Forums / Discussion / Meme Research

One of the most common complaints I see of modern (late 2010s) meme culture is that most memes, both good and bad, die rather quickly. A day or two at worst, a little over a month at best. Granted, there are some memes that still see resurgence in some form or another. (I.E. Cd-i memes)

I do wonder, why is this the case? If I had to guess, I'd say the shorter life cycle of memes might be because of social media sites like Twitter spoiling the masses when it comes to 24/7 news and media.

Because they're the same meme recycled over and over. How often do you see a meme that's not an object labeling meme, a 4 panel comic with the punchline replaced, a "Look at me, I'm depressed" meme, a Twitter outrage, a "Thing-I-Don't-Like" meme, a "I have a niche interest, look how cultured I am" meme, a Trump meme, or another Waifu?

Anyone else care to add to the overused meme types I'm too tired to remember at the moment?

I feel that many memes these days are somewhat manufactured. Quite a lot of people go out of there to find something "memeable", instead of letting something catch on naturally.

A lot of recent memes are just taking quotes from recent media that are ultimately unmemorable, which is why we forget them quickly. I've noticed more than a few are things taken from somewhat older media, which is more or less just people scouring media looking for something to make a meme, whereas for the majority of these, the fact that weren't memes already is usually an indicator that they are not worthy of being memes.

I recall back when Bill Wurtz's History of the World video came out, and someone complained that "The Sun is a Deadly Laser" was not worth making a meme out of, and that "You could make a religion out of this" was more worthy. This completely misses the point of what a meme is. You don't just decide to make a meme out of something, it's something that sticks with you, whether it's a moment from a video game, film, book or even comments and forum posts. "The Sun is a Deadly Laser" was more popular because it was a quick, catchy jingle that stuck with people.

TL;DR if you want to ignore my rambling: Basically what I'm saying is that people are going out of their way to make memes happen like they have some sort of quota to fill, instead of letting them happen, which results in a lot of either forced, unmemorable or just plain uninteresting things being labelled as "memes", when they do not fit the spirit of what a meme actually is.

I came here to say that the dissemination and creation of memes is easier and more efficient than ever thanks to social media, but you pretty much said that. I think all 3 posts so far here are very good points.

the internet has gotten way bigger and more people are participating in it (meme culture) compared to a decade and a half ago.

flash memes, cat memes, newgrounds memes, youtube memes, touhou memes, ytmnd memes, 4chan memes all had their time in the spotlight then for so long because that's pretty much only what existed on the internet for years and years. everyone had their hands on those memes and knew what they were about. helped them to stick around and mature.

(till 2010?) when there's a bigger pool of people, more meme repositories, more incentive to create or kill memes, more meme opportunities and interests to throw around, it sure dilutes what sticks and what doesn't. it's that, or it can appear to you that way with how it seems your beloved memes die out.

the pot of spaghetti has increased so dramatically that sometimes there's not enough sauce to go around.

its not any different now than it was any other point. We have memes like doge, loss, pepe, "You Know I Had to Do It to Em", gamergate (unfortunately), "Press F to Pay Respects", Ricardo Milos, and many others that have been around for years and are "modern"/made in the past 5 years.

The only difference is short term memes didn't get as much documentation back in the day, so you didn't notice them as much.

Meme culture has gotten more mainstream. Instead of injokes on sites with a niche audience and no leaking of their contents to the outside, memes are now part of the mainstream social media and reached a point of oversatturation that companies hijacking them is already normal. Meanwhile the old memesites like 4chan still have their injokes but they have gotten much more niche.

Ryumaru pretty much nailed, but another contributing factor to this, in my opinion, is meme elitism. People used to be proud and glad when a meme lasted for a long time. Now people automatically shoot down any meme that lasts over a week and label it a normie meme as soon as it reaches any degree of popularity, as I have already seen it happen for Storm area 51 memes, which is not even a mold meme that fits an obvious format.

So, naturally, it is harder for memes to live long now when people are actively sabotaging memes that try to live long in the first place.

I'd say the crux of the problem is that there are too many people, especially the younger netizens, wanting to get a slice of the 15 minutes of memetic fame pie, which results in more forced memes and overreliance on ironic/lazy jokes regurgitated from Twitter, iFunny or other popular sharing platforms.

With the emergence of social media and the aforementioned saturation of irony, people can simply put "relatable" captions on a Spongebob screenshot and it will be the flavor of the week meme before their jig is up.

The advent of Mobile Internet Browsing is what did most of the damage to meme longevity. Pre-2010 memes where, at some level, taken ownership and given a distinct personalities by the internet. It's quite difficult for mobile users to invest that same level of ownership, as the tools necessary for creating something distinct and unique are sparse for that platform. Add in the fact that the number of people using the internet since 2010 has more than doubled, the difficulty in giving something an identity is increased because too many people are involved in a meme's initial birth, and no two people can agree on what a particular meme is supposed to represent anymore.

Mix that in with other factors like the speed at which we consume and discard new media increasing, the definition of what a meme is becoming less and less defined, and major platforms encouraging quantity over quality when it comes to user generated content; you're only ever left with something that took any one person about 10 minutes to make.

TL;DR, It would be inconceivable for a meme with the applications, impact, and sub-genres like (for example) Youtube Poop to be born in this year because the mobile platform does not support that type of retention or necessary tools.

Meme longevity is hampered by our "Fear of Missing out" culture. New content is constantly flooding its way onto the internet and new memes come with the constant wave of content.

People want to stay trendy and ahead of the curve so they'll constantly move from one popular thing to the next. There's no time now to just let a meme sit and gestate another vapid internet celebrity just said something questionable on Twitter.

You can see relationship between FOMO and meme longevity clearly in the Anime community since you have a deluge of content coming in every season and the only way to stay in the conversation is to jump into the top show. Only to drop the show at the end of its run and repeat the same thing next season.

We still do get relatively long lived memes from time to time. Some memes are so applicable or abstract that they just mutate or attach themselves to other memes past the point where they should have died. Videogame memes also from what I've seen tend to stay alive a lot longer the n memes from other forms of entertainment.

That probably explains why we don't see creative .gifs as much as we used to. It's hard to really accomplish stuff of that caliber on a smart device.