Dubai: Minutes after content is published online or an event takes place, multiple memes are instantly created on social media usually mocking or highlighting specific footage, words or sentences.
In 2016, Google Trends, which tracks how often people search for a particular term, found that the word ‘memes’ surpassed the most searched term, ‘Jesus’, since 2011.
The world of memes has become a part of social media, with pages and profiles specialising in keeping users entertained and updated with the latest memes.
Abdullah Sa’ad, researcher in the field of new media, talked to Gulf News about the memes trend online as well as the origin and concept behind the ongoing movement.
“When it comes to why memes spread quickly, the rise of media that enables a wide-ranging participatory process of culture-making means that memes developed must relate to issues that a wide cross-section of society face,” he said.
He explained the common denominator seen in memes can be anything as small as “something that many people find humorous, such as a grumpy cat and other cat memes, or as large as referring to a social issue faced by many people, as in the case of the famous ‘yeh bik gayi hai gormint (government)’ lady from Pakistan.”
Social media allows the average user to become a repository and hub for that which they can relate to — whether it’s humorous memes or more serious ones addressing different issues or socio-cultural norms, explained Sa’ad.
Describing the contemporary internet meme as “a wide-reaching phenomenon”, Sa’ad pointed out it’s a trend that is not likely to fade into irrelevance one day.
“Our contemporary understanding of memes emerges as a subcategory of online humour, and particularly online viral humour,” he said.
Sa’ad further explained there are two concurrent developments that contributed to this emergence — advancements in the technology used to record things such as pictures and videos, and the rise of the internet and social media.
Technology made the ability to record and edit occurrences that would be used for meme-making much more accessible, where as in the past only a limited number of people would have cameras, with even less knowing how to develop and edit pictures.
“Now we live in a world where most people carry cameras in their phones. As a result, the internet and social media have become a terrain where the average person has the power to contribute to a collective and participatory process of culture-making,” said Sa’ad.
He added the impact of this process can be seen in the universality of internet speech norms, as well as in the proliferation of internet memes as they are understood by most people — in other words, funny pictures with text on them.
Origin of meme
However, was the trend of meme making born in the 21st century?
According to history, the term ‘meme’ was coined by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in the 1970s in his book ‘The Selfish Gene.’
Sa’ad pointed out the term was shortened form of the Greek term mimema, which itself refers to something that is copied or imitated.
“It really depends on how you define a meme. For many people nowadays, a meme is a funny combination of picture and text, although this is not what the term was originally coined to refer to,” said Saad.
He explained the term was originally thought of as a small unit of culture — or cultural capital, in a sense — that spreads within and among societies.
“As a result of this understanding of the term, the concept gained relevance in fields outside of evolutionary biology, most notably in literature, anthropology, and of course, cultural and media studies. In this sense, memes have always existed for as long as human societies have existed, since every society has a culture of some sort and thus some notion of cultural capital and currency to exchange,” said Sa’ad.
He added the only thing that has made memes more relevant in recent decades is that we now have a vocabulary to describe them.
The process of creating a meme is also not complicated.
“I am always impressed by how quickly memes emerge after even the most minor of events takes place. Part of the reason for this is that people are already browsing social media when they come across said news items or events, but the other reason is that there are genuinely creative people out there who deserve credit for being so quick-witted,” said Sa’ad.
