Against The Meme-ification of Information

By Cindy Zeng ’27

In his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins puts forth the idea that evolution functions at the level of genes, with genes that promote successful replication and transmission being favored by natural selection. Beyond making a good footnote in my Honors Bio lab report, this book fascinates me for its eleventh chapter, where Dawkins coins the term “meme,” from the Greek root mimeme (“imitation”), describing it as the unit of information transmitted in cultural evolution.

Understood as the cultural analogue to genes, memes can be anything that spreads from brain to brain in our society: images, music, ideas, religion, fashion, language, etc. But these categories are certainly not those that come to mind when one says “meme” in internet speak. Most likely, a certain meme template comes to mind, for some, the Left Exit 12 Off Ramp, for others, perhaps the Buff Doge vs. Cheems. The “internet meme” is the epitome of the mimetic method Dawkins described, which prioritizes transmission and gene-like replication before all else. Internet memes encapsulate specific experiences through templates—the Left Exit 12 Off Ramp, for example, embodying the impulsive decision to turn away from a conventionally desirable choice—that, with repeated exposure, can communicate subtextually. However, as our communication conforms more and more to the meme method, we are losing the ability to recognize and express the complexities of the human experience.

Faithful to its etymology, memes spread through imitation to communicate not only knowledge, but also experiences, emotions, and, broadly, meaning. Memes are becoming more dominant as a method of communication, specifically because the format is sociobiologically satisfying. A 1992 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology expanded on the mere exposure effect—the idea that people tend to prefer things they’ve been exposed to before—and found that people in fact preferred stimuli shown so fast that they could only be subliminally processed over stimuli that could be consciously processed. The template nature of internet memes reflects this phenomenon: every time you recognize a meme template, you already subconsciously understand the core experience the meme represents. The specific fill-in-the-blank is merely a garnish.

Dawkins observed that, in 1976, memes were “still in [their] infancy, still drifting about in [their] primeval soup [of human culture], but already… achieving evolutionary change at a rate that leaves the old gene panting far behind.” Now, exactly fifty years later, the meme has become a veritable monster of information propagation, with innumerable eyes and tongues and wings and mouths, in no small part due to the digital mediums we utilize today. Broadly, I see online content as another expression of the meme method. The generalization of the word “content” is, I think, symptomatic of how the internet relies on mindless propagation just as much, if not more, as it does on creation of content. Video essays are content. Memes are content. Political debates are content. Vlogs are content. Social commentary is content. Interviews are content. The collective designation of everything we produce on the internet as “content” reflects a tacit allowance for our creative output to be turned into an amalgamation of data to be passed on as indifferentiable units of information through an amoral web of algorithms whose only objective is, once again, transmission.

As a result of the sociobiological nature of cultural evolution and the mediums by which we operate, we of the internet age have converged and created the genre of the meme. However, the dominance of this genre is, I believe, dangerous. The pitfall of the meme genre is also its definitive trait: the prioritization of transmission. Memes have been optimized to transmit as much information in as little space as possible, an inherently compressive and reductive act. Subsequently, in our increased consumption of memes, we too have been trained and optimized by the genre itself to recognize vast and complicated emotional experiences through one simplistic template.

I see this trend reflected in our everyday use of language. So many experiences have become “inexplicable” and “inexpressible” save through the templates offered to us that we can conveniently use without thinking. For example, we describe any remotely intense experience, regardless of context, by attaching “ahhh” onto the end of an often dull and tasteless adjective. I believe, however, that change also begins in our everyday use of language. Search for the exact word to describe what you’re feeling, even if it’s eluding you right now; talk to your friends when in Forbes about tangible, present things instead of losing yourself to the world of “content.” Only when we speak and write with intention do we cease to be mere agents of propagation.