Dr. Erica Brozovsky is a sociolinguist, a public scholar and a lover of words. She is the host of Otherwords, a PBS series on language and linguistics, and a professor of writing and rhetoric at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. You can find her at @ericabrozovsky on most platforms. Photo: Kelly Zhu
If you’ve been on the internet anytime in the past 25 years, there’s a good chance you’ve seen a meme, shared a meme, or perhaps even created a meme. From the LOLcats and Advice Animals of the mid 2000s to the many emotions of Moo Deng, the world’s favorite pygmy hippopotamus, internet memes allow us to share pieces of media that we find funny, ironic or relatable.
The Cow Guide, for example, might be considered a precursor to the internet meme.
Full of ASCII character drawings of variations on cows, The Cow Guide spread on Usenet in the ‘80s and ‘90s (pre-Reddit and Tumblr, which debuted in 2003, 2005, and 2007, respectively. In the late aughts, internet curators like BuzzFeed and social media sites made memes more mainstream. And now they’re everywhere.
Meme culture is so quick, with turnaround and multiple iterations within minutes of an event happening. Even if the source material is a real and consequential topic, a funny meme brings attention, as humor and levity travels further and faster than seriousness and sincerity.
Global and national events (like the Olympics and the U.S. presidential election) are goldmines for meme-able opportunities that allow information to spread faster than the traditional news cycle. Take, for instance, Stephen Nedoroscik, Team USA’s horse powerhouse, who became the subject of countless memes for his incredible performance and comparisons to Clark Kent.
Obsessed with this guy on the US men's gymnastics team who's only job is pommel horse, so he just sits there until he's activated like a sleeper agent, whips off his glasses like Clark Kent and does a pommel horse routine that helps deliver the team its first medal in 16 years.
There’s a meme out there for every facet of your identity and every interest you hold, from a corporate job to a keen interest in birdwatching to crossovers between Pokémon and Thomas the Tank Engine. When multiple specific interests collide in a meme… well there’s a reason the phrase “I’ve never had an original thought or experience” became so popular online.
That’s not even touching the surface of the weird, wild and wonderful world of niche memes. And that is exactly where the hyper-specific meme shines in its ability to broker connections. If you can parse through the layers of meaning and referential humor, then you’re part of the exclusive club of people in the know.
Today, we can be defined by the media we consume, so understanding a meme, especially if it’s highly intertextual and referential, gives insight into who a person is and what corners of the internet they inhabit. Memes serve as inside jokes for subcommunities online, and the more iterations and riffs on the joke, the higher barrier to entry for outsiders, further cementing the group’s identity. If you understand a niche meme, you come to realize you’re part of a very specific collective of internet users, for better or for worse.
A meme is a digital manifestation of a shared online experience and interaction. They have set structures and social dynamics, and by intertextually referencing various pop culture tokens, they show affiliation and affinity to specific internet subgroups. They subtly ask if you understand, and if you do (and iykyk), you’re initiated into the club as “one of us, one of us!” Memes are not random. They’re created to appeal to a specific chosen audience who will then hopefully pass on the meme like a contagion of amusement because they identify with it.
We share memes because we assume our audience, upon wading through the subtext, will find them worthwhile, whether because of humor or in-group membership. Whether posting into the void that is Tumblr or 4chan or Reddit, or sending memes directly to your friends or family in a form of digital pebbling — like penguins presenting smooth stones to their prospective mates in courtship rituals — spreading these internet cultural tokens is a bid for social connection. And through that connection, we show affiliation with others who understand the digital inside joke that is a shared piece of popular culture. Memes are cultural artifacts and efficient forms of communication to those who understand the context. And oftentimes they’re funny, which is just an added bonus. Put simply, humans crave connection, and memes just do it for us.
