The history of the Meme

What’s in a meme?

You wake up to find your Facebook Timeline flooded with them. You don’t really need context to get the joke, it’s simple enough to be self-explanatory. It can be an image or a video, coupled with a one-liner; regarding a current event or a shared human experience. It can be really micro or very meta. They can be self-referential, where a new one references an old one that was popular a month ago; in social media time that’s OLD!

It would be hard to describe a meme to someone who has never actually seen one. They bring us tremendous joy, sometimes my friends and I speak only in memes and nothing else need be said, each of us understands everyone else, and that is the beauty of a meme, it’s a shared human experience, and has become a form of communication.

History of the meme:

Let’s get a hold of the Tardis and take a trip a few decades into the past. We’re going all the way back to 1976. In ‘76 celebrated author, Richard Dawkins published a book titled ‘The Selfish Gene’. In this book, he compared ideas to living organisms in that they have the ability to change and mutate and take on a life of their own. He termed this concept ‘mimeme’ from the Greek word which means ‘that which is replicated’. He later abbreviated the word to just meme to make it shorter and easier to pronounce.

Decades later the internet got hold of the concept and ran with it. Few people know the origin of the term but everyone who has ever used the internet, is guilty of sharing it; they may pronounce it wrong but they know what it is, and isn’t that what Dawkins wanted all along?