what we talk about when we talk about memes

definitions of "meme"

an audio version of this post.

So what do we talk about when we talk about memes?

There are a few competing answers to that question. For some, it’s tied to the type of media in front of you: a meme is an image macro, a re-used picture with a changing funny text caption. But then, a lot of the things we call memes are (strictly speaking) videos, strings of text, dances or songs, not images at all.

Other people might reference the definition of the word meme, coined in 1976 by Richard Dawkins: an idea replicated over the years, moving through a human population the way a gene does. But this term, coined before the internet even existed, is unhelpfully broad: if everything is a meme then nothing is a meme. If the cut of a skirt and a way of building arches are memes (examples Dawkins uses) alongside everything else under the sun, then the category doesn’t say anything relevant about pictures on the internet.

Memetics also brings a lot of baggage with it, beyond just Richard Dawkins as a person: it seems like painting yourself in a corner to say culture has to “evolve,” that popular ideas succeed because they are more “fit,” that changes in culture are random mutations. Memetics is an idea of everything that achieves its elegance by lassoing all the stuff of the world into it, and claiming to explain it all by an analogy to biological evolution. That analogy, I think, is more limiting than it is helpful.

Limor Shifman’s 2013 definition, rather than Dawkins, is where most researchers today begin. Shifman says memes are “…a group of digital items sharing common characteristics of content, form, and/or stance, which were created with awareness of each other, and were circulated, imitated, and/or transformed via the Internet by many users.”

If you asked me, I would answer with the Shifman definition because it is rooted in a practical sense of how memes are experienced and discussed: memes are things we meet on the internet which are similar to other groups of things. My only bone to pick is that I’d expand somewhat on the “content, form, and/or stance” part: It seems to me like memes are made of mostly-constant pieces (the image that keeps getting reshared, for example) and mostly-variable pieces (the text that can be added, for example). In a TikTok dance, the constant piece might be choreography, while the variable piece is the person doing it.

“Content, form, and stance” are much more slippery than dividing a meme by the pieces of content within it, because you can’t really separate “content, form, and stance” from each other and you never see one without the other two. Seeing memes as objects which have different material pieces in them (like image and text) which users treat in different ways is more useful and reflects a division people do make while using them.

Other types of art share this structure: a sonnet has fourteen lines (mostly-constant) but the poet decides how to fill them in (mostly-variable). A pop song has verses, choruses, a bridge (mostly-constant) but the songwriter decides how it’s going to sound (mostly-variable). One aspect of what makes memes different is that we pay more attention to the mostly-constant pieces than to the mostly-variable ones: we mark and understand memes by talking about the stable pictures rather than the changing texts, the catchphrase rather than the edit. It’s a “Hide The Pain Harold” meme because we recognize a picture of the same dude showing up over and over again, but it’s a Joni Mitchell song because she doesn’t sound like anyone else.

This was initially what drew me into memes as a type of art. I am uncomfortable with how, in other forms, we tend to be fans of artists rather than songs, are more interested in painters than in paintings. This is of course a function of the specific market and historical context the arts are in right now. I felt this way of talking about art erased a lot of the people behind the byline who put something into it, and kept the reader at arm’s length — this is mine, not yours. A meme invites you in because it belongs to no one. I enjoy seeing these collectively shared ways of making sense of the world, I feel at home in them. I love authors, singers, and artists, but there’s something special about how a meme can be approached as itself rather than the product of some other named person.

The broad questions which memes open up — about the evolution of culture, the nature of consciousness, all the pretentious thoughts that originally attract me and everyone else to art — seem vague, remote, and abstract when met through a philosophy or a theory. But the more narrow questions that a practical, form-focused approach to art (such as this one) leads to — questions like “why is this feature here, what is its place in the overall work of art, where does it come from historically” — are more concrete, more answerable. I don’t see them as less-difficult, but I do see them as more generative than the grand theories of memetics. I’d rather have a definition of meme, like the Shifman one, which is tailored to a specific group of things that exist in a specific context.

For me, these literal descriptions lead to a deeper enchantment than bigger theoretical ones. By looking at the way a meme format or a novel works, you get a sense of how people themselves worked in their time. Not in the sense of like, labor (although that’s important) but in the sense of how they felt, how they saw, how they thought about stuff. What kept them together, what kept them sane, what kept them going?

So what we’re talking about when we talk about memes is precisely that: how do modern people work emotionally, economically, intellectually, spiritually, socially, intimately, all the other -ly words.

Every work of art is a self-portrait, just like how every footprint is a foot-portrait. Feet vary in size, but a lot of their other differences are not evident in a foot-print. It’s a partial portrait, showing the form of “foot” overall, which is shared by everyone, since it’s hard to tell one individual’s footprints from another’s (experienced trackers may disagree, but bear with me please).

Once people put on shoes, footprints change. Memes, like any artistic form, are a type of shoe and they change the way our prints look, and where they might lead — people wearing shoes tend to walk in different places and along different paths than those without them.

Types of media reflect modes of self. Perhaps not individual selves, but collective ones. Questions which feel quite deep — identity, memory, intimacy — are often functions of a great number of simple things, like how an image and text are arranged in an online post. To me that doesn’t reduce these questions down to something banal and quotidian, but rather elevates the everyday.

The fact that eating lunch relieves my existential malaise doesn’t mean my bad feelings were inauthentic, but that food and cooking are great and deep things. I like to see enchantment growing out in the wild of the everyday rather than sitting behind a fence, confined to the other side of an art museum’s revolving doors or buried in the pages of some massive tome. I open my phone and find memes just as deep as what I will find when, someday, I finally sit down to read The Brothers Karamazov. I don’t say this from an anti-elitist kind of place, but from a personal place — if I wasn’t finding enchantment in memes and in good lunches, my life would suck.

So that’s what I’m talking about when I talk about memes.