What is a Meme?

But really! What is it?

Seldom do we ask what these actually are, or their history. Most of us reference them in our everyday lives so it is important to understand their origins to better appreciate what we are seeing today in the media. This post is going to help you better understand what a meme is, and the difference between what an Internet Meme is along with that. Then we will wrap up with some stock memes and explain their history.

Meme v. Internet Meme

The first I want to describe what a meme actually is, because well their history is more complex than what most think. Dawkins who is an evolutionary biologist coined the term back in 1976 in his book The Selfish Gene. Keep in mind the World Wide Web did not become publicly available until August 6, 199, so memes have been around much longer than the internet has. Dawkins said a meme is, “a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation” (Shifman, 2013, p. 37).

There are two types of memes, mentalist-driven and behavior-driven. Mentalist-driven are seen more as parts of complex information that are located in the brain; while on the other hand behavior-driven memes are seen as artifacts (Shifman, 2013).

However, Shifman (2013) explains that there is more than just these two points of view that need to be considered in defining what a meme is. She believes that we should look at the ways people imitate and seeing memes as a group not as an individual.

Now, Internet Memes expand of these branches of thought and are defined as, “(a) a group of digital items sharing common characteristics of content, form, and/or stance, which (b) were created with awareness of each other, and (c)were circulated, imitated, and/or transformed via the Internet by many users” (Shifman, 2013, p. 41).

Stock Memes

There are a variety of memes, one of which being a stock meme. Stock memes are those with characters involved in the image, they have a certain attitude or vibe they give off, and it is repeated throughout all remixes of the image. Today we are going to look at two rather popular stock memes, Distracted Boyfriend and Mocking SpongeBob.

Distracted Boyfriend

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Mocking boyfriend quickly took the Internet by storm, or so many believe. This image is actually from an iStock photoshoot from November 2015 (D, 2017). The meme’s popularity began in January of 2017 on Facebook, which then quickly had it spreading like wildfire on most mainstream social media platforms.

The image became so popular that later more images with the same “couple” appeared creating a storyline. Check that out here! To add to the wonderfulness that is this meme, it turns out the photographer, Antonio Guillem, had no idea what a meme was until recently, so this was just a pure stroke of luck for him (D, 2017).  

If someone wanted to understand what makes this meme better, they would need to understand it is usually sarcastic. Also, that the woman in red is usually labeled as something either too good to be true for the man in blue who is usually labeled as “Me”.

As Shifman (2013) said these memes are created with the understanding of the other imitations made, hence why we eventually saw Distracted Girlfriend and other variations of this meme. Thusly, we understand that we can take one idea and grow it from another together as an online community.

Mocking SpongeBob

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As many of us growing up watched SpongeBob we have learned to enjoy this childhood classic with all the memes that have come from this show. One of the more recent ones is Mocking SpongeBob, from an episode back in November 2012. Just like Distracted Boyfriend this meme did not gain popularity for several years. The first rendition of this meme was from a Twitter user in May of 2017 (M, 2017).

The meme entails this image, along with it the caption is someone saying a normal sentence, with Mocking SpongeBob (who has usually deemed as “Me”) repeating the sentence but with letters capitalized incorrectly. Check out this version to see what I mean!

This meme is always sarcastic and does not typically have a long caption with it. Shifman says that through Internet users this meme is transformed (2013). The first Mocking SpongeBob was merely the image and the caption was not what incorrectly capitalizing words. This meme transformed through users coming together and creating the meaning the use for this meme. Through this we understand that memes are not deemed by an individual, but that it is a collective effort to bring this all together.

References:

D. (2017, September). Distracted Boyfriend. Retrieved from

     https://knowyourmeme.come/memes/distracted-boyfriend

M. (2018, August 23). Mocking SpongeBob. Retrieved from 

     https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/mocking-spongebob

Shifman, Limor (2013) Memes in Digital Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ISBN: 9780262525435