If you have a stable internet connection, you might have come across at least one internet meme today. Notice how I used the term internet meme and not just meme. It is because they are just an example of the broader context of memes.

It is fun to create and share a meme but, why do they always look a certain way?

Creating memes is synonymous with the idea of creating bits of culture, and in this context, religion might be the most infectious or “viral” meme ever.

Meme

The word meme was coined by biologist Richard Dawkins in his book - The Selfish Gene (1976) as a concept for discussion of evolutionary principles in explaining the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena. To understand the concept of memes, one must understand the concept of a replicator.

A replicator is the theoretical basic unit of evolution in the gene-centered view of evolution. It copies information with variation and selection. Genes are a replicator. When animals mate or seeds grow, information is essentially copied with variations and selection pressure. Most of them die and only few survive. This is what Darwin explained in The Origin of Species in 1859.

Thus, evolution depends on the existence of a self-replicating unit of transmission—genes, in the case of biological evolution, and memes, in case of cultural evolution. Examples of memes given in Dawkins' book include melodies, catchphrases, fashion, architectural designs, etc.

Any cultural entity that an observer might consider a replicator is a meme. Memes generally replicate through exposure to humans, who have evolved as efficient copiers of information and behaviour. Because humans do not always copy memes perfectly, and modify them with other memes to create new memes, they can change over time. Think of all the information that is generated and put out each day. All of them, are competing for our attention but, very few of them succeed to get millions of people involved and, are the ones that we see all around us in the world. Memes survive and change through the evolution of culture in a way similar to the natural selection of genes in biological evolution.

Strictly speaking, a meme is an idea, behaviour, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme. It acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices, that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme. They are cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures.

Memetics

The discipline of memetics, provides an approach to evolutionary models of cultural information transfer based on the concept of the meme. Memetics attempts to apply conventional scientific methods to explain existing patterns and transmission of cultural ideas.

Proponents theorize that memes are a viral phenomenon that may evolve by natural selection in a manner analogous to that of biological evolution. Memes do this through the processes of variation, mutation, competition, and inheritance, each of which influences a meme's reproductive success. Memes spread through the behaviour that they generate in their hosts. Memes that propagate less productively may become extinct, while others may survive, spread, and mutate. Memes that replicate most effectively enjoy more success, and some may replicate effectively even when they prove to be detrimental to the welfare of their hosts.

Commentators in the social sciences question the idea that one can meaningfully categorize culture in terms of discrete units, and are especially critical of the biological nature of the theory's underpinnings.

Meme Lifecycle

Memes, just like genes, vary in their aptitude to replicate; successful memes remain and spread, while others are forgotten.

Retention

Memes first need retention. The longer a meme stays in its hosts, the higher are its chances of propagation. When a host uses a meme, the meme's life is extended. If a meme increases the longevity of its hosts, it will generally survive longer. On the contrary, a meme that shortens the longevity of its hosts will tend to disappear faster. However, as hosts are mortal, retention is not sufficient to preserve a meme in the long term.

Transmission

Life-forms can transmit information both vertically (from parent to child, via replication of genes) and horizontally (through viruses and other means). Memes can also replicate vertically or horizontally from one nervous system to another one, either by communication or imitation. They can also lie dormant for long periods of time.

Transmission of memes is also comparable to the spread of contagions because, hysteria, copycat crime, and copycat suicide are few of the many acts that exemplify memes as the contagious imitation of ideas.

It is important to understand that, genes and memes, or replicators in general are selfish by nature. Given an opportunity, they will get copied whenever they can. We think we are developing them, designing them, creating them for our own purposes, but, in reality they are using us to get themselves ahead in the competition. Our role is not to be in charge and do it for our own sake, it's all really happening for the sake of the memes themselves.

Evolution of Memes

Three necessary conditions for evolution to occur are:

·         Variation, or the introduction of new change to existing elements.

·         Heredity or replication, or the capacity to create copies of elements.

·         Differential "fitness", or the opportunity for one element to be more or less suited to the environment than another.

The process of evolution naturally occurs whenever these conditions co-exist, and does not apply only to organic elements such as genes. The evolution of memes is a real phenomenon subject to the laws of natural selection.

As various ideas pass from one generation to the next, they may either enhance or diminish the survival of the people who obtain those ideas, or influence the survival of the ideas themselves. Hence, one can view people as "hosts" for replicating memes and consequently, a successful meme may or may not need to provide any benefit to its host.

Unlike genetic evolution, memetic evolution can show both Darwinian and Lamarckian traits. It means that, evolution of memes can occur in two modes – Darwinian mode as "copying the instructions" and the Lamarckian as "copying the product”.

Memeplexes are clusters or groups of memes that replicate together and coadapt. Memes that fit within a successful memeplex may gain acceptance by piggybacking on the success of the memeplex. These could be anything from cultural doctrines to political systems. They play a part in the acceptance of new memes. This could also be referred to as the propagation of a taboo.

Religion

Religions are particularly powerful memes. Many of the features common to the most widely practiced religions provide advantages in an evolutionary context. By linking altruism with religious affiliation, religious memes can spread more quickly because people perceive that they can reap societal as well as personal rewards. Furthermore, the longevity of religious memes improves with their documentation in revered religious texts.

The robustness of religious memes in human culture is due to the fact that such memes incorporate multiple modes of meme transmission. Most people will hold the religion taught to them by their parents throughout their life, even if they feature adversarial elements.

The Internet Ugly Aesthetics

The website 4chan and its architecture played an unknown but really significant role in the rise of what we now refer to as meme/troll culture.

4chan is a simple image-based bulletin board where anyone can post comments and share images anonymously. There are boards dedicated to a variety of topics, from Japanese animation and culture to videogames, music, and photography.

In the early 2000s, when Internet memes were first becoming a thing, all of the different meme formats started on 4chan. The reason that that happened was because it was not a very robust website and didn't have a lot of server space. To start a conversation on an image board, one needs to post a picture. But 4chan had really limited server space, so it had to constantly delete old pictures to make space for new ones. If a thread had a lot of engagement, it would stay up, but if not, it was deleted.

So, anyone who would spend a lot of time working on a piece of content on 4chan, would get frustrated and disappointed when their stuff was deleted very quickly. The threads on 4chan's random board has an average lifespan of just about 9.1 minutes. So, there was no point in spending a lot of time creating some clever response as by the time it was ready to be posted, the concerned thread might be over.

One had to be really fast, in order to engage in these conversations.

The edgy design of the website also meant that, the memes emerging out of 4chan were often deeply problematic. The aesthetic often contained profound dehumanization because that was part of the joke on 4chan. One of the classic examples is “Advice Animals”. Most of them were about sexual and racist violence and all kinds of violent dehumanization. But everyday people, who spread the fun and funny versions of that content labelling them as wholesome, have also helped spread that same foulness without realizing the implications.

It’s Rewind Time

Richard Dawkins noted that in a society with culture, a person need not have descendants to remain influential in the actions of individuals thousands of years after their death. But, if we contribute to the world's culture, if we have a good idea, it may live on, intact, long after our genes have dissolved in the common pool. Memetic processes can explain many of the most familiar features of ideological thought. They form narratives, social networks, metaphoric and metonymic models, and a variety of different mental structures. The same structures used to generate ideas about free speech or free markets also serve to generate racist beliefs. The lack of a consistent, rigorous, and precise understanding of what typically makes up one unit of cultural transmission still remains a problem in debates about memetics.

Today, memes have become a universal language. Anyone who wants to be a part of the internet collective, needs to communicate through memes. Memes also play a major role in brand advertisements and political propagandas. Know Your Meme is a website and video series which documents various Internet memes and other online phenomena, such as viral videos, image macros, catchphrases, Internet celebrities and more. It investigates new and changing memes through research, as it commercializes on the culture.

At some point, memes left the weird corners of the Internet and became a part of how almost everyone communicates. They define how we experience popular culture. Having said that, one must act and communicate responsibly because, memes become harmful depending on the environmental context in which they exist rather than in any special source or manner to their origination.