The word meme was invented by an evolutionary biologist in 1976
Richard Dawkins coined meme in The Selfish Gene as a cultural counterpart to the gene: a unit of culture that copies itself from mind to mind. Seventeen years later Mike Godwin applied the idea to the internet. Now memes spread through populations in patterns resembling the models epidemiologists use for disease.
Dawkins wanted a way to explain how pieces of culture replicate, mutate and evolve, and he chose a word that echoed gene. Godwin proposed the online version in the June 1993 issue of Wired, describing how ideas multiplied across message boards, Usenet and email. Arguably the earliest internet meme predates both web and social media: the sideways smiley made of a colon, hyphen and bracket, introduced by Scott Fahlman in 1982.
Early web memes of the late 1990s, such as the Dancing Baby and the Hampster Dance, circulated slowly and lingered longer than today's. The imageboard 4chan later gave rise to lolcats, the prototype of the image macro, a picture overlaid with bold text, alongside rage comics and parody motivational posters. YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram accelerated everything, and short videos on Vine and TikTok spawned new styles, including surreal and so-called dank memes.
Scholars pick out two defining traits. The first is creative reproduction, either mimicry, where people restage something like the viral Charlie Bit My Finger video, or remix, where an image is digitally altered while keeping the original recognisable. The second is intertextuality, mashing together references from different worlds; one example laid a phrase from Mitt Romney's 2012 debate over a frame from Psy's Gangnam Style video. Memes can also serve as in-jokes that bind a community and baffle outsiders.
Researchers Michele Knobel and Colin Lankshear tested Dawkins' criteria of fidelity, fecundity and longevity against online memes and concluded that replicability describes them better than fidelity, since remixes change them while keeping the core. Unlike traditional memes, judged by how long they endure, internet memes are often fleeting. Studies by Coscia found memes compete for attention, shortening their lives, but can also reinforce each other. They now appear in marketing, finance, politics and healthcare, and borrowing copyrighted material sometimes sparks legal disputes despite frequent fair-use claims.
Source: Internet meme
