Millennials and Their Memes

Millennials and Their Memes Sid Corbin Senior Research Spring 2017 Corbin 2 Memes are an extremely recent cultural phenomenon that have grown to be the medium of choice for any and all political, social, and cultural movements in the west in the past few years. However, the prevalence of memes in every aspect of our culture has gone relatively unexamined. The average person regards memes as innocuous; they’re just some funny pictures with words on them that their friends share on social media. Memes are so much more important than that. I show that memes are a powerful new political tool due to their unique evolutionary nature, history, accessibility. I use Dworkin to understand what memes are. I read Adorno and Horkheimer’s view of mass media in order to evaluate the political potential of memes and show that memes are not eligible for Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of mass media. Indeed, I show that memes are a positive political force in that they impact younger people politically by making them more skeptical traditional governmental authority and advertising. The force of these changes is obvious when one considers the primaries in the 2016 Presidential Election. Memetics Memes are quickly changing pieces of media. One of the most defining traits of a meme is its ability to mimic and be mimicked. Understanding exactly how and why memes evolve, as well as how they survive, is the key to being able to use them advantageously. Richard Dawkins, Corbin 3 credited with coining the word meme in 1976 in his book The Selfish Gene1, has some incredible insight on the progression of memes. In his book The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins makes note of the similarities between cultural phenomena and genes. He names these cultural phenomena “memes” and goes on to discuss what exactly defines a meme, how memes grow and evolve, the qualifications of a successful meme, and how memes become successful. “Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to via sperm of eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.” 2 Written in 1976, Dawkins had no sense of the internet, and is describing cultural events and trends existing offline. He focuses on both long term and short term trends from the concept of God to a catchy song you hear on the radio. With that, he does an astounding job of describing the life and death of internet memes as they currently exist. He lays out the three qualities necessary for a successful meme: longevity, fecundity, and copying-fidelity. He acknowledges that any singular copy of a meme is relatively unimportant to the longevity of the meme itself. While there have been memes that have endured short-term success in the way of popularity, the true signifier of a successful meme is its lifespan. Fecundity is the most important quality 1 Solon, Olivia. "Richard Dawkins on the internet's hijacking of the word 'meme'" WIRED UK. July 05, 2016. Accessed October 05, 2016. http://www.wired.co.uk/article/richard-dawkins-memes. 2 Dawkins, Richard, and Robert L. Trivers. The Selfish Gene. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. 192. Corbin 4 when it comes to the survival of a meme as its ability to be imitated and reproduced is a core aspect of any given meme. If unable to be replicated, a meme will quickly die out. 3 While Dawkins approaches both longevity and fecundity with an almost flippant certainty, he addresses copying-fidelity with some hesitance. Recognizing that memes are almost necessarily being passed along with some deviance from the original copy, he admits that they are quite unlike genes in this way. While genes tend toward an all-or-nothing trend concerning transmission, memes do not suffer from being mutated.4 While Dawkins’ memes do not suffer from alteration, internet memes are necessarily altered in order to be successful. When a meme becomes static, its audience loses interest. There are few current internet memes that survive more than a few days without being altered. In order to achieve longevity, internet memes have to constantly change, more often than not to the point of absurdity. “Harambe”i is an excellent example of this. Originally a rather sad news story of a Gorilla being shot and killed at the Cincinnati Zoo, the meme escalated to be a sort of faux remembrance of the gorilla. Initially the meme started as a legitimate, or non-satirical demand for responsibility to be taken for unnecessary cruelty on behalf of Harambe5. Over the course of five months, a significant lifespan for contemporary memes, this meme has been warped to the length that the phrase “dicks out” is all that is needed to reference or participate in it. The question is, which part of this news story is the actual meme? This large overarching concept of “Harambe”, the story behind the gorilla, and the internet community’s response to the event makes this meme more complex. Dawkins tackles this problem as well in his writing: 3 Dawkins, A Selfish Gene. 194 4 Dawkins ,A Selfish Gene. 195 5 http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/harambe-the-gorilla Corbin 5 “…I divided the ‘gene-complex’ into large and small genetic units, and units within units. The ‘gene’ was not defined, not in a rigid all-or-none way, but as a unit of convenience, a length of a chromosome with just sufficient copying-fidelity to serve as a viable unit of natural selection. If a single phrase of Beethoven’s ninth symphony is sufficiently distinctive and memorable to be abstracted from the context of the whole symphony… then to that extent, it deserves to be called one meme.”6 When considering this, it would be safe to say that just the most recognizable parts of the event or reaction would have to be considered a meme. Dawkins also addresses one of the most important factors when considering internet memes. Time is the leading cause of death in memes. “The human brain, and the body that it controls, cannot do more than one or a few things at once. If a meme is to dominate the attention of a human brain, it must do so at the expense of ‘rival’ memes.”7 This is glaringly obvious when you look at the turnover rate for internet memes as they are today. If a meme doesn’t constantly grab the attention of its audience, or treads the thin line of “over-used”, it quickly dies out. There doesn’t necessarily have to be a new meme to replace it, though there usually is. The internet community collectively decides when a meme is dead, though this is not a democratic process; Memes generally die quietly at the hands of disinterest. Dawkins goes on to discuss the idea of “mutually-assisting memes”. Mimicking the evolutionarily stable sets of genes that do exist, mutually-assisting genes are self-perpetuating, 6 Dawkins, A Selfish Gene. 195 7 Dawkins, A Selfish Gene. 197 Corbin 6 reinforcing each other and “assist(ing) each other’s survival in the meme pool”8. He uses the example of the god meme and the hell fire meme. Religious observance is enforced with the threat of hell fire, and the threat of hell fire comes directly from refusing to acknowledge God. “The idea of hell fire is, quite simply, self-perpetuating, because of its own deep psychological impact.” While this concept only addresses a very strong, deep-seated religious system and way of life, it’s also important to look at for the future of internet memes. While there are some weaker examples of this phenomena e.g. Rick Rolling9 which has yet to die out despite its age due to the necessary condition of the bait-and-switch meme being properly executed as a surprise. If a culturally significant meme was to arise with another culturally significant mutually-assisting meme, we would be in the ballpark of potentially starting a very large, very stable, cultural movement. A Genealogy of Rick Rolls10 Before I get ahead of myself, it would be in everyone’s best interest to clearly define what a meme is. For the remainder of this paper, memes are defined as a phrase, concept, or piece of digital media that spreads, sometimes virally, among communities on the internet, generally through social media platforms. Though there has been much debate in the online community over which meme was the first, we know that memes have been around since the late 1990’s. Memes have also made their way into traditional media, but are used as supplemental material. While all memes are important, I will only be discussing the trends in 8 Dawkins, A Selfish Gene. 198 9 "Internet Memes timeline." World History Project. Accessed April 17, 2017. https://worldhistoryproject.org/topics/internet-memes. 10"Internet Memes timeline." Corbin 7 viral, or “Dank11” memes. These most accurately highlight the direction memes have taken over the past two decades, as they have the largest audience. Memes started in online gaming communities and internet boards. They tended to be used in place of typing responses or used as supplements to keep the conversation going. These boards also started the trend of using phrases as memes. The earliest phrases are crude, to say the least, with little historical context that exists in today’s memes, but lay the foundation for the current memes in use.

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