In his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins gifted the world more than even he might have bargained for when he declared his intention to coin “a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. Mimeme comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like ‘gene.’ I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme.”25
Dawkins may or may not have been forgiven by classicists, but one thing he couldn’t have predicted would be that his new word (the cousin of a similar word coined by the German biologist Richard Semon in 1904, also from the Greek: mneme) would come to be one of the most useful and defining terms of twenty-first-century internet culture. For, in a digital age, memes are a uniquely contemporary class of object—a kind of pop cultural flotsam, spreading via all those they persuade to laugh out loud along their path.
There are tens of thousands of memes online, embodying near-unimaginable quantities of ingenious timewasting. From dancing babies to flying felines shaped like pop tarts, they sweep from satire (the gap between politicians releasing campaign posters and the net adapting them into parodies is now numbered in minutes rather than hours) to pop-cultural gags with more layers than a set of Russian dolls. Read the three-thousand-word Wikipedia article on “Rickrolling” for an example of how a meme can eat itself several times over within the space of five years.
In addition to fans by the million, memes have their many chroniclers too. The definitive point of reference for all matters meme-like is perhaps knowyourmeme.com, which boasts of its dedication to “documenting Internet phenomena.” With over twelve hundred confirmed meme entries, it’s a repository of human inventiveness and strangeness bordering on the pathological; not to mention a treasure trove of wonderful would-be words. A “kitler” is, for example, a “cat that looks like Hitler,” and some of the photos are uncanny.
There’s much argument over the first digital meme—although one leading contender is the emoticon for a smiley face, :-). There’s little debate, though, over the most influential of all memes: the infamous “lolcat.”
Lolcats are the near-numberless offspring of a venerable class of object: the “image macro,” in which text is superimposed on a photograph. Born around 2006 on the notoriously obscene and inventive imageboard website 4chan.org, “laugh-out-loud-cats”—as nobody would ever dream of spelling them out—pair cute animal images with comically misspelled captions. This may seem distinctly limited grounds for amusement. But type “lolcat” into Google and you’ll turn up not only six-million-plus pictures, but initiatives ranging from scholarly studies to the frankly bewildering “lolcat bible translation project.”
Like the capacity of human society itself to act, in Dawkins’s terms, as a kind of gene pool for thoughts and belief, we are today the conscious agents of our own delight and distraction in a way never previously possible. And with this comes a new sense of what it means to be part of a global human collective, celebrating and rethinking its own nature every day—comic cats and dancing babies included.