Memes Are Fun

When most people hear the word 'Meme', the think of a funny picture with a hilarious joke- the set up on the top of the image followed by a hilarious punchline along the bottom. Memes are the things your friends text you so that you can have a laugh in the middle of work hours, the things you 'Like' on Facebook but don't actually comment on. Memes are the profile pictures of people that love to share hilarity.




However, memes are actually much older than the age of digital sharing. In fact, they are older than the Internet itself.

A little history: The phrase 'Meme' was coined in 1976 (a good thirty six years back) by Richard Dawkins as he described evolution. Dawkins concluded that evolution doesn't simply operate on a chemical level, it it also required some self replicating form of communication. In the chemical world, a gene is self replicating, it duplicates on and on and on and on. It's the reason a baby goes from a tiny thumbnail sized ball of tissue to a 6'11 NBA center. However, outside the chemical world, there are ideas or information that do the same thing. They duplicate and travel through society the way small pox travelled through the newly discovered Americas. These information packets, self replicating units of transmission, are memes.

Enter the Internet Meme we all recognise so easily. These are information packets- whether it be something as simple as using the word 'teh' instead of 'the', or 'moar' instead of 'more', these are all little packets of information that travel through huge amounts of people at incredible speed. They evolve and adapt as some genes do too- what is funny one day is parodied the next. Companies are spending thousands of dollars daily to analyse what makes them funny and what makes them spread, they are an advertisers holy grail.

And occasionally they are pretty funny.

Much funnier than genes.