Meme

Science Diction

Science Friday and WNYC Studios

Friday, Society & Culture, Science, Origin, Culture, Words, History, Word, Language

4.8 • 610 Ratings

🗓️ 10 March 2020

⏱️ 12 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Remember that summer when the internet was one Distracted Boyfriend after another—that flannel-shirted dude rubbernecking at a passing woman, while his girlfriend glares at him? Everyone had their own take—the Boyfriend was you, staring directly at a solar eclipse, ignoring science. The Boyfriend was youth, seduced by socialism, spurning capitalism. The Boyfriend could be anyone you wanted him to be. We think of memes as a uniquely internet phenomenon. But the word meme originally had nothing to do with the internet. It came from an evolutionary biologist who noticed that genes weren’t the only thing that spread, mutated, and evolved. Want to stay up to speed with all thing Science Diction? Sign up for our newsletter. Guest: Gretchen McCulloch is an internet linguist. For some fun, check out her book, Because Internet, and her podcast Lingthusiasm. She’s also appeared on Science Friday. Footnotes And Further Reading: For an academic take on memes, read Memes in Digital Culture by Limor Shifman. Read The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. Check out the first time the word meme appeared in an internet context, in Mike Godwin’s 1994 Wired article called “Meme, Counter-meme.” Credits: Science Diction is written and produced by Johanna Mayer, with production and editing help from Elah Feder. Our senior editor is Christopher Intagliata, and we had story editing help from Nathan Tobey. Our theme song and music are by Daniel Peterschmidt. We had fact-checking help from Michelle Harris. Special thanks to the entire Science Friday staff.

Transcript

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0:00.0	If you've been on the internet at all, the past few years, this song is ingrained in your brain.
0:14.4	The original Gangnam style video has been viewed over three billion times, and it spawned endless parodies.
0:23.2	Versions inspired by video games.
0:27.1	Super 90s style.
0:28.7	And former presidential candidates.
0:31.3	Mitt Romney style.
0:32.4	And even the more cotidian.
0:35.6	Working farmer style.
0:40.1	Since Gangdom Stiles heyday in 2012, approximately a gazillion memes have circulated the internet.
0:47.5	And we think of memes as a phenomenon that's particularly born and bred online.
0:52.7	But it turns out the word meme didn't actually come from the
0:56.4	internet. It came from an evolutionary biologist. From Science Friday, this is science
1:03.3	diction. I'm Johanna Mayer. Today, we're talking about the word meme.
1:27.7	Yeah. about the word meme. You've probably used the word meme to talk about all sorts of stuff that you see online.
1:30.3	But first, let's clear something up.
1:33.5	What exactly is an internet meme?
1:35.8	Ah, that's an interesting question.
1:43.9	So I think of an internet meme as a unit of internet culture, a piece of internet culture that spreads through
1:49.9	internet people or people on the internet, making their own versions of it.
1:55.8	That's Gretchen McCulloch. She's an internet linguist, coolest job ever. And she wrote a really great book called Because Internet.
2:03.6	So a meme spreads through people making other versions of it and through people putting their own spin on it. You don't just, you know, copy the thing that's been sent.
2:13.6	Like the original Gangnam style video. You remake it to appeal to your particular subculture or to appeal to some other group of people or to mash it up with some other type of meme.
	...

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