MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

When Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” in 1976, he was referring to how information is disseminated through a culture, and he likely couldn’t have imagined how the internet generation would adapt his term to describe one of the most ubiquitous and identifiable types of communication of the post-modern world. The initial use of meme tended toward the truly abstract, but even the notion of Internet meme embraces a dizzying array of images, words, and sounds. A meme can seemingly be almost anything anyone declares it to be. Given how pervasive and influential internet memes are, however, it is perhaps useful to identify some features and strategies that comprise some of the most common memes. Although memes are often simply meant to be silly or funny, often they can be subversive, taking very familiar materials from the media and using various strategies to subvert the expectations the original carried with it. Understanding how memes are often more than humorous throw-aways may help enlarge the conversation about how memes took hold so quickly (in 1993, a writer for Wired is attributed with the first use of the phrase “internet meme”) and have taken such a prominent place in popular culture. A frequent strategy for subversion in American literary tradition is to take a common form that creates expectations for meaning and undercut those expectations by marrying that form to contradictory content. The comfort of the ordinary is suddenly undermined by the realization that the content is not fulfilling what the form had promised. And even though some critics have observed that much social media is already so suffused with irony that nearly everything seems to carry at least some element of subversion, the subversive nature of internet memes can actually be quite a powerful form of communication in the online community.