spreading jam

The Internet is an amazing place. A random, esoteric, collaborative mish-mash of a place where sometimes, just sometimes a little chunk of life gets boiled down, the inane removed (or added in spades), and served back up to the world as a delicious meme.

Esoteric and difficult to manufacture on demand, it’s near on impossible to pre-define what elements of society or the Internet will be transformed into memes, and what conditions these organisms need to thrive. It’s perhaps this that makes them so fantastical, so fleeting and so precious – by their very nature memes defy traditional boundaries of humour, taste and sentence structure.

Take double rainbow for example:

From my completely non-scientific experience these are 5 key elements required:
1. Content – Memes tap into something unexpected and universal. The most successful memes contain a simple concept that has been stripped down, and then reduced again. Think ‘cats with captions’ ‘gorilla on the drums’. The initial content can come from virtually anywhere, but it takes a group of people to boil it down to the core universal elements. That’s why forums such as 4chan are so successful at creating memes, a large group of uncensored people work like a group of mates at a pub – in-jokes get created and their shorthand becomes funny.

2. Timeliness – Memes burn brightly, quickly and die just as fast. While they don’t need to ride the peaked interest of a current event, they do need to capture the interest of a community at the same time. Referencing a meme months after it’s peaked is, like, so not cool.

See the spike in searches for 4chan’s pre-eminent meme ‘boxxy’, and it’s similar decline in interest:

3. Platforms & Transmission – The formation of Internet memes is usually quite a disperse happening. The seed might initially grow in a forum (often 4chan.org) but in order for them go ‘viral’, they’ll often need to harness the reach of YouTube or the mainstream usage of a site such as Facebook or Twitter to really break through. However, if something breaks into the wider internet lexicon too early it runs the risk of its uniqueness (and thus sharabiliy) being diluted.

4. Re-postability – video, image + text. Memes need to be easy to post and easy to remix.

http://memegenerator.net/ is a good example of how important it is to have all these areas covered off. It provides content (meme seeds), its access is blocked from most work places (exclusivity), the most topical are heroed (timeliness) and it is both host and transmitter.

See the process of one of my all-time favourite memes here – Kanye West : imma let you finish