![]() ![]() How important that is depends on why you want to understand the meme. Often, the origins of such memes can be buried in context so deep that understanding their origins requires dedicated research. Others might be bizarrely obscure, referencing a particular episode of a TV show or movie that aired decades ago. Something like Slender Man can seem scary or dangerous. Others can be a little harder to nail down. They acknowledge a shared experience between the creator and the viewer. They’re emphatic and designed to help convey an emotional state in a manner that’s simple to understand. The easiest ones are known as “image macro” memes, which usually involve some sort of expressive image and block text. ![]() Some memes are easier to understand than others. But that doesn’t mean we can’t try to wrap our heads around the most important ones. The speed of their sharing and creation is only accelerating, too, so attempting to learn or understand all of them is an impossible task. Memes are incredibly varied, ever-changing, and impossible to pin down in a neat and defined category. But you could include everything from planking to Good Guy Greg to the Momo Challenge on the list. The memes that have come and gone over the years are too many to count and too varied to cover in detail (although we did collect all the most famous ones). ![]() Today, they are one of the major ways people communicate online, with millions of permutations of the most popular ones. It wasn’t until the 2010s that memes became a cultural phenomenon in their own right, though. It was shared widely through email chains and showed up in popular TV shows like Ally McBeal. Sometimes referred to as “Baby Cha-Cha,” the short GIF of an animated baby dancing became a viral hit in 1996. Most would consider the first internet meme to be the dancing baby. He couldn’t know it at the time, but that term would later be used to describe an infinite number of permutations of different phrases, images, sounds, and videos, all spread via the internet in an effort to share ideas and thoughts quickly and succinctly. He described the idea of a meme in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene as a cultural entity or idea that replicates, evolves, and is passed from person to person. Some researchers have traced the idea of a meme back hundreds of years, but its modern interpretation is considered by most to have been coined by British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. ![]()
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