The weakness of the memes-as-genes theory becomes more apparent in an online context. Memetics, more interested in the movement of memes than their content, may be helpful in tracking or predicting meme lifespans, but cannot fully account for how human participation factors in. And, as I’ve written, thinking of memes solely in this way tends to “relegate agency to the memes themselves” as if they are not subject to human innovation, creation, and responses. Anthropologists and sociologists “charge that memetics sees ‘culture’ as a series of discrete individual units, and that it blurs the lines between metaphor and biology,” wrote the Fordham University researcher Alice Marwick in 2013. Baum worry that the scientific rigor implied by “memes as genes” has yet to be met by actual memetics research. On the scientific side, researchers such as the behavioral scientists Carsta Simon and William M. Memetics in general is uninterested in why these components survive, or the contexts that allow them to do so-and much as individual persons are considered unwitting actors within the gene pool at large, so too are our intentions deemed irrelevant when it comes to the transmission of culture. In The Selfish Gene and in memetics at large, “memes” are components of culture that survive, propagate, and/or die off just like genes do. The study, in which Dawkins extends evolutionary theory to cultural development, has been elaborated upon as well as critiqued in the three decades since its publication, spawning the field of memetics and drawing ire from neurologists and anthropologists alike. Though he has yet to return to the subject in earnest since 1976’s The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins remains a specter over discussions of internet memes. Why do some memes last longer than others? Are they just funnier? Better? And if so, what makes a meme better? The answer lies not in traditional memetics, but in the study of jokes. Crying Jordan lasted years did Damn Daniel even last two weeks? Salt Bae took over social media in January 2017, but was quickly overshadowed by gifs of Drew Scanlon (“white guy blinking”) and rapper Conceited (“black guy duck face”), which lasted throughout the spring. Nor can it alone account for the varied lifespans amongst concurrent memes. But if overexposure is partially to blame for their demise, it certainly doesn’t tell the whole story. While internet memes categorically remain alive and well, individual memes do seem to die off faster than in Poole’s “good ol’ days.” They just don’t last like they used to: Compare the lifespans of say, Bad Luck Brian to Arthur’s clenched fist or confused Mr. Today, many of the internet’s favorite memes come from fringe or ostracized communities-often from black communities, for whom oddball humor has long been an art form. Contrary to what Poole and Baio implied, weird humor and memes are hardly the exclusive domain of Redditors or the mostly white tech bros who populated ROFLCon. Increased mobility and access across platforms and communities has brought to the surface some of the funniest and weirdest content the web has ever known. But is that really why memes die?Īnd in 2017, it’s clear that the doomsday crew vastly underestimated internet users’ creativity. Our overextended attention leads to an obvious explanation for meme death: We are so overstimulated that what brings us joy cannot even hold our focus for long. Our devices are “engineered to chip away at concentration” in what’s called the “attention economy,” writes Bianca Bosker in The Atlantic, and apps such as Twitter keep us anxious for the next big thing in news, pop culture, or memes. “Everybody knows” a generation raised on feeds and apps must have focus issues, and that assessment isn’t totally false. Even as a concept such as “average attention span” is not incredibly useful to psychologists who study attention (different tasks require different attention strategies), there’s a general assumption that this number is shrinking. While tracing the origin of any individual meme requires a separate trip down the rabbit hole, it makes sense to assume that memes die because people get tired of them. The recent “Disloyal Man Walking With His Girlfriend and Looking Amazed at Another Seductive Girl,” the title of the stock image shot by photographer Antonio Guillem, just made the rounds a few months ago.Īt a glance-even from a digital native-meme death seems like a much less mysterious phenomenon than meme birth. The constancy of this narrative may be observed in any number of internet memes in recent memory, from the incredibly short-lived ( Damn Daniel, Dat Boi, Salt Bae, queer Babadook) to the ones seemingly too perfect to ever perish like Harambe the gorilla and Crying Jordan.
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