When John Chadwick was rigging the model of a baby doll to the sporadic dancing animations programmed by Robert Lurye at Unreal Pictures Inc. in 1996, the concept of the internet meme was just beginning to be formally described.
Almost three decades later, the resulting “Dancing Baby” animation remains synonymous with the birth of meme culture online.
Memes have evolved a long way, developing from niche references on archived message boards to facets of culture baked into the digital media landscape.
Seeing the effects of the “brat” meme in the public zeitgeist today exemplifies how all-encompassing this form of expression has become.
Spawned from the release of Charli xcx’s sixth studio album, “brat”, the low-resolution Arial text stretched over a lime green background swept the internet.
Not only has it been shared by countless individual users across social media platforms, it has been used in numerous advertising campaigns wholly unrelated to the British pop singer.
Following Charli xcx’s post on X (formerly Twitter) proclaiming “kamala IS brat,” the official U.S. presidential campaign for Vice President Kamala Harris also adopted the meme on its Kamala HQ page.
Given the scope of influence, cultural impact and human creativity, it’s time that memes are recognized as the legitimate form of contemporary art they are.
Richard Dawkins first described “meme” in his 1976 book, “The Selfish Gene”, as a particular iconography and behavior that is replicated, iterated on and widely spread.
Further than just being spread, the content of a meme is something that is mutated and impacted by creative input.
Memetics is the study of memes as a unit of culture, a practice that precedes the existence of media online and with applications that extend far beyond an Instagram feed, according to a journal article by Francis Heylighen and Klaas Chielens for the Encyclopedia of Complexity and System Science.
Michael Godwin was one of the first to apply Dawkins’ framework to certain media shared on the internet in a 1994 Wired article.
In an increasingly fragmented, contemporary internet space fueled by passive discovery, memes are more important and necessary than ever in facilitating cultural communication across various communities.
Looking at the history of memes online, one can draw parallels between the evolution of the internet phenomena and that of various historical art movements.
The ‘90s represented the first experimentations with the art form as internet access was becoming available to general populations in the U.S. via the creation of the World Wide Web.
In this era, memes were spread through email and across early online forums, with the forerunner “Dancing Baby” animation shared throughout CompuServe forums before escaping onto other platforms.
If this period was similar to an Ancient Classical era of digital memetics, the 2000s were the Renaissance.
Internet use continued to explode as Web 2.0 hit the scene, expanding the possibilities of user-generated content and with it the proliferation of memes.
YouTube was created in 2005, catapulting viral videos and animations to the forefront of the conversation such as the “Numa Numa Dance” and “Chocolate Rain.”
Videos weren’t the only big players in the meme arena though as image macros, humorous images with large superimposed text, were rampant on imageboard websites such as 4chan.
Launched in 2003, 4chan hosts a variety of boards dedicated to specific topics that users can contribute to without registration.
The website is credited with the popularization of many early internet memes.
One of the most prominent of these were “lolcats”, images of cats overlaid with text often containing purposefully misused grammar.
As these new technologies and techniques emerged, they greatly iterated on the concepts laid out by Dawkins’ classical meme and did so with earnestness, representing the hopeful optimism of the fledgling internet.
However, as online spaces have been increasingly privatized and corporatized, memes have responded by becoming increasingly abstract and surrealist.
Similar to how the Dada and Pop Art movements rejected the mainstream sensibilities of capitalism and supplanted them with avant-garde irony, the modern meme landscape seems to sit in the same place.
The community r/SurrealMemes on Reddit contains 898,000 members, ranking in the top 1% of Reddit communities by size.
After a very demure, very mindful “brat” summer, it feels pertinent to reexamine these pivotal ways memes have shaped culture on and off the internet.
