What is a Meme? They seem like a shibboleth for the younger generations. We see them and recognize an idea, but it is difficult to describe how.
A meme is a reproduction of a social idea that is recognized as an expression of the idea by the community. Its message is translatable as universally understood within the social group it is meant to include. Its format is transferable as the communication evolves, as long as the essential concept remains recognizable.
This format plays with the boundaries to imagination, creating a new form of communication not relying on language, color, or shape, but the interchange of these within an established concept. Memes have created a universal, living form of expression irrelevant of culture, region, age, or language in which individuals cross normal borders of expression and communication. The meme has potential to have real world, expressive effects to cross barriers to communication.
The fundamental purpose of the internet meme is to spread. It can be argued that a meme’s purpose varies from meme to meme, but all internet memes—humorous memes, esoteric memes, absurd memes—are created with the intent to share, even if that sharing only takes place between a small number of people. Therefore, all memes have in common the same underlying objective: to be replicated and spread.
Consider music. Culture plays a significant role in determining the most common keys, instruments, and vocalization styles in different geographic regions. Music as a meme contains meaning because fundamental elements of a peoples’ culture, such as religion and tradition, contribute to which pieces of music gain popularity in which regions.
For example, the first four notes of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 are rather universally recognized. When we hear the notes, we may think of European Romanticism, getting dressed up to attend an orchestra performance, or an artistic film score. In contrast, we might not know that we are familiar with the guitar piece Gran Vals by Francisco Tárrega. But if anyone who lived though the 1990s and 2000s hears the motif, we instantly recognize the tone that unsilenced Nokia devices would play, disturbing all sorts of social gatherings. For the culture who lived this experience, the thirteen notes invoke annoyance.
By fulfilling the definition provided above, memes have evolved through the language of irony, cleverness, or wit the global conversation of how humans communicate criticism, revolution, and everything in between; the human condition.
What does seem certain is that memes have united people from different cultures and languages with a common form of communication. It may be argued that the meme format fulfills in part Leibniz’s quest for a characteristica universalis (universal ideographic language) while using format or image to substitute for ideograms or what he called grammatica rationalis (rational grammar), logic for interpretation, mnemonics to recall meaning, and most of all the art of invention to communicate meaning beyond borders. The internet community has indeed proven that format or image succeed in representing concepts and that the art of invention can be limitless online (Leibniz, 1679). The next question is whether Eco would be satisfied with the limited yet ever growing lexicon of the language and whether it is possible to communicate only via memes (Eco, 1993).
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McGrady, M. & Hamm, K. E. (2019). A Meme is Worth a Thousand Words: Universal Communication Through Memes. Paper presented at the 44th Annual Conference of the Semiotic Society of America, October 9-13, 2019, Portland, OR.