Copying is the sincerest form of flattery

IDEA N^o 53

INTERNET MEME

Have you ever played an April Fool’s joke? That’s a meme. Have you ever worn your baseball cap back to front? That’s a meme too. Have you ever said, ‘Cheers’? You get the idea.

A Golden-mantled Ground Squirrel crashes the Brandt’s self-portrait at Banff National Park in 2009. The image has become a popular meme, known as Crasher Squirrel.

A meme is a behaviour that is transmitted from person to person. The term was coined by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, from the Greek, mimema, meaning ‘imitate’. Examples of memes cited in the book include stories, sayings, fashions and learnt skills. Dawkins sums up a meme as ‘a unit of cultural transmission’, meaning just about anything you can think of is potentially a meme. It can be a phrase, image, behaviour, sound or fashion.

According to Dawkins’ theory, memes evolve in the same way as living things. Some become extinct, some spread and others mutate. The meme is perhaps most simply described by Malcolm Gladwell as ‘an idea that behaves like a virus that moves through a population, taking hold in each person it infects’. This is true, but it confuses a meme with viral content.

Memes differ from viral campaigns in that they evolve and change over time. Crasher Squirrel is a meme, appearing in a different photograph each time it’s shared. Dancing Baby is viral; the same file is shared every time.

Historically, a meme would travel via word of mouth, usually as an interesting story, a funny joke or an expression of speech. An internet meme spreads from person to person via social networks, blogs, content aggregators, instant messages and email. Away from the keyboard, memes evolve and spread relatively slowly. On the Web, they can spread extremely rapidly, potentially reaching a global audience in hours.

Internet memes are often humorous, such as Crasher Squirrel or the Star Wars Kid. Humour reaches the most people because it is easy to forward funny content to large numbers of people. Conversational expressions are popular too, such as ‘Keep Calm and …’. Whatever the motive, in each case a piece of customized content spreads between people in a virus-like fashion.

Internet memes have attracted a lot of academic attention. Making ideas stick has enormous potential for influencing social change. Why are some ideas replicated and virally shared, while others are discarded? There appears to be no formula. Although starting with an unamused cat will give you a fighting chance …■

Planking is the act of lying down, arms by your side, in an unusual location. Seen here, Deb Taylor of What’s Deb Doing?