The Strange Career of the Meme
Trace how Dawkins's evolutionary metaphor became the native vernacular of online life — and what that says about humour, virality, and the gap between generations.
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When Richard Dawkins coined the term ‘meme’ in 1976, he had something austerely scientific in mind: a unit of cultural transmission analogous to the gene, replicating from mind to mind and subject to selective pressures of fidelity, fecundity, and longevity. It was a serviceable conceit, even if the analogy frayed under scrutiny — minds, unlike cells, edit what they copy, and the boundary of any given ‘unit’ was always more rhetorical than real. What Dawkins did not foresee, and could hardly have, was that his coinage would shed its theoretical scaffolding entirely and migrate into the vernacular as the name for a particular kind of joke that travels through screens at the speed of attention.
The contemporary meme is something stranger than its progenitor. Its content matters less than its template; what makes a meme legible is not what it says but the recognisable shape into which it pours whatever is being said. To grasp this is to understand why a still image from a forgotten film can, twenty years later, become the carrier for political commentary, romantic complaint, and gallows humour about the housing market — often within the same hour. The image is not the joke; the image is the grammar through which the joke is uttered. And like grammar, it presupposes a speech community fluent in its conventions, which is to say a population of users for whom the reference is so saturated that it functions almost subliminally.
Virality, the metric by which the meme is so often celebrated, is therefore a poor measure of what is actually going on. A piece of content can spread because millions of people find it superficially amusing, or because a far smaller community finds it densely meaningful in ways the broader audience cannot decipher. The most enduring memes tend to be the latter — opaque to the casual observer, layered with self-reference, and frequently ironic about the very condition of being a meme. Were sheer reach the criterion, advertising slogans would qualify; what distinguishes the meme is that its currency is recognition by an in-group rather than persuasion of an out-one.
The irony layers, in particular, have become so dense that they exceed the analytical patience of those who did not grow up inside them. A teenager’s joke may be sincere on the surface, ironic at the second level, and earnestly affectionate at the third — sincerity reasserting itself only after passing through several stations of mockery. Older audiences, expecting jokes to terminate in a stable register, often misread these formations either as cynicism or as confused enthusiasm; younger audiences, expecting irony as a default, mistake older sincerity for ineptitude or condescension. What is at stake here is not merely taste but a divergence in the implicit pragmatics of what a joke is for. The meme has become the native medium of a generation accustomed to communicating through dense, recursive irony in part because it offers safety: nothing said quite at face value can quite be held against you.
There is, finally, a melancholy reading of all this. The meme thrives on shared reference, but the conditions for shared reference grow ever thinner as audiences fragment. What functions as common ground within a given micro-community is opaque elsewhere, and the very speed at which memes are produced and exhausted ensures that no reference accrues the cultural weight that older idioms accumulated over decades. The medium that promised universal shorthand has, in practice, generated thousands of overlapping dialects, fluent within their borders and incomprehensible across them. Whether this represents a renaissance of vernacular creativity or the final pulverisation of common culture is a question on which reasonable observers, watching the same scrolling feed, may disagree without ever quite locating the disagreement.
Questions
What did Dawkins originally mean by 'meme,' according to the first paragraph?