16 - The Half-Life of a Meme: The Rise and Fall of Memes

Summary

This chapter discusses the life span of memes or, to put it differently, how long do memes last? The answer is that generally speaking humorous memes’ life span is rather short and is characterized as a very fast gain in popularity (“going viral”) followed by a very fast loss of popularity. As you will recall from Chapter 2, memes are fads. The term “fad” is usually rather derogatory, in the sense that it implies that the interest is short-lived and possibly excessive (for example, Webster defines fad as “a practice or interest followed for a time with exaggerated zeal”). Here we consider the faddish nature of memes as merely descriptive. Berger and Le Mens (2009) make the case that the faster a fad is adopted, the faster it disappears. It should be noted that their work involves names, which are less mediated by tech, but as we will see their analysis applies fully to internet memes.

Memes as Viruses

As we saw the term “meme” itself was born as a metaphorical analog of genes: genes are to physical organisms as memes are to cultures. However, another metaphor, also from biology and largely unrelated to genetics, has “colonized” the conceptualization of memes. Namely that memes are viruses and spread like diseases. Indeed, the very term “going viral” is an expression of this metaphor. Virality, i.e., meme diffusion, has been the subject of much discussion. In what follows we will review the reasons why memes “go viral” but we will also examine the much less discussed reason why memes go out of fashion. We will also briefly address why both the rise and fall of interest in memes is so fast.

The Birth of the Cool

A key concept to understanding the rise and fall of memes is that of “cool.” Cool comes from African American English, through jazz music. The sense of “general approval” is attributed to Lester Young (1909–1959), the famous saxophone player. “Cool” is seen as “desirable” (Danesi, 1994). Blommaert (2015) argues that memes have open, indeterminate meanings, but index (connote) “cool”: using a meme is cool. The motivation for users to share a meme would thus be to associate themselves with this positive connotation (technically this is called indexing by association or enregisterment, Chapter 2).