Memes are not conscious acts. Memes are what you get when the many many minds of humanity come together and share a space, without a filter of communication between one another. No meme is a deliberate act, in a sense. It's more akin to a collective brain being formed, and all the participants of the internet simply being the neurons firing at one another. This is why memes can get so strange. They’ve always been so strange.
The internet started out wholesome. It used to be a place where you shared jokes and cartoons that existed in the world already; the internet was simply the membrane through which they reached one another. The internet started out with email forwards. I started out on Fun and Fun Only [FFO]; I was excited for every new mail that came through on that forum. Every single one of those mails were simply 30 year old jokes, cartoons from newspapers, or lists of amazing things that already exist in the world. Blame my dad’s email forwards for turning me into such a dad.
Even so, the internet has had an element of the insane from the start. I don't think it's an accident that the Oogachaka baby was the very first meme. Very quickly after the people of the world started connecting in this brand new space, they started getting weird. Or maybe all of their little individual bits of weird came together and coalesced on the internet, the way a hundred different homesigns came together to blend in Nicaragua, 1978. Old memes seem quaint to us only because they are old. At the times that they came out, whether they were ragecomics, or rickrolling, or the Oogachaka baby, they were all exploring a paradigm that hadn't thus far existed for them to be on. They were all pushing their contemporary social expectations of what is an acceptable little bit of comedy. They were never not weird.
This is why I think it's so important that we start studying memes systematically. When I say memes, I mean almost every kind of interaction that exists on the internet, and the morphological changes that occur within them. Morphological, lexical, semantic shifts. The way sentences are put together. What real world cultures and events, traditions, styles of speech, and sets of behaviour contribute the most to the culture of the internet. How that has shifted. If parallels for that existed in the pre-internet era as well.
The internet is suddenly a space where the minds of all kinds of people are suddenly aashna shode with one another. Comment sections are a big part of this, I believe. They are conversations that you are witnessing, in a space you both occupy. They are interactions that you are not a part of. It doesn't matter if we are thinking about it or not. It influences you in ways that you’re not clocking.
We are suddenly finding ourselves exposed to an insane amount of stimulus. And for children, they're starting out right there. I believe there’s scope in exploring something akin to language acquisition that happens in the adult human mind, as they interact and form seen and unseen connections on the internet. What are we acquiring? What do we remember from the gargantuan amounts of content that we force through our retinas, day in and day out; what is it that stays in our minds, what is it that we forget?
What linguistic features are we borrowing? What morphological shifts are we doing? Why do we take our memes, and almost invariably push them into the realm of the nonsensical? What happened to trollface? What happened to so many of those guys? Which ones did we keep? Which ones changed form? How many of them can you link together as being part of the same tradition, the same memetic DNA?
How did wojacks come in, and stay for so long? What kind of morphological shifts have they had? What kind of affinity do they share with the rage comic?
We think of them as two entirely different worlds, when they were essentially borne of the same thing. Every era seems to discover its own brand of nonsense; this is true pre-internet as well. It seems to be something intrinsic to human beings - it simply never had a space to propagate so freely, to mingle and blend with one another, without scruples or deliberation. It's never had a space to form networks, the way it has on the internet. There is a collective brain at play, and we all retain our individuality only in the sense of the part that we play in the larger collective brain. It's why memes don't feel deliberate.
The semantic shifts, the morphological shifts that occur in memes, they feel as organic and undeliberate as sound changes do across the history of spoken language. Sure, people change the way they speak. In that strict sense, a choice. But look at how uniform that choice is. When a sound change occurs, it occurs across the board, no exceptions. The regularity hypothesis is so precisely traceable. So much so that over and over again, we can reconstruct languages with startling fidelity; languages that have been lost to the records for thousands of years, which no ear can ever attest to. We know what they sounded like. That's how regular it is.
Is there any kind of regularity that happens in morphological shifts, and formal shifts, and semantic shifts in meme culture?