The “Funny Posts” Instagram page boasts an impressive 3.2 million followers and is just one of probably hundreds of meme pages out there. There are no two ways about it, people love and absolutely crave new memes every day. A side effect of this endless drive to create more memes is the expansion of what a meme even is.
As the online magazine Built In noted, memes are now commodities, surrealism art, inside jokes, and political statements. Sometimes, a meme will fall into multiple categories at once, depending on who is looking at it. If you have ever explored more niche meme pages, you will understand what I am talking about.
It’s not uncommon for meme pages to have followings significantly larger than many world leaders. Memes are also quite universal, as these same world leaders might even be following and viewing them just like us. Multiple meme page admins have admitted that they really took off after various celebrities started following their pages and reposting their content.
While a common “fun fact” is that Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” in his 1976 book, “The Selfish Gene”, the more modern use of the word comes from Mike Godwin, in an article he wrote for Wired. He defined it as “an idea that functions in a mind the same way a gene or virus functions in the body. And an infectious idea (call it a "viral meme") may leap from mind to mind, much as viruses leap from body to body.”
When we look at it like this, there is solid evidence that there were no doubt memes in the past, but the communications technology of our ancestors was, unfortunately, simply not quick enough. Add in the fact that in a pre-digital world, most people couldn’t “create” content, due to the combination of the costs, illiteracy, and lack of time, that it makes more sense that the internet was ultimately crucial for the explosion of memes.
We can see a sort of internal evolution in internet memes as certain tools became more widespread. What started as text over various images evolved into meme songs, videos, and really anything else a common person could get their hands on. With smartphones comes the ability for every person to shoot, direct, and upload their own clips, so the same is just as true for memes.
At this point, one can simply Google any relatively well-known meme with the word “template” and find a site that will allow you to turn your idea into reality in mere moments. As a result, memes are being produced at a scale never seen before, creating a sort of digital folklore for future anthropologists to sift through.
