traditional memes in that they often represent fleeting trends, whereas the success of traditional memes is measured by their endurance over time. Additionally, internet memes tend to be less abstract in nature compared to their traditional counterparts. They are highly versatile in form and purpose, serving as tools for light entertainment, self-expression, social commentary, and even political discourse.Two fundamental characteristics of internet memes are creative reproduction and intertextuality. Creative reproduction refers to the adaptation and transformation of a meme through imitation or parody, either by reproducing the meme in a new context or by remixing the original material. In mimicry, the meme is recreated in a different setting, as seen when different individuals replicate the viral video "Charlie Bit My Finger". Remix, on the other hand, involves technological manipulation, such as altering an image with Photoshop, while retaining elements of the original meme.
Intertextuality in memes involves the blending of different cultural references or contexts. An example of this is the combination of US politician Mitt Romney's phrase "binders full of women" from the 2012 US presidential debate with a scene from the Korean pop song "Gangnam Style". In this case, the phrase "my binders full of women exploded" is superimposed on a frame from Psy's music video, creating a new meaning by merging political and cultural references from distinct contexts.
Internet memes can also function as in-jokes within specific online communities, where they convey insider knowledge that may be incomprehensible to outsiders. This fosters a sense of collective identity within the group. Conversely, some memes achieve widespread cultural relevance, being understood and appreciated by broader audiences outside of the originating subculture.
A study by Michele Knobel and Colin Lankshear examined how Richard Dawkins' three characteristics of successful traditional memes—fidelity, fecundity, and longevity—apply to internet memes. It was found that fidelity in the context of internet memes is better described as replicability, as memes are frequently modified through remixing while still maintaining their core message. Fecundity, or the ability of a meme to spread, is promoted by factors such as humor, intertextuality, and juxtaposition of seemingly incongruous elements. Finally, longevity is essential for a meme's continued circulation and evolution over time.
Evolution and propagation
Internet memes can either remain consistent or evolve over time. This evolution may involve changes in meaning while retaining the meme’s structure, or vice versa, with such transformations occurring either by chance or through deliberate efforts like parody. A study by Miltner examined the lolcats meme, tracing its development from an in-joke within computer and gaming communities on the website 4chan to a broader source of humor and emotional support. As the meme entered mainstream culture, it lost favor with its original creators. Miltner explained that as content moves through different communities, it is reinterpreted to suit the specific needs and desires of those communities, often diverging from the creator’s original intent. Modifications to memes can lead them to transcend social and cultural boundaries.Memes spread virally, in a manner similar to the SIR model used to describe the transmission of diseases. Once a meme has reached a critical number of individuals, its continued spread becomes inevitable. Research by Coscia examined the factors contributing to a meme’s propagation and longevity, concluding that while memes compete for attention—often resulting in shorter lifespans—they can also collaborate, enhancing their chances of survival. A meme that experiences an exceptionally high peak in popularity is unlikely to endure unless it is uniquely distinct. Conversely, a meme without such a peak, but that coexists with others, tends to have greater longevity. In 2013, Dominic Basulto, writing for The Washington Post, argued that the widespread use of memes, particularly by the marketing and advertising industries, has led to a decline in their original cultural value. Once considered valuable cultural artifacts meant to endure, memes now often convey trivial rather than meaningful ideas.
History
Origins and early memes
The word meme was coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene as an attempt to explain how aspects of culture replicate, mutate, and evolve ", introduced by Scott Fahlman in 1982. The concept of memes in an online context was formally proposed by Mike Godwin in the June 1993 issue of Wired. In 2013, Dawkins characterized an Internet meme as being a meme deliberately altered by human creativity—distinguished from biological genes and his own pre-Internet concept of a meme, which involved mutation by random change and spreading through accurate replication as in Darwinian selection. Dawkins explained that Internet memes are thus a "hijacking of the original idea", evolving the very concept of a meme in this new direction. Nevertheless, by 2013, Limor Shifman solidified the relationship of memes to internet culture and reworked Dawkins' concept for online contexts. Such an association has been shown to be empirically valuable as internet memes carry an additional property that Dawkins' "memes" do not: internet memes leave a footprint in the media through which they propagate that renders them traceable and analyzable.However, before internet memes were considered truly academic, they were initially a colloquial reference to humorous visual communication online in the mid-late 1990s among internet denizens; examples of these early internet memes include the Dancing Baby and Hampster Dance. Memes of this time were primarily spread via messageboards, Usenet groups, and email, and generally lasted for a longer time than modern memes.
As the Internet protocols evolved, so did memes. Lolcats originated from imageboard website 4chan, becoming the prototype of the "image macro" format. Other early forms of image-based memes included demotivators, photoshopped images, comics, and anime fan art, sometimes made by doujin circles in various countries. After the release of YouTube in 2005, video-based memes such as Rickrolling and viral videos such as "Gangnam Style" and the Harlem shake emerged. The appearance of social media websites such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram provided additional mediums for the spread of memes, and the creation of meme-generating websites made their production more accessible.
Contemporary memes
"Dank memes" are a genre of internet memes that reached mainstream prominence around 2014. Dank memes refer to deliberately zany or odd memes with features such as oversaturated colors, compression artifacts, crude humor, strange captions, and overly loud sounds. The term dank, which refers to cold, damp places, was adapted as a way to describe memes that fit the aforementioned criteria of a dank meme. The term may also be used to describe memes that have become overused and stale to the point of paradoxically becoming humorous again. Despite having lost popularity since the late 2010s, dank memes have seen several "revival" attempts, popularised on platforms such as TikTok. The phenomenon of dank memes sprouted a subculture called the "meme market", satirizing Wall Street and applying the associated jargon to internet memes. Originally started on Reddit as /r/MemeEconomy, users jokingly "buy" or "sell" shares in a meme reflecting opinion on its potential popularity."Deep-fried" memes refer to those that have been distorted and run through several filters and/or layers of lossy compression. An example of these is the "E" meme, a picture of YouTuber Markiplier photoshopped onto Lord Farquaad from the film Shrek, in turn photoshopped into a scene from businessman Mark Zuckerberg's hearing in Congress and captioned with a lone 'E'. Elizabeth Bruenig of the Washington Post described this as a "digital update to the surreal and absurd genres of art and literature that characterized the tumultuous early 20th century".
Many modern memes make use of humorously absurd and even surrealist themes. Examples of the former include "they did surgery on a grape", a video depicting a Da Vinci Surgical System performing test surgery on a grape, and the "moth meme", a close-up picture of a moth with captions humorously conveying the insect's love of lamps. Surreal memes incorporate layers of irony to make them unique and nonsensical, often as a means of escapism from mainstream meme culture.
After the success of the application Vine, a format of memes emerged in the form of short videos and scripted sketches. An example is the "What's Nine Plus Ten?" meme, a Vine video depicting a child humorously providing an incorrect answer to a math problem. After the shutdown of Vine in 2017, the de facto replacement became the social network TikTok, which similarly utilizes the short video format. The platform has become immensely popular, and is the source of many genres of internet memes as of the mid 2020s.
In 2022, the term brain rot became used to reflect a shift in how memes, particularly TikTok videos, were being interacted with. The term describes content lacking in quality and meaning, often associated with slang and trends popular among Generation Alpha, such as "skibidi", "rizz", "gyatt", "sigma" and "fanum tax". The name comes from the perceived negative psychological and cognitive effects caused by exposure to such content.
By 2024, news outlets documented the spread of AI-generated memes on major platforms, noting their growing role in shaping online discourse. In 2025, some TikTok users expressed concern over a "meme drought", which was said to be caused by a cringe culture community known as SlimeTok. The meme drought was also used to criticize AI-inspired brainrot trends and deliberately meaningless content by Gen Alpha and younger Gen Z, such as 6 7, for being "oversaturated and unfunny". They called for a "Great Meme Reset" on January 1, 2026, returning to memes from the 2010s such as Nyan Cat and Big Chungus.