Lol, brb, lmfao, maxlol, LOLcats, Old Spice Commercials, Chuck Norris Jokes, internet sensations via YouTube – these are all indisputable elements of our culture. What is it that drives these sayings, videos, and musing to be so wildly popular and so readily accepted into our social system? How does an idea take on a viral form and penetrate nearly every aspect of modern society? How about a little cultural ephemera, eh?

What we have been witnessing over the last decade was the rise of the “meme”.

So what’s a meme? It’s a little difficult to explain because a meme could be a number of things: a saying, a video, or simply just a fad. The easiest way to describe it would be to say that it is an inside joke that millions are in on. Memes are cultural phenomenons that are widely known to vast groups of people. When your friend comes up to you and says, “Hey dude, have you seen that one video on YouTube, with the cat that is smoking a cigar? It’s hilarious,” that’s the essence of the meme. It’s a fad, something of current interest to millions that spreads with a viral effect strictly by word of mouth.

MEMEXAMPLES

Internet slang is responsible for a good amount of the memeing going on out there in cyberspace. What originally developed as shorthand for early programmers in the 1970s eventually culminated a series of phrases and annotations of programming language, and as technology and the the ‘distance of contact’ between people got smaller, the use of this language became more widespread – a universal language of abbreviations, if you will. So this thing which started out as functional coding,  soon became more applicable to popular culture in social media web sites like Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace.

People needed a quick way to communicate and thus the shorthand forms of type were developed. The programmers did it out of necessity, popular culture did it out of convenience. The resulting abbreviations could be considered “memes”.

“JICYDK, Totalvid.com is the l8tst and gr8tst, n if u eva hava ?, jus ask youself, WWCND?”

[Translated]: Just in case you didn’t know, Totalvid.com is the latest and the greatest, and if you ever have a question about it, just ask yourself, “What would Chuck Norris do?”

I know. It doesn’t make much sense, but you get the point.

VISUAL MEMES

In going with the theme of the necessity of the intuitive, time-saving slang (since the abbreviated use of internet slang is inherently necessary to save us time from having to convey our ideas in great detail as our communication avenues drift further and further away from actual spoken word, inclining more towards brief character phrases), I’ve decided to segue into visual memeing with a lovable little picture series known as LOLCATS.

Memes don’t singularly apply to language. Since the event of media sharing sites like YouTube and Flickr, folks have been using a visual medium to express themselves, their ideas, their emotions – and the world responded. Take LOLCATS for instance, the ultra-famous picture series depicting cats making funny faces and displaying misspelled comical phrases. Like a lot of other memework, LOLCATS serves no actual function other than to be internet fodder for the bored masses mindlessly clicking and typing away. But, it somehow became wildly popular phenomenon.

Depicted below, is one of the LOLCATS snapshots:

A typical LOLCATS picture.

Notice the unassuming feline perched inside of the underwear drawer and how the image itself is not so humorous until paired with the misspelled text appendage, giving the cat an air of lower intelligence and a stunted vocabulary. Get it? I’m not so sure that I do, but after repetitive views of the thousands of lolcats picture, you begin to find its charm.

These cat portraits have actually been around nearly a century, also called “cat macros”, but not until the mid-2000s did they become the popular cyber-craze and the cultural pin-point that they are today. In 2007, the website, americandialect.org voted “lolcat” the second-most creative word of the year, just behind Googleganger. (May I also point you in the direction of the similar image macro meme “O RLY?” featuring an photo of a snowy owl.)

Cats in general have become a sort of meme of their own. The website stuffonmycat.com, which came out around the same time as LOLCATS, grew popular enough to spawn three books that sold reasonably well over the years. Recently, cats were featured on the indie music critique website, Pitchfork.com, in an article called Hello Kitty: Indie Rock Goes to the Cats:

“Best Coast leader Bethany Cosentino’s cat Snacks became an unlikely indie rock ambassador this year, starring on the cover of Best Coast’s Crazy for You LP and Wavves’ King of the Beach. (Snacks also has his own Twitter if you’re into that kind of thing.) And, considering MGMT’s psych-cat-delic (sorry) cover for Congratulations and Klaxons’ astro-cat sleeve for Surfing the Void, the cat trend was official.”

Enough with cats.

VIRAL VIDEOS

The other side of the visual meme spectrum is the video meme made popular by video sharing sites like YouTube and Vimeo. Ever hear of what industry professionals call, “viral marketing”? Some prime examples are the Old Spice Commercials that aired on YouTube, the Wii Fit Girl (which wasn’t actually a PR ploy, just a homemade video gone viral), the infamous OK GO music video that had the band performing synchronized treadmill routine to their music, and latest craze, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, a stop motion short about a shy, eager shell that wears shoes and has an adorable, little voice (pictured below).

Marcel the Shell with Shoes On

In the case of the Wii Fit Girl video, the filmmaker of the video filmed it for fun to see what kind of reaction it would have out in the YouTubeiverse. Much to his surprise, the video took off becoming an internet sensation. There’s really no telling what when the next meme will be, it’s a matter of being at the right place at the right time and the ability to conjure mass appeal.

CULTURAL SIGNIFICANCE

In today’s age, where tons of information shared freely on the web and anyone at anytime can get access to said information, the meme has become a signifier of trends and societal inclinations. If an alien came down to planet Earth and saw a bunch of humans staring a tiny little boxes laughing at people falling backwards off of tables and Will Ferrell getting yelled at by a 4-year old. For instance, no one is going nuts about the 45-minute documentary about WWII, they’re going crazy over the ludicrous Old Spice Commercial guy riding a unicorn. This mode of instant communication and instant gratification is both a good and bad thing, a blessing and a curse.

On one hand, it could be shortening our attention spans and diminishing our expectations as to what should entertain an audience (although “Marcel the Shell with Shoes On” is most certainly creative,  funny, and completely enjoyable). This could prove to be very debilitating trend in the art world, as more and more amateurs are breaking into film-making through low-budget avenues like YouTube, masters of the craft are left producing what is probably a more superior piece of work and not being appreciated for it because they didn’t cast any cats. Their viewers simply don’t have the discipline any more to surrender their time to a feature-length film.

On the other hand, it is bringing people together and giving them something to enjoy and talk about, something to come together for. The base idea of a “meme” is that it spreads uncontrollably through a network, like a virus through a biological environment, and in order for this to happen, this network has to be incredibly close-knit and constantly sharing information. The fact that “memes” are even a possibility really speaks to the proximity of our cyber-social networks.

Of course, this is all speculation. Memeing is ultimately a harmless little nugget of our modern society. Colloquial, funny, and a nice little way to blow off time, and now that you know what they are, you can start your own.

Official memes coined in this article: “memexamples“, “memework“,  “YouTubeiverse“.

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