Viral and Internet Memes – A Clarification
Over the last few years, I’ve come across more and more instances of the terms Viral Memes and Internet Memes in reference to attention-grabbing “things” – Viral Memes doing this undeservingly, without the host’s awareness – Internet Memes because of the commerce of web-based cultural currency.
As a self-proclaimed memetician (or memeologist?… memetic evolutionist), a part of me is pleased to see the rhetoric of memes proliferate into the mainstream. And what could be considered more mainstream than the culture of professional advertising, thinking ‘outside the box’ to latch on to this concept. (After all, they seem to determine what constitutes pop culture, at least). In stark contrast stands the inexplicable, democratic force of Internet Memes – the elusive attention grabbing effect of absurd web content – which captivate the audience that advertisers attempt to apprehend.
So, one kind of meme serves as an institutional tool to indoctrinate (whether implemented intentionally or benignly, for Christianity or Pepsi), while the other kind of meme can only be seen as the symptom of a groundswell interest in an arbitrary object – cats or Star Trek or Rick Astley or something – serving as a lingua franca for trendy power users. What an elegant dichotomy. There’s only one problem:
Neither of these phenomena are memes…
