How To Categorize Memes
My first steps towards meme taxonomy
When looking for something to read, you can choose between fiction, non-fiction, plays, poetry, this blog post, your other emails… the list goes on. And then within each of those categories there’s genres: within non-fiction there’s self-help books, biographies, journalism, memoirs… the list, again, goes on.
There are many kinds of memes, just as there many kinds of writing. And like different kinds of writing, different kinds of memes do different jobs. While they may spread the same way and are produced using some of the same processes (sharing to socials, remixing, copy-and-pasting) a Wojak meme is not the same as a Galaxy Brain, which is not the same as a TikTok lip-sync trend, which is not the same as an Advice Animal.
Listing out every kind of meme is a task I would definitely fail at — there’s just too many. Similarly, drawing thick, clear lines between genres or types of memes would be as impossible as drawing lines between literary genres: nobody can say for sure when a book becomes sci-fi instead of fantasy, what distinguishes poetry from prose, or where the line between memoir and autofiction should be drawn.
But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to say on the topic. If a piece of text has line breaks in it and seems to use a lot of figurative language, it could be a poem. If there’s spaceships, it could be sci-fi. If it’s about the author and realistic things happen, it could be a memoir.
A Provisional Typology Of Memes
So, here are some ideas about what traits might distinguish types of meme from one another. I’ve divided them into three broad categories: practicalities (meaning difference in the practices of creators and communities) lore (meaning a meme’s relation to the in-real-life world, and to other memes) and usage (meaning, what task posting a specific meme accomplishes).
Practicalities
Materials and Practices. One way memes differ is in what they’re made out of and what you have to do to make them. Some places where memes circulate, like TikTok or Vine, are video-centric; platforms like Instagram are image-centric, and others like Twitter are text-centric. Of course, memes cross between platforms all the time and image, text, and video are present on every major meme platform to some degree. But the tools each platform gives people to express themselves affect the kind of memes that move through it. The differences between the algorithms and follower/following structures of different social media platforms also play a part.
Platform/Community. Specific communities on the internet have a very specific vibe, often stemming from years of built-up tradition. A 4chan meme is not like a Boomer meme, just as a “-cellectuals” style meme will not be like a Tumblr meme. Further, there are specific demographics online which interact in specific ways, and memes can be divided (just like any other human cultural production) according to categories like generation, linguistic region, political belief, identity, etc. Of course, these categories are also frequently crossed and muddled together.
Lore
Sourcing/Relationship With Reality. Some memes are originally photographs or screenshotted posts found in the wild, featuring real people and situations. Other memes come from pre-existing fictions, like those that borrow images from anime or movies. Some memes come from a purely online environment, and don’t have any tether to the IRL reality. Each of these origin types brings along its own baggage: a meme captured in reality feels a little journalistic, a meme based on a show or movie participates in a fandom tradition, and a purely online meme is almost always niche.
Know Your Meme, “Parkour! (The Office). Originally posted by u/Velvet_Thunder-567 to /r/DunderMifflin, January 4 2019. This meme, like many, is sourced from a still of a TV show (The Office) and so to some extent relies on a viewer’s familiarity with that show (although, it can be appreciated without knowing Michael Scott). Characters/Context. Some memes, like Pepe, Quandale Dingle, or Wojak, participate in a broader expanded universe of characters and lore. An individual meme with a Wojak in it only makes sense through reference to the bigger tradition and the meme character’s interaction with other characters. Wojak isn’t really one meme, but a system of interrelated and interlocking memes that form one organic whole, like how Thor is just one part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. There are many other meme systems like this (consider Dogelore, Chad comics, etc.) and often they are used to communicate particular themes or truths, like a set of characters in a mythology. Some memes, by contrast, don’t have any lore around them: they directly represent to a poster’s opinion and situation in real life, without making reference to a larger system.
Usage
Reaction Value. Some memes function like emojis, representing the reaction of a person to something that happens online or is said to them. These are the memes which frequently show up in comment threads and quote tweets.
Rhetorical Value. Some memes are used to make arguments, allowing a poster to arrange objects in such a way to argue that one thing will lead to another, or one thing is preferable to another.
Know Your Meme. “Distracted Boyfriend.” Originally sourced from Twitter, August 22nd, 2017. Account since deleted. Descriptive Value. This one has some overlap with rhetorical value. Some memes are used primarily to tell or present situations/stories in a certain way. However, I think the line between description and rhetoric is blurred in memes: the example above of Distracted Boyfriend (which I intend to write a whole thesis about) demonstrates the slippage between these two actions. You can interpret the meme above as telling a story (“the youth have abandoned capitalism for socialism”) or as making an argument (“the youth should (or shouldn’t!) abandon capitalism for socialism”)
lol Value. Many (if not most) memes are funny and use humor. But an open question for me is whether humor is the end goal of a meme or a tool which a meme uses to communicate something else. A joke is rarely just a joke. Humor is a behavior that we use to attract, intimidate, and care for other people. So, I’m choosing the word “lol” because I want to think of this category as a meme’s ability to evoke a positive affective response from other people. I like to think that very often, people want to do that for each other without any other motive.
Identification Value. One of the things posting a meme does is mark membership or belonging in specific online communities. The kind of meme you like or share says something about you. An obvious example of identification value is the alt-right’s adoption of Pepe the Frog to represent itself. But identification value could also be found on the level of aesthetic: being an e-boy doesn’t mean just looking a certain way, but posting a certain way. All memes have some identification value because posting a meme means you are the kind of person who “gets” that meme.
This list is definitely incomplete — if you can think of any more criteria, or have any criticisms of the ones I’ve listed, please comment and help me out here. Also, by writing the list, I don’t want to make up some kind of exact taxonomy of memes. Not only would that be difficult, but it would be useless: memes are slippery, they do different things in different contexts, there is always an exception to every rule. So I think it’s better to instead go from a general set of principles, keeping my eyes peeled for relevant differences, rather than invent a strict set of categories so you can point at any meme and say, “oh, that’s an x” as if it were a bird or plant.
Examples
Bear with me as I classify (kind of) two memes according to the criteria I listed:
Practicalities: this meme is an image-macro. It was made by inserting text and image, using copy-and-paste. There is no video component. I found it posted to the Twitter account @RespectfulMemes. It perhaps had an earlier source.
Lore: this meme references the Dogelore canon. Originally, Doge came from a photo of a real dog but neither version of Doge presented here (Cheems or Swole) corresponds to that real dog. The “be like” construction is also frequently used in memes, possibly derived from African American Vernacular English. It can mark “memeness” in many instances. Here, the difference between two characters within the Dogelore system (meek Cheems and swole Doge) is being used metaphorically to describe something outside of Dogelore.
Usage: In this meme, the Dogelore figures are used to represent the pitch of strings on musical instruments: the cute and diminutive Cheems is the higher strings, Swole Doge is the lower strings. In that sense, the meme is performing a kind of descriptive function. But I’d argue this meme also performs an identification function for two different constituencies: first, players of guitar or bass, and second, people who know Dogelore. As a member of both, I found this meme very compelling. It also made me lol.
Practicalities: this meme is an image-macro. Like the last meme, it was made by inserting text and image, using basic mark-up software. It was posted by @FarnousAmiri, a Congressional Reporter for the Associated Press on January 4th, 2023. I found it on Twitter.
Lore: this meme is a screen shot from the Noah Baumbach film “Marriage Story.” As a meme, it found initial traction in December 2019, shortly after the film was released. It depicts a heated marital argument, and a stereotypical form of impotent male violence: punching a wall. In this context, it refers to the long drawn-out “speaker election” in which Kevin McCarthy continually humiliated himself in search of a position he doesn’t deserve. The “Marriage Story” meme does not belong to any system of memes. It’s sort of a one-off structure used in specific situations.
Usage: this meme has reaction value, depicting Amiri’s frustration at the ever-continuing speaker election. Adam Driver’s character in the meme emotes for her. Also, the meme has identification value because this meme circulates among her very plugged-into-politics Twitter circle.
Memes Are The Light Of The Internet
The memes above are not just an image and text, in the same way that writing is not just letters and sentences. A meme is also something you post, a thing you do, an action like writing. It’s similar to how light is a particle and a wave: the substance behaves both ways, as noun and verb.
So, for thinking about meme genres, it’s necessary to look at both the particle and the wave. There’s differences at the particle/practicality level (that is, how the meme is made and with what tools), at the usage/wave level (that is, how the meme moves through the social world and what purposes it accomplishes) and at the lore level, which is somewhere between those two (that is, how the meme takes on a kind of intangible but reference-able form within the social world).
Naming distinct genres, rather than just sketching out the criteria which I would use to determine them, would take another 2,000 word blog post.
But Why Does Any Of This Matter?
I’m operating off the premise that memes are interesting because they are interesting. I imagine that looking at genres of memes is like looking at genres of Renaissance painting: it’s an end in and of itself, because it can be a fun and beautiful thing to think about. Art is fun.
But this knowledge is also practical. We tend to just say “memes” to refer to all kinds of online cultural phenomena, which blurs a lot of important differences. Developing a more specific vocabulary can help to navigate the tricky world of memes and respond to them in more productive ways. There’s a difference between saying, “Oh, there’s a mammal!” and “Oh, there’s a bear,” or “Oh, there’s a bunny.”
There are some mammals you run from and some mammals you pet. Different kinds of memes should be read and responded to in different ways.