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Hi, my name is Drew and I'm one of the creators of Know Your Meme [http://dembot.com/post/12]. Since I sold it to Cheezburger several years ago, I've been under a non-compete and NDA which ended last year.
Despite some minor disagreements and disappointments, I still love Know Your Meme. I'm so grateful to Cheezburger, the editors and the mods for keeping it afloat and hope it continues onward fulfilling its mission on the internet. When I'm out and about myself I find people from all walks of life, all around the world know-of and light-up to discuss it.
Now, years later, I still get excited by memes but in a predominately different way.
I do still like to track memes in a similar historical fashion, starting at the beginning and then exploding out. For example, I haven't mentioned this to anyone yet but last month I found the owner of the original Anteater photo. He had no idea his image had been adopted. Here it is on Flickr in all its glory: https://www.flickr.com/photos/rantav/153838089/in/photostream/
When I contacted him, I didn't need to ask him to confirm if it was his photo, I wrote him to tell him as a matter of fact his photo was the original and had been adopted. This is a key point for context about the new site which I will return to below.
I wanted to contact him because it's a part of one of my favorite internet meme mashups of all time, the anteater in the Hopper diner painting:
I also found the reddit user who added the anteater on top of what was probably a Banksy painting (he didn't credit Banksy, he just posted it with the anteater), but it was only around 300px in height so another reddit user took the time to make a hi-res version using a paint effect to compensate for pixel-loss (you can still see the shadow of the man Banksy had in place under the Anteater:
I didn't need to ask the reddit users to confirm this, either. It's all clear as well from the metadata.
Despite the trill of investigation over such small details, here is where I really diverge from Know Your Meme's universe in my interests: I still like to look at the world similarly from initial instance through explosion, but when applied to everything in life, including the most minor and major ideas in all of human history.
I suspect one of the biggest memes of my own life time includes the events surrounding 9/11, which peaked with the fall of the world trade center in 2001, and continued on with intense effect for ten years until spiking again when Bin Laden was killed.
If you are old enough to remember what it was like on Sep 10th, 2001 and then how different it was the next day on the 11th, you will appreciate the idea that the news of the towers falling spread around the world so quickly, to such great lengths, with such impact. It was surprising to see how many people outside of the US felt deeply about it and changed too. The consequences of that single act would change cultures in ways that other events rarely do. I can't think of another event in my own lifetime that captured the world's attention so quickly and deeply and then caused the world to change and act so dramatically for such a sustained period of time.
Of all time? I don't think it's a concept like a wheel. While a wheel, or cooking, or a computer e.g. can play a big part of our everyday lives, they may not be fully present enough in most people's minds to have an effect on the day-to-day thoughts and ideas that people have effecting change. Maybe. They are there, and they are often critical, but I wonder if they belong in another class of things that tend to be more a part of the biological or subconscious for most people.
My almost-hypothesis is that Islam is one of the biggest memes of all time. It's not hard to imagine that religion would at least be in the top five, if not easily number one, and yet Islam seems to stand out in certain ways that suggest it's more memetic than other popular religions like Christianity.
While Christianity may have the greatest reach, it's possible it may not have the most effect on people's minds on a day-to-day basis. Many go to church and do some things related to their religion, but the majority of people probably do not incorporate religious thoughts into their day-to-day activities at work and at play. Many seem to just reread the same words form the bible and don't create anything new with them. It's more of a philosophy that they can keep, and talk about like a wheel, but is perhaps typically absent except in critical cases of life and death.
Islam on the other hand, or some interpretation thereof, can get really extreme by large groups causing some of the most unfathomable action against people, also some of the most memetic ideas in-and-of themselves. Christianity is no saint in this regard as history has shown, though the types of brutal acts against innocent people presented by ISIS for example, for exactly the sake of being memetic, are so horrifying and effective by today's standards that they are hard to unsee. On the non-extreme side of those who practice Islam which would obviously be the majority, maybe there is a more present philosophy that is more effectual upon the ideas and actions of daily life nonetheless.
And as we have seen from Know Your Meme, one of the insights we were lucky enough to have going into it, is that a healthy meme is not solely measured by reach, but by its incorporation into other events where people don't just regurgitate a headline, but actually incorporate it into their own worlds, creating their own images and expressing their own unique feelings. As internet tools regularly make it easier for people to do so, with regards to internet media, when we see an explosion of media being created by people around a certain idea, we know the meme is in many ways stronger.
If Islam turned out to be #1, or not, what else might be #1, or #2? Would landing on the moon be big? What about the atom bomb?
And how would we tell? This question of how would we tell is a big one and this is where things get really interesting, IMO.
How exactly do you track the explosion of a large-scale, historical meme like the moon landing? How many people did the event reach over what span of time? What was the technology of the time that enabled the idea to spread? How did it change people's perspective on things? This would be hard to gather on some levels because it would likely include long-term inspiration on future generations – today we have Elon Musk e.g pushing things forward, personally, and notably, he was born after the moon landing thus growing up taking for granted influential possibilities that others before him might not of seen. There really is a lot to consider, it can get exciting yet daunting.
On the other hand what about trends we can see as they happen, like the explosion of drones or VR right now? What about the smallest ideas, too, even on a day-to-day basis where lifespans are very different but still important?
I'd like to start to figure it out and I created a site with some tools to start that process. I think it's past time for the word 'meme' as it fits into our lexicon today to be extended to ideas that spread as opposed to being known as comedic commentary on the day's viral events.
See Part II below in the comments (only 10k char per forum post) :/
