The Past, Present and Future of Memes

It wasn’t that long ago that memes came onto the scene and took the internet by storm.

Due to their ability to express thoughts and feelings in a fun and relatable way, they have resonated with young audiences from the get-go. Where most other mediums have failed to maintain their relevance in the internet age, memes have since become one of the most widely consumed types of online content.

Memes are not only an internet powerhouse but a social phenomenon, too. Yet because they’re everywhere around us, their actual impact is very easy to overlook.

To understand the important role that memes play in the online media landscape, we need to take a step back and examine their short but illustrious history.

The Origin of the Meme

Surprisingly, the concept of memes actually predates the internet.

The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins originally coined the term “meme” in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene.

It described a concept — an idea, a style, or a type of behavior — that circulates and gains popularity within a culture. Since the process is similar to the transmission of genetic traits in humans, Dawkins was looking for a monosyllable word that would rhyme with gene. He thus took the Greek word “mimeme” (that which is imitated) and shortened it to — meme.

It took 18 years for the term to transition to the internet.

Writing for Wired Magazine in 1994, Mike Godwin described how he created the earliest known example of the internet meme. At that time, he would regularly take part in Usenet newsgroup discussions. But he soon noticed that most online debates would sooner or later end with references to Hitler and Nazism. He dubbed this observation Goodwin’s Law of Nazi References.

Godwin was aware of Dawkins’ meme theory and believed this was a perfect example of that model. He decided to create a counter-meme by posting about Goodwin’s Law to any newsgroup that had senseless Nazi references. Much to his surprise, other people would soon start reposting his observations to other newsgroups. Just like that, the idea he originated was now circulating and becoming popular among internet users — and the first internet meme was born.

The Evolution of the Meme

In the wake of Godwin’s Law, there were several other notable internet memes. The two that stood out the most were the Dancing Baby, created in 1996, and the Hampster Dance, created two years later. Both initially gained popularity thanks to email chains and newsgroups, but other media channels helped them reach a global audience. As such, the Dancing Baby appeared in several episodes of the popular TV show Ally McBeal, while the Hampster Dance served as an inspiration for a popular novelty song.

Of course, these early examples aren’t necessarily what we think of when we hear the word meme today. They were fairly simple animated images, precursors to today’s GIFs. But they were unlike anything people had seen before, which was enough for them to become an instant sensation.

As the broadband internet was entering more homes in the early aughts, internet memes started sporting the look we associate with them today. Websites like eBaum’s World and online trends like LOLcats helped define the standard image macro that most internet memes use.

The common image macro template showcases a drawing or a photo with two blocks of text at the top and the bottom of the image. As a rule, the text is white with a black outline, written in all caps using the Impact font. These memes work much like spoken-word jokes: the top text sets up the joke, while the bottom text delivers the punchline.

One of the best-known examples of the standard meme layout is the Chuck Norris Facts series that was wildly popular during the mid-aughts. Other popular examples include the Success Kid, Scumbag Steve, and the Overly Attached Girlfriend.

As this last example illustrates, internet memes don’t come only in image form. There are also video memes, often referred to as vemes.

Enter Video Memes

In 1997, a video file titled “badday.mpg” started making rounds on the web. The 27-second clip depicting an angry man smashing his office computer was one of the earliest examples of a successful video meme. But it wasn’t until the 2005 launch of YouTube that video memes became so widely distributed.

If you were online in 2007, you surely remember just how popular rickrolling was. People would send their friends a YouTube link, urging them to check out a new movie trailer, a controversial video everyone was talking about, or a preview of their favorite show’s season premiere. When they opened the link, it would start playing the video to Rick Astley’s 1987 smash hit “Never Gonna Give You Up.”

Another popular video meme came a few years later. It was a short clip of the renowned Soviet singer Eduard Khil singing his song “I Am So Happy to Finally Be Back Home.” The meme became so successful that the audiences that didn’t know Khil before have started referring to him as the “Trololo Guy”.

The creation of these early video memes coincided with the growing popularity of social media platforms. In 2009, Facebook and Twitter both already had millions of users sharing different types of content with their online friends and followers. Together with YouTube, these platforms led us into the viral video era.

Viral video is the term applied to online videos that become wildly popular through sharing on social media and websites. The viral video era gave us the Nyan Cat, Harlem Shake, and Turn Down for What. As long as it had millions of views, any video could earn the “viral” prefix.

Of course, not all viral videos are memes. Virality refers to the nature of how quick and widespread something is or can be, especially via person to person communication online, while meme refers to an idea, behavior or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture. While online video’s like Despacito or Gangnam Style are easily classified as viral content, they themselves aren’t memes in and of themselves.

How Social Media Changed Internet Memes

Parallel to helping online videos reach wider audiences, social media also gave memes a facelift of sorts. The early 2010s introduced a new type of internet memes — reaction GIFs. These were mostly memorable scenes from movies, TV shows, and videos converted into animated GIFs.

Reaction GIFs are short, fun, and relatable, which makes them perfect for use on social media. As their name suggests, instead of posting comments on social media posts, users can simply share the GIF that best describes their reaction. Whether it’s TV’s Dawson Leary crying, Peggy Olson entering her new office on Mad Men, or Tyra Banks screaming at Tiffany Richardson — there’s no emotion a well-chosen reaction GIF can’t convey.

To most social media users, animated GIFs also served as a more convenient alternative to online videos. This way, they could still witness the pop culture moments everyone was talking about without having to go to YouTube, find the video, and then fast forward to the exact moment when something interesting happens.

But there’s a simple reason why animated GIFs couldn’t fully replace online videos — they didn’t have sound. So the next logical step was to combine the brevity of GIFs with the technical capabilities of online videos to create video memes for the social media generation.

Video Memes Make a Comeback

In late 2012, Twitter bought a soon-to-be-launched video hosting platform Vine and incorporated it into its services. The platform allowed users to record six-second videos on their phones and share them with their followers. Although very successful at first, Vine has since been discontinued. But during its four-year lifespan, it served as the launch pad for some of the best-known video memes in recent years.

Other social media platforms were joining the online video game, too. Facebook and Instagram — both parts of the same company — as well as Twitter itself, let their users share original videos directly to their friends and followers. They can even add effects, filters, images, and text to make their videos more interesting and thus also more shareable.

Speaking of sharing, statistics show that more than 92% of Twitter users regularly share videos on their profiles. Snapchat videos — which used to be only 10 seconds long until recently — generate more than 10 million views every day. On top of that, videos get 12 times as many shares on social media as text and images combined.

Looking Ahead

The internet meme in all its forms is as strong as ever, but these statistics clearly show that viral video memes are the future. Content creators will have to focus their attention on creating short-form videos that will deliver a powerful message while being highly shareable at the same time, and marketers are also facing a big challenge as they realize that internet memes are very hard to monetize.

In light of the recent cases of social media data breaches on current social networks, it’s also important to create decentralized social media and video sharing channels. Blockchain technology provides a great platform for this, and there are already apps like Veme that are already changing the way viral videos are created, shared, and monetized. This helps eliminate the middleman and gives creators exclusive rights to use their content any way they want, making sure that even video memes are enough to let you pay rent if enough people want to watch them.