Meme Culture: How Memes Took Over The World

Ah, here we go again. On the 1st of September 1939, Germany invaded Poland from the east, starting World War II. As you would expect, there is fear and panic throughout Europe. So, to calm the British population down and to prevent widespread panic, the war ministry released a poster encouraging citizens to "Keep Calm and Carry On."

In the year 2000, more than 60 years after the poster was released, one of the original versions was discovered. Thanks to its simple design and now satirical sounding message, it was memified, spreading all across the internet as a message of irony: "Keep Calm and Carry On," even in the face of a life-threatening situation. The Nazis are about to blow up London. Keep calm and carry on. World War III is about to break out, on top of dealing with Corona. Keep calm and carry on.

The message was simple, funny, and a lighthearted way to express deep-seated concern for the situation we collectively found ourselves in. This is a meme; it has the power to express the collective emotions, feelings, and thoughts of people, often as a coping mechanism for something that would have otherwise been rather sad. Memes, we all know them—they make us laugh, cry, think, smile—but we just can't quite explain exactly what they are. Are they just funny pictures with text, or perhaps jokes that we turn into running gags?

What exactly are memes, and how have they taken the world by storm?

The word "meme" is a term that was originally coined by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book, "The Selfish Gene." Derived from the Greek word "mimeme," which means imitated, Dawkins described a meme as a unit of cultural information that's spread by imitation. The cultural equivalent of a gene—tunes, catchphrases, ideas, ways of building arches, and making pots, clothes, and fashion—were all described by Dawkins as memes propagating themselves in the meme pool by moving from brain to brain through a process that can loosely be described as imitation.

Today, the word meme might mean something else in the dictionary, but its use still closely resembles the idea that Dawkins expressed in his work. A meme is considered good when the message in it is concise and relatable, easy to catch on and pass from person to person when it talks about a shared experience within a group of people. When it says a lot without saying too much, or when you just take a jpeg and throw it in a deep fryer—those are also good memes.

Memes are so powerful because, as humans, we understand pictures more than words. Before we could write, we could draw. This is why it's no surprise that a relatable image will pass a message across much faster than, say, a long Twitter thread. Memes are so powerful because they are seemingly harmless, humorous, and fun. Because of this, they allow us to express our views about the world and the things that are happening around us, without starting some serious debate.

The year 2021 was a rather difficult year for a lot of people—not for the same reasons as 2020, but because of hope killed in 2020. We were told that the pandemic would only last for a few weeks if we all stayed inside and social distance. We did, and yet a year later, we were still inside.

So, at the beginning of 2021, the meme "When COVID is Over" was created. In it, people describe the experience of waiting for something that might never happen, using metaphors of everyday experiences, like "When COVID is over is starting to sound like when I'm all caught up on laundry" or pop culture references like "When COVID is over is starting to sound like when One Direction comes back"—all of which are never happening.

On the surface of it, these memes are funny, relatable, and interesting expressions of the situation we're going through, but these memes carry a sense of hopelessness underneath them. And that's another thing that makes memes so powerful—they're baked with emotion. From Keanu Reeves sitting on a bench to a horse standing on the beach, memes can be used to express every form of emotion: from surprise to disappointment, excitement, skepticism, disgust, anger. Memes help us express things that we might not be able to find the right words to explain.