Internet memes
Internet memes are a form of cultural expression that spread rapidly across the internet, often in the form of images, videos, phrases, or other digital content. The term "meme" was originally coined by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in 1976 to describe ideas that replicate and evolve within societies. Memes can convey humor, commentary, or social observations and are typically shared through social media platforms, forums, and websites. One of the earliest internet memes was the "Hamster Dance," which emerged in 1998, followed by the viral popularity of "Peanut Butter Jelly Time!" in 2002.
Memes have significantly influenced marketing strategies, with businesses leveraging their ability to engage audiences at little or no cost. Notable examples include the LOLCats phenomenon, which features humorous images of cats paired with playful text, and successful campaigns like "Will It Blend?" that showcase products in entertaining ways. While many memes serve lighthearted purposes, they can also engage with serious topics such as politics and social issues, sometimes leading to unexpected consequences. Despite their transient nature, certain memes, like "Distracted Boyfriend" and "Kermit sipping tea," have achieved lasting popularity and recognition in contemporary digital culture.
Internet memes
Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins first coined the term "meme" in 1976. He used it to describe an idea that organically reproduces and spreads throughout a society. Through the Internet, memes are able to spread quickly and reach millions of online users within hours. There is seemingly no limit to what a meme can be. Videos, websites, parodies, phrases, photos, and other online items are all considered Internet memes. Marketing agencies quickly began utilizing memes to promote various products, shows, and films.
Online Origins and Popular Memes
Internet memes began as websites that were made popular through word of mouth and online sharing. One of the earliest examples of a meme website is the Hamster Dance, which debuted in 1998 and featured graphics interchange formats (GIFs) of animated hamsters dancing to a looped song. One of the first website memes to become massively popular in the 2000s was the website Hot or Not, which launched in October 2000. The website allows users to upload their photos and have other users rate their attractiveness. Within a week, Hot or Not was receiving nearly two million hits a day.
One of the first Internet memes that was not a website is the flash animation “Peanut Butter Jelly Time!” The video became hugely popular in 2002 and featured a cartoon banana dancing to a song of the same name. In March 2001, the phrase “All Your Base Are Belong to Us” became the next big Internet meme. This phrase was taken from a Japanese video game that was produced in the 1990s in which a character speaks the poorly translated phrase. The phrase was accompanied by a brief video and was quickly embraced by online humorists and video game enthusiasts.
In 2005 the video sharing website YouTube was launched, allowing for video memes to spread even faster through email, blogs, and social media. YouTube also led to meme comedy series, which were ongoing memes in the form of short films. One of the first of these popular memes was Ask a Ninja. This series featured a ninja, portrayed by cocreator Douglas Sarine, who answered questions. Another video meme series that was popular on YouTube was lonelygirl15. This series premiered in June 2006 and ran until August 2008. The series featured a fictional teenage girl named Bree who was played by actress Jessica Lee Rose. The show was presented as Bree’s video blog and it was not until September 2006 that the series was revealed to be fictional. The series received over 110 million combined views and was applauded for being one of the first online drama series.
LOLCats
Possibly the most successful and influential meme of the 2000s was the phenomenon of LOLCats. A LOLCat is an image of a cat with humorous text attached to it. The text, known as LOLSpeak, is written in a misspelled, quirky manner, supposedly as if a cat were the one writing it. The name comes from the online acronym LOL, for “laughing out loud.” While the term "LOLCat" first surfaced on the Internet in 2005, the memes did not become immensely popular until January 2007, when the website I Can Has Cheezburger was launched to aggregate these images.
After its launch, the website, created by Hawaiian bloggers Eric Nakagawa and Kari Unebasami, was quickly receiving over one million views per day. It is credited with creating the popular animal-based memes that use LOLSpeak. According to its owners, by July 2007 the website was receiving nearly five hundred submissions per day. In September 2007 the website was acquired by investors for $2 million. Unlike many memes, which tend to fade from popularity as quickly as they appear, the popularity of LOLCats and other animal photos with LOLSpeak continued strong through the end of the decade and into the 2010s. Other long-lasting memes include Crying Jordan, in which an image of basketball star Michael Jordan's crying face (from a photo at his 2009 induction into the Basketball Hall of Fame) is inserted in other contexts to symbolize defeat or humiliation, and Rickrolling, in which a link is presented that allegedly leads to something relevant to the discussion at hand but instead leads to the song "Never Gonna Give You Up" by Rick Astley.
Marketing through Memes
Marketing experts have utilized memes to advertise a variety of products, media, TV shows, films, and more. Memes created to market a product can spread organically through social media and other online outlets at no cost to the advertiser. Other advertisers adopted memes that were already popular online to incorporate the image or phrase into more traditional advertisements. As the meme becomes more popular, the source website will increasingly come up on Internet search engines such as Google, making whatever product or service the meme is advertising more popular.
Some of the more successful advertising memes of the early twenty-first century were the commercials created for FreeCreditReport, a personal credit score website. The commercial featured a band singing humorous songs about their poor credit. The advertising began in October 2007 and the commercials quickly spread online. Several parodies of the commercials were uploaded soon after.
Another successful meme marketing campaign is Will It Blend?, a series of humorous infomercials created by blender manufacturer Blendtec. The first infomercial was uploaded to YouTube on October 30, 2006, and became an instant success. The series stars creator Tom Dickson; in each episode Dickson attempts to blend an item consumers would not normally put into a blender in order to demonstrate his product’s strength. These items include golf balls, marbles, and cell phones. Dickson went on to make national television appearances and the Will It Blend? series has received tens of millions of views.
Impact
Internet memes help shape popular culture and marketing. Although many memes are spread through the Internet solely for comedic purposes, many of them are embraced by advertisers as inexpensive promotional tools for branding and marketing. Memes sometimes help make ordinary people into overnight celebrities and, in the case of LOLCats, millionaires. There is no exact science to making a meme popular, but those creative and lucky enough to become so are able to make their mark on popular culture.
As memes became ever more common in the 2010s and 2020s, some scholars began to research their influence not only on pop culture, but on traditionally serious subjects such as politics, social justice, racism, and other issues. Presidential races and other major media events were interpreted through brief memes, leading some observers to wonder whether memes and other Internet culture, such as hashtags used to designate topics on the social media site Twitter—renamed X in the 2020s—were radically changing how people interact with information. Many political or social themed memes remained light-hearted and humorous above all, such as those in the popular format of images of President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden with captions imagining their conversations as goofy best friends. However, experts noted that memes could be coopted for more sinister purposes, as in the case of the cartoon character known as Pepe the Frog, who became associated with ant-Semitic groups as was listed as a hate symbol by the Anti-Defamation League in 2016.
Although there is no way to quantify which meme has become the most popular, by the 2020s, several candidates have emerged as among the most shared on the internet. Among them are 2017’s “Distracted Boyfriend,” in which a young man walking with his girlfriend reruns to eyeball another passing girl; “Kermit,” in which a thoughtful Kermit the Frog sips tea and makes a passive/aggressive comments; and “Condescending Wonka,” which posts a sarcastic comments on a photo of Gene Wilder playing the character Willie Wonka from the 1971 Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.
Bibliography
Gallagher, Katherine. “50 Famous Memes and What They Mean.” Triad City Beat, 27 Dec, 2022, triad-city-beat.com/50-famous-memes-and-what-they-mean/. Accessed 22 May 2024.
Huh, Ben. "10 Classic Memes that Owned the Internet." CNN, 12 Mar. 2014, www.cnn.com/2014/03/11/opinion/10-classic-internet-memes/. Accessed 22 May 2024.
Milner, Ryan M. The World Made Meme: Public Conversations and Participatory Media. MIT P, 2016.
Pogue, David. “Internet Memes 101: A Guide to Online Wackiness.” New York Times, 8 Sept. 2011, archive.nytimes.com/pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/08/internet-memes-101-a-guide-to-online-wackiness/. Accessed 22 May 2024.
Sternbergh, Adam. “Hey There, Lonelygirl.” New York Magazine, 20 Aug. 2006, nymag.com/arts/tv/features/19376/. Accessed 22 May 2024.
Tozzi, John. “Bloggers Bring in the Big Bucks.” Bloomberg Businessweek. Bloomberg, 13 July 2007. Web. 9 Nov. 2012.
Williams, Alex. "How Pepe the Frog and Nasty Woman are Shaping the Election." The New York Times, 28 Oct. 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/10/30/style/know-your-meme-pepe-the-frog-nasty-woman-presidential-election.html. Accessed 22 May 2024.
Wortham, Jenna. “Behind the Memes: Kickin’ It with the I Can Has Cheezburger? Kids.” Wired Magazine. 25 Apr. 2008, www.wired.com/2008/04/behind-the-me-3/. Accessed 22 May 2024.