Internet memes, sure. And image macros have been around for a while. But I’m fairly sure that the specialization came later. That is to say, among a certain crowd, if I said “I’m sending you a meme”, they would expect an image macro (with black-outlined white text in Impact font) and be surprised at anything else. It’s this latter specialization that I believe originated on Reddit.
Yes, thanks for pointing that out. “A religion” is indeed more accurate. Individual memes become much more powerful when bundled together, but they are somewhat specific. “You go to heaven if you’re free of sin” and “Jesus can forgive your sins” are fairly powerful on their own, but much more so when put together.
I think that meme-bundles are also much more stable than singletons. It’s why the typical internet meme has a short shelf-life; they get corrupted and boring if there’s nothing else backing them up. Meme-bundles like individual religions are stable because any perturbation has a restoring force from the other memes in the bundle. “Jesus can forgive your sins” is stable because the other memes require a forgiveness mechanism of some kind. So it isn’t prone to general drift. Less important memes may drift, though, which is why we still see some diversity in religion.
There was a good while there when the archetypical example of a meme, to the extent that hardly anything else was ever so described, was a computer virus. This analogy is also where the concept of something “going viral” (meaning, becoming a meme) comes from.
Dockor Who alien species: the Adherents of the Repeated Meme
See also the memes in John Barnes’ “Century Next Door” series John Barnes (author) - Wikipedia
I’m one of the other crowd. I would never consider a picture with words to be a meme. That’s a gross debasement of the fairly advanced meta-level thinking that went into coining the term.
Note I’m not disagreeing with your assertion about Reddit. I’m merely saying that they apparently destroyed a good idea for a lot of people.
Well, a picture with words can be a meme. But most of them aren’t, or at least are extraordinarily unsuccessful memes.
Something like the original “I can haz cheezburger?”, though? Yeah, that’s a meme.
I’m on the fence. I think that the most successful image macros (like the “I can has cheezburger” one that Chronos mentioned) do just barely qualify. However, even the best of these lack many of the “weapons-grade” tools that more powerful memes possess.
Among these tools:
- They come in bundles, such that the sub-memes reinforce each other.
- They’re self-referential. The meme isn’t spread just by being funny, etc., but also because it instructs you to spread it.
- They’re at least somewhat resistant to copy errors. This also might be achieved through instruction in the meme itself (“this is the word of god, and you are commanded to copy it faithfully”). Like genes, some amount of mutation is desirable, but not too much.
So I dunno. A good joke is a meme, and also lacks these qualities. I’ll say that they barely qualify, but that they’re weak and pathetic examples compared to religions, languages, etc.
Very meta.
But then it’s not “co-opting” it is simply “using.”
Do a google search on “Internet meme” and find results only before June 2005.
Agreed. I overstated my case.
“Meme” as a noun meaning simply “a picture with a caption” is IMO always wrong. But certainly some specific pictures & captions (think some of Gary Larsen’s most iconic work or the original cheezburger lolcat) rise to the level of ideas that possess the rest of the indicia of a true meme.
Ok fine but now I’m confused.
What do we call those little video clips which appear alone (no Youtube etc) and repeat again and again?
Animated GIFs.
Hard G or soft G? 
On the other hand, a gene that causes horrific birth defects such that no one who possesses it lives past the age of five, still counts as a “gene”, even though it will not be very successful at spreading. On that ground, the thought, “you must never let anyone else know that you are having this thought, nor act any differently because of it”, should still count as a (spectacularly unsuccessful) meme.
I also object to the idea that a successful meme must explicitly instruct you to take more than ordinary effort to spread it. Memes like, “birth control is bad”, and “it is good to have a big family” spread by causing their possessors to have more children, who, being more impressionable than the general public, more easily pick up memes from their parents just through regular osmosis.
I always assumed hard G, since it stands for “graphics” in Graphics Interchange Format. And because using a soft G would make me think of peanut butter.
In internet culture hard-g gif is simply an image that uses gif format, soft-g gif is the fad of creating or finding very short animated gifs (usually from movies or tv shows) and using to show an emotional reaction to something. So gif is just a graphic format and “jif” is that thing my 20-something coworkers do in every email.
I can understand the confusion because a lot of memes also happen to be image macros, people recaptioning and recycling the same images that are highly recognizable (sometimes more recognizable from their meme use than their original use).
E.g., the fist-pump baby, “one does not” graphic from LOTR, grumpy cat. And those are the easiest example to use to explain the net usage of meme.
It is a hard g. Graphics has a hard g so so does gif. Anyone who says otherwise is wrong and should be shunned.