How Memes Help Us Communicate, Criticize, and Sell

Memes are viral ideas

Memetics is not a science, it is only on the verge of being scientific, says Alexander Sergeev, a member of the Commission for Combating Pseudoscience and Falsification of Scientific Research at the Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences. However, if you do not take into account all the ambitions of memetics and apply it as one of the theories of communication, then in its person you can get a working scheme for the representation of ideas.

Here memetics complements the theory of concepts in cognitive linguistics. A concept is a word or expression that summarizes certain meanings and situations. For example, the concept of “justice” is both the word “justice” itself, and the image of Themis with a bandage over his eyes, which arises in consciousness when pronouncing this word, and certain situations that we imagine when pronouncing it, and our personal and general cultural associations, related to equity.

In cognitive linguistics, the concept of "script" is also considered - a certain scenario, a stereotypical change of events in certain situations, and the concept of "frame" is a structure for describing these situations. But these terms are intended primarily to describe and study linguistic reality.

A meme is a concept similar to a concept, frame and script, but capable of describing not only language, but also any extra-linguistic reality: cinema, cultural customs, music, fashion, painting, stereotypical representations and their variations. This term turns out to be very convenient for the study of mass culture, especially media culture and ideology.

A meme is not only a funny picture, but also a piece of cultural information. Science, or rather knowledge, studying memes in this sense is called memetics.

A meme in memetics is an idea, symbol or image that is self-copied and transmitted from the consciousness of one person to the consciousness of another. The creator of memetics, British biologist Richard Dawkins, believed that memes are structures in the nervous system that are transmitted from person to person due to their psychological attractiveness to people.

His follower Susan Blackmore believes that humans are meme machines, and the brain is a storage meme, which explains the large size of the human brain compared to the brain of primates. According to Blackmore, if the gene is the first replicator of evolution, then the meme and the technological meme (propagated by means of machinery) are the second and third replicators. Like genes, memes are selfish replicators that seek to maximize the dissemination of themselves. This means that they are parasites or viruses for their carriers.

Recently, various phenomena of mass culture, such as the growing popularity of pseudoscientific theories, manifestations of homophobia, or marketing trends, have been interpreted quite often through the theory of meme-ideas. It was with the help of the theory of memes that it became possible to describe quite fully and succinctly objects so different in content: in these examples, memes perfectly reflect both the “anatomy” of the phenomena themselves, and the mechanism of their distribution.

Memes as viral ideas contain something attractive to those who disseminate them.

Such psychological attractiveness is possessed by the desire of adherents of pseudoscience to explain to everyone how everything is arranged "in reality", and the idea of dividing people into "us" and "strangers" on the basis of some attribute, and the promise of a "better life" or involvement in it, which is contained in marketing memes. Let's take a closer look at the last two examples.

The division into “us” and “foes” contains the approval of “ours” and disapproval of “others”. It is both the basis of the so-called hate speech, or rhetoric of hatred, and one of the main instruments of the language of social power. Any ideology is built on the same opposition. Thanks to the properties of the modern media space, ideology can form and spread among a large number of people in the shortest possible time.

It is convenient to imagine the modern ideology of any society as a so-called meme-plex, that is, a complex of memes that work together and reinforce each other. We can conditionally say that the ideology of the ruling Republican Party of the United States of America is a meme-plex consisting of the Make America Great Again memes, Islamophobia, a democracy meme, a chauvinist meme and a meme of Donald Trump's personal success.

Some of them are truly viral: the Make America Great Again meme appeared not only as an inscription on a red cap and a designation of Trump's conflict with General Motors, but also as an ironic Internet meme with a golden retriever depicting a redneck (redneck is a conservative provincial, representative of the American the working class; among Trump's voters there were a large number of those who are called rednecks in America).

In a different way, the virality of the meme manifested itself in marketing. There is a whole section - viral marketing, focused on creating the most engaging and reproducible advertising products - the kind that people will share on the Internet and social networks with friends and subscribers. Virality has become a defining indicator of content success.

Marketer Jeffrey Miller writes that marketing does not respond to existing consumer preferences, but in fact is cultural engineering - the process of purposefully creating and disseminating new cultural units, that is, all the same memes: “All the money goes to promote certain memes, brands, products or specific people."

Therefore, it is no longer a shame to appear in advertising - this directly affects the indicators of popularity, citation, mentions in various sources, perhaps without affecting sales growth directly, but increasing the personal rating and replication of the image.

Opinion leaders become such not so much because of the high-quality knowledge they possess, but because they control popular channels of information, which means they can broadcast certain ideas or products to the masses.

So, to summarize briefly: the theory of memes can be used not only in the context of evolutionary psychology, but also as a visual description of how certain ideas are spread - in isolation or in a complex. This is especially suitable for those cases when we need to talk about the phenomena of mass culture, advertising, ideology, or show how elements of media culture, certain perceptions of people function. In this context, the term “meme” is part of the theory of communication, the theory of discourse and related linguistic sciences along with the terms “idea”, “concept”, “stereotype”, “frame” and “script”.

Memes in advertising: hype and antihype

We all remember the L'Oreal meme "After all, I deserve it," the company's former slogan, which eventually turned into a full-fledged viral idea. But marketing uses not only memes as ideas, but also memes in a more familiar sense for us.

Here it is appropriate to recall the second definition of a meme from the Oxford Dictionary: "A meme is a picture, video, piece of text, usually humorous in nature, which is copied and quickly distributed by Internet users."

Susan Blackmore was the first to talk about Internet memes in her 1999 book "Mem Machines." She meant primarily viruses or fake emails that contain them.

Internet memes, in the sense reflected in the second definition of the Oxford Dictionary, came to the attention of the English scientist Peter Ludlow. In his 1996 article “High Noon of Electronic Frontiers: Conceptual Issues of Cyberspace,” he notes that memes are “snippets of conversation” representing a common phrase or idea that is released and begins to work differently in many discourses. Summarizing, we get the definition of an Internet meme as a special type of Internet communication.

The Internet meme uses several channels of information, usually visual and verbal, and sometimes an auditory channel, if we are talking about a video or a melody. Since Internet memes use several channels of information, they are on a par with the genres of caricature and poster, which makes the Internet meme an ideal vehicle for advertising or political propaganda.

One of the significant moments for the dissemination of Internet memes on the Runet was the use of memes by large Russian banks in their official social networks to advertise services. On the example of last year's meme "Vzhuh", you can understand how quickly it spreads, being at first a fuzzy photograph with a cat in a cap, then it becomes a professionally drawn wizard cat, conjuring a quick transfer of funds.

Another segment in which memes are actively used is telecom. Memes have penetrated television precisely through advertisements of the largest telecom holdings. This is the video "Winter is close" from MTS, where the slogan from "Game of Thrones" is used, and "Captain Unlimited" of "Beeline", which reminds us of the Captain Obvious meme.

MegaFon also relied on the level of “memeticity” of the advertising video - Steven Seagal starred in the advertisement for the mobile network. Russian character from the 90s.

Memes are not only used in advertising - the commercials themselves are often "taken away" by Internet users into memes. Videos based on a song or an obsessive motive are especially susceptible to this: for example, the video about Tantum Verde Forte cough syrup was segmented into funny images after the first week of rotation.

Perhaps, memes about rap battles have been spreading with the greatest speed lately. In fact, every SMM specialist is forced to react to the emergence of a new competition in order to be in trend and not miss the news feed.

Nowadays, the word “hype”, which has become a meme, is especially popular among marketers, which was taken out of the English language by young Russian rappers to denote hype and excitement around something (first of all, of course, around themselves). Quickly replicated, it just as quickly became boring - so much so that there was an "antihype" - deliberately ignoring the excitement in any area.

Memetic Wars: The Phantom Menace

Marty Lucas, founder of the New York-based company Paper Tiger Television (quoted from Douglas Rushkoff's book "Media Virus"), talks about hype as a way of working for American media: “The main method of working of American media is hype. This word was originally used in the United States in the 1920s to refer to a drug dose. It was short for hypodermic needle. American media is a series of hypes. This became especially true during the Reagan era. Reagan was excellent at manipulating the media. During his presidency, we were presented with a series of events designed to cause public outrage and turn public opinion against a number of objects."

Lucas goes on to talk about the events surrounding the Gulf War, when a massive press campaign was launched on national American television by Paper Tiger Television. Then thousands of materials from video makers located in the bay area got into the rotation of satellite television, filled the information vacuum and created a buzz around the events. The author of the book, Douglas Rushkoff, calls the resulting effect a "media virus": it was the anti-war idea that became the virus, which suddenly became widespread thanks to the information channels provided to it.

Another episode is connected with the Gulf War: in 1991, the French philosopher Jacques Baudrillard published a series of essays, which later formed the basis for the book "There was no Gulf War." In this book, Baudrillard says that as such there was no war between the United States and Iraq, and all the information that people received about the war is a product of propaganda. All events, according to Baudrillard, were stylized and narrated by the media using simulacra (a sign without content, a copy of a copy).

Here we again come close to the iconic nature of the meme and its similarity to a simulacrum. Memes, or simulacra, replace events that actually happened: it is not the fact of what happened, but the chain of reactions to it that is important.

Modern press campaigns consist of media memes that broadcast certain ideas, and news feeds often exist in the media space as memes. For example, the covfefe meme from Donald Trump's Twitter account was immediately picked up by those who wanted to focus on Trump's carelessness.

Recall that on the night of May 31, a mysterious tweet appeared on Twitter of the President of the United States: “Despite the constant negative press covfefe”. Probably, the president began writing some incriminating message, but did not finish it, but mysteriously changed the English coverage ("coverage") to covfefe. It's hard to disagree that writing a message with a typo on the fastest-responsive social network is pretty reckless.

There are also plenty of politically colored Internet memes specially created by political strategists. Among the relatively tenacious memes, one can mention a meme made from a photograph of Vladimir Putin, invariably resting with his naked torso on an annual fishing trip. Made with a clearly positive message, it did not escape replication by thousands of users who made their own adjustments to its elements - someone with irony, someone with displeasure.

In the wake of the activity of Russian liberal thought in 2010-2012, the meme “Party of crooks and thieves” (abbreviated as PZhiV) was replicated, which can still be found in liberal discourse. And if then we did not meet vivid memes-oppositions in the discourse of the official authorities, now the production of memes is equally well-tuned on both sides of the barricades.

Some researchers (Korovin, Prokhanov) attribute the very existence of political memes to the phenomena of political competition and ideological propaganda, referring to the replication of memes as “memetic wars”, and the memes themselves as “memetic weapons”. Thus, memes become part of the information war, the war of the 21st century.

The entire social network Odnoklassniki, where the older category of Russian citizens communicates, is filled with very vivid examples of such a confrontation. If we want to study all of its content along the line of Russian-American relations, we will find that the intensity of passions has not changed much since the Cold War: “enemies” are given offensive nicknames (“stupid”), and “ours” are endowed with heroic features (meme "this people cannot be defeated", "savvy"). Even if we assume that once these memes were launched by political strategists, now they are successfully replicated by the users themselves.

The situation is different in other social networks, where a variety of memes, including political ones, are replicated through the publics of large imageboards. But they are not taken for granted by the audience as quickly. First of all, the meme here is an element of the comic, and only then it is the bearer of a certain idea.

Nevertheless, ideas packaged in this way can just as obsessively arise in our minds, even if we only perceive their comic shell. Therefore, it is extremely important to keep a cold mind and operate with critical thinking when analyzing content - after all, our mistakes will be replicated the next day, and a violent reaction will create unnecessary hype.

Comic packaging of an idea in a meme can be used both for negative informational impact and for the formation of a positive image.

An interesting example is the British youth Stefan Bertram-Lee. In 2017, he moved to Syria to support the People's Defense Forces. From there, he runs his meme channel on Facebook, creating funny pictures about ISIS (Islamic State - an organization banned in Russia) to raise the morale of the soldiers of the Syrian resistance. Since early 2017, the Dank Memes for Democratic Confederalist Dreams page, where Bertram-Lee publishes his work, has been gaining popularity.

The community's avatar features a meme depicting a young man and a girl, each dreaming about his own: a young man about a kiss, and a girl about a Syrian democratic union. According to the testimony of the fighter of the Syrian militia Christopher, Stefan's memes support him: "The war is very cruel, so if you don't laugh, you will be torn apart."

As you can see, the Internet meme has become a universal unit of communication: with the help of it you can show your emotions or your attitude to something, advertise something, criticize something.

With the help of memes, you can influence political opponents and associates, broadcast your position, search for and create communities of like-minded people - in a word, you can transmit any information. It is thanks to their endless comic potential that memes are conquering an ever wider audience.