The website was created by a Canadian art student in a competition with his sister and a friend in 1998, to see who could generate the most online web traffic.Īfter generating only 600 views in 8 months, her website suddenly went viral. It's a website that features rows of animated GIF hamsters that dance to an accelerated version of the song "Which Stop Stop"-a song used in Walt Disney's Robin Hood credits. The Hampster Dance was the first popular internet meme. One of the demos was sent to the inbox of a LucasArts employee, who then turned the video into a GIF and shared it (mostly via forums and email, but also on the site in development), send it into a widespread sensation. Girard's owners then sent out a demo to the developers to show off the capabilities of their software. The final design is a model of a baby showing different movements from Cha-Cha-Cha.
In 1996, graphic designer Michael Girard created software that showed how motion could be programmed and projected through a computer. The first internet meme that could be pinned for a special baby dancing went viral across the internet, before eventually appearing on an episode of Allied McBeal. In fact, they've been around since before Dawkins coined the term, appearing as early as AD 79 in Pompeii ruins and in the late 1970s, in graffiti. Memes have been around long before the internet existed. And in the same way that genes and physical traits evolve through natural selection, Dawkins believes that anything that has the potential to evolve - like memes and ideas - has done so through natural selection. So to put it simply, a meme is an idea of what a gene is for a physical trait.
The word was later abbreviated as “meme” due to its similarity to the word.ĭawkins coined the term because he was trying to find out if there was a unit of measure that describes how ideas spread and propagate through generations. Dawkins calls it a Mimeme word, a word derived from the Greek word for imitation.
The term "meme" first appeared in print in 1976 in Richard Dawkins' book The Selfish Gene. Several creative versions of the meme are enjoyed by many users. Every time internet users find an interesting meme, they tend to personalize or reinvent the meme content to suit their own needs. When a new meme is born, dozens, hundreds, and even thousands of variations of it will follow. One of the characteristics that make memes so popular in the Internet age is creativity.
This 1967 book used the term meme to describe the ideas and behaviors used in a culture. The father of the term is Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene. Currently, the meme is understood to refer to images that are widely spread on the internet.Ī concept that became popular in the era of development of social networking platforms, but Memes have relatively long roots.
As you'll soon see, though, this ranking is perfect and indisputable.A meme is a term for an idea or behavior that is spread and becomes popular in a community or a culture. (Sorry, Kilroy.) We also considered the ubiquity and persistence of a meme in determining its position on this list, which means more recent memes tend to wind up lower in the ranking, but may rise or fall in future update. We confined ourselves to the internet, so only symbols and phrases that crossed from traditional media to the web qualify.
Whether repurposed from YouTube videos, movie screengrabs, or viral catchphrases, these golden nuggets shape how we consume, criticize, and communicate through cultural touchstones.īut which ones have achieved lasting greatness? To answer that, we looked for memes with universality and malleability a dank meme exists in many permutations, and can cross cultural and linguistic barriers. True, meme-ifying images and videos is a practice as old as humanity itself, but the advent of the internet has made that process much.