The life cycle of internet memes
INTRODUCTION
Memes are all around us and crop up and die off before our eyes. The rise and fall of a meme is very apparent and anyone can track this by simply looking at its google trends graph of that memes search queries. Well then if it is easy to see the rise and fall of a meme the next question that follows would be, how do you predict the meme?
Everything has a pattern and most things repeat patterns, memes are no exception. By uncovering the pattern of what memes are popular you can gain the ability to stay relevant in the internet’s eye forever. In order to understand the pattern, or the life cycle, of meme popularity first you need to understand the different types of comedy that we can group memes into.
CHAPTER 1 : Genres of Comedy
The idea of there being different genres of comedy is well known: situational, spoof, sketch, black, shock, slapstick, standup. These all fill their own roles and have, in the 20th century, existed somewhat harmoniously and they all floated around their own similar popularity. This is not the same with memes. Internet memes exist as a truth that is funny today, maybe tomorrow. Where as with televised comedy in the 20th century you had a small group of people created the humor, now with internet memes you have a large group creating the humor. Back when only a few created the humor they stuck to what worked and to what people knew, repeating, repeating, repeating. Now that investing into a meme cost almost nothing, humor adapts and changes with what is currently funny. Overtime with this cycle of adapting and rapidly changing internet humor a pattern has started to form.
CHAPTER 2 : The Cycle
The cycle of what the internet finds funny is as follows: sincerity->irony->post irony->new sincerity. In order to understand the cycle I will explain each of the terms. ‘Sincerity’ is where something is funny or interesting on its own, think: Mr.Beast, Prank videos, Cod Commentaries. ‘Irony’ would be when you do one thing but its funny because you are doing it, examples: Montage Parodies, Dank Memes, h3h3/leafyishere react channels. ‘Post Irony’ exists when the original meaning of why it was funny or interesting is lost and a new meaning emerges: deep fried memes, gangweed, we live in a society. ‘New Sincerity’ is the same as sincerity but it doesn't fully regress back to that time of humor, it builds upon all the humor that exists, the most popular thing in 2019 is unironic minecraft nostalgia and Mr.Beast videos. Now that you know each term we can discuss how to utilize this cycle in our world of internet memes to predict what will be popular next.
CHAPTER 3 : The Timeline
In order to predict what meme will be popular next we need to place the cycle within an accurate timeline. In order to do this I have taken the first popular meme from each paradigm and counted the years in between them. What I have come to is that each paradigm in the cycle is around 3 years long. The easiest paradigm to figure out the timeline is the 2013 montage parody meme. The first big popular ‘Ironic’ memes bred from parody frag edits called montage parodies. The subreddit (r/montageparodies) that housed them gained popularity in 2013–2014. Montage parodies in late summer 2015 started passing the torch channels like h3h3 and leafyishere which were known for their reactions, watching mostly bad or cringing videos ironically and making fun of them. Also a shift to ‘dank meme’ subreddits. We then saw a shift in late 2016 from irony to post irony right after donald trump got elected. ‘Dank meme’ subreddits turned into ‘Deep fried meme’ subreddits and the meta grew and grew until the peak in 2019 of post ironic memes and the rise of unironic new sincerity memes, /r/MinecraftMemes and youtube channels like Mr.Beast.
We can see that a pattern is emerging that we go from each paradigm to the next around every 3 years. This would mean we can place the pattern onto our timeline and accurately predict what will be popular.
CHAPTER 4 : Pewdiepie
The best example of someone online that has followed this pattern is pewdiepie. Over the last decade pewdiepie has been doing the same type of youtube videos, edit live gameplay reactions (morphing into edited live meme reactions). if you look at the google trends for searches for pewdiepie, you can see that he has only grew in popularity during times of sincerity humor. From 2011–2014 he grew, and from late 2018–2019 he grew. These are the times in which the mainstream internet was into sincerity humor. Pewdiepie is the first popular example online of someone reaching one point of the cycle twice. He was so big that he survived through the period in which his brand of humor was not the dominate paradigm. Now that the pattern is proven how can you use it to your advantage?
CHAPTER 5 : BREAKING The Cycle
If a say youtuber wanted to stay relevant past the average of 1–2 years they need to learn to break the cycle. They will need to adapt to the next paradigm and sooner than once it arrives. The next paradigm starts gaining popularity about 2–3 years before it becomes mainstream internet culture. That means that living in late 2019 the next paradigm is starting to take root now! This would be the ‘irony’ phase. Using late 2019 as an example if you wanted to break the cycle and stay relevant you would need to once again do the dirty work and find out where the ironic memes are coming from.
