What Even Is a Meme?

The word "meme" predates the internet. Biologist Richard Dawkins coined it in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene to describe a unit of cultural information that spreads and evolves — like a gene, but for ideas. He was describing concepts like catchy tunes or fashion trends. He could not have predicted what was coming.

The Early Days: 1990s — The Proto-Meme Era

Before memes had a name online, they were just weird things that spread on early internet forums and email chains.

  • Dancing Baby (1996): A 3D-rendered baby doing a cha-cha. One of the first pieces of content to go truly viral via email.
  • Hamster Dance (1998): A GeoCities page with cartoon hamsters dancing to a sped-up loop. Millions visited it. Nobody knows why.
  • All Your Base Are Belong to Us (2000–2001): A mistranslated line from a 1989 video game became a massive internet in-joke, spawning countless image edits.

These weren't called memes yet. They were just "that weird thing going around the internet."

The Golden Age: 2004–2012 — Image Macros and 4chan

The rise of broadband internet, image hosting, and forums like 4chan, Reddit, and Something Awful created the classic meme format we recognize today: an image with bold white text, top and bottom.

  • LOLcats (2006–2007): Photos of cats with deliberately misspelled captions ("I can haz cheezburger?"). Launched an entire website and proved animals + text = internet gold.
  • Rickrolling (2007): Tricking someone into clicking a link that plays Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up." Still deployed to this day.
  • Rage Comics (2008–2012): Crudely drawn faces expressing relatable emotions. The precursor to modern reaction memes.
  • Doge (2013): A Shiba Inu with Comic Sans text describing its inner monologue. "Much wow. Very internet."

Social Media Takes Over: 2013–2018

As Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and later Instagram gained dominance, meme culture exploded in scale — but also fragmented. Different platforms developed their own meme dialects.

Tumblr gave birth to absurdist, surreal humor. Twitter compressed memes into text-only formats. Facebook became the domain of "normie" memes shared by relatives. Reddit hosted increasingly niche subcommunities.

The Drake Approving/Disapproving format, Distracted Boyfriend, and Change My Mind all originated in this era and became globally recognized templates.

The TikTok and AI Era: 2019–Present

TikTok fundamentally changed meme evolution. Instead of static images, memes became audio-visual formats — sounds, dances, and video templates that spread within hours.

Meanwhile, AI image generators introduced a new frontier: custom, surreal imagery generated on demand. Memes became more personalized, more absurd, and faster-moving than ever.

Why Do Memes Matter?

Memes are more than silly images. They are a form of shared cultural language — a way for communities to express complex emotions, social commentary, and in-group identity quickly and efficiently. Political movements, social causes, and generational identity all flow through meme culture today.

Richard Dawkins would probably be bewildered. But he'd also probably appreciate the irony that his word took on a life of its own — spreading, mutating, and evolving exactly as he described.