![]() Memes provide a bank of near-universal visual expression that users can be certain just about everyone else will understand, no matter where they’re browsing from. Memes are often a kind of viral media which refuses to die even when people stop “liking,” commenting on, and sharing it, and move onto the next viral thing, a potential meme merely waits, lying dormant on a server somewhere until fresh relevance breathes new life into it. The greats are taken far, far out of their original context-often inconceivably so-becoming applied to daily interactions, and used in entirely new content, to the gleeful appreciation of anyone familiar with the original viral “thing.” The memes on that particular branch of the evolution tree continue to multiply. It goes deeper: Those memes, according Know Your Meme, are in fact spin-offs of Advice Dog, a meme that started on a Super Mario fan site in 2006, called The Mushroom Kingdom. Richard Dawkins wasn’t kidding in his 1976 book “The Selfish Gene” when he defined a meme as a unit of human cultural evolution, a bit like genes, which are a unit of human biological evolution.Ĭonspiracy Keanu was spun off from the Advice Animal meme, a bunch of similar memes featuring animals, like Socially Awkward Penguin and Actual Advice Mallard. The meme features a dopey-faced picture of actor Keanu Reeves culled from the 1989 comedy “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure,” overlaid with stoner-speak conspiracy suggestions like “What if the CIA invented dinosaurs to discourage time travel?” But this meme is actually based on another meme. Kim’s theory checks out: According to Google Trends, searches for the phrase “meme” really took off in 2011. One of the most beloved memes from that year was Conspiracy Keanu, a perfect example of how memes can travel so far and wide that they morph into other memes. the Occupy Movement), people really started inserting themselves into the content with photo fads, invented new visual languages like the Rage Comics universe and indexed existing social codes through Advice Animals. Also, 2011 was the last year when the word ‘meme’ was technically a slang term before dictionaries picked it up the next year.” Kim added: “There was a major growth in terms of how people used memes and to what ends, which didn’t really exist before (eg. #Internet iceberg 4chan Offline#Several series of memes peaked in 2011, including Rage Comics, a crudely-drawn comic book series that started with Rage Guy (you probably know him better as the “F FFFFFUUUUUUUUUU-” guy), Advice Animals, memes featuring different animals with captioned text, and the revival of “My Little Pony,” a popular children’s toy franchise and cartoon series from the 1980s that has since been reclaimed by adult male fans called-wait for it- Bronies.īrad Kim, editor of Know Your Meme, said that year was a “major turning point for the growth of meme culture in multiple senses.” He told Vocativ in an email: “ was the in-between period when memes really started making their ways offline and into mainstream pop culture and commercial domains.” Other memes are the bastard children of the internet’s collective ability to tear things apart and put them back together again in new and messed up ways. Some of those memes lived past lives as viral content. There were at least 317 KYM-sanctioned memes created in 2011, and that’s only including memes which can be traced back to a particular year. #Internet iceberg 4chan archive#Vocativ analyzed the index of memes on , the internet’s most comprehensive archive of meme genesis, to find the year of peak meme: 2011. But, in sad truth, the internet’s best meme years might already be behind it. ![]() 2016 feels like it’s already been a rich year for memes: we kicked things off with the delightfully weird “Don’t talk to me or my son ever again” and then transitioned into the great (and perhaps truly timeless) unicycling Dat Boi frog. ![]()
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