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50shadesofbrain · 7 years ago

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What makes a meme go viral?

A bit of a warning before reading: This post starts talking about Twilight roughly halfway through, and doesn’t really stop. I offer neither excuse nor apology.

Hello, internet, and welcome to another exciting installment of 50 Shades of Brain. I’m your host, Tim Carroll. Today, I’m delving into the exciting/horrifying world of internet memes.

What are memes?

The word “meme” was first invented by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book “The Selfish Gene.” A meme is an idea, behavior, or belief that spreads from person to person like a thought contagion. In the same way that a person can develop biological traits (hair color or skin color) by expressing the right genes, a person can develop mental traits (political beliefs and religions) by expressing memes. Just as the study of genes is known as genetics, the study of memes is known as memetics. (Meme rhymes with team, and memetics loosely rhymes with phonetics.)

Memetics and Psychology are closely related sciences. But while Psychology often asks “How do people find ideas?” Memetics asks “How do ideas find people?” [This quote - along with many of the ideas expressed in this blog post - is taken from the book Thought Contagion.]

I’m a big fan of the term “Thought Contagion” to describe memes, as it likens memes to viruses. Memes, like viruses, require people to spread, and, also like viruses, often don’t need the people involved to be willing participants in the spreading. That’s why memes are often described as “self-spreading ideas.”

Now keep in mind, an idea doesn’t have to be true in order for it to be a meme. A great example of a probably-untrue self-spreading idea is the story of Saint Elmo’s Fire. In case you’ve never heard of it, Saint Elmo’s Fire is a meteorological phenomenon in which glowing plasma surrounds tall, pointed objects during thunderstorms (or any situation where there’s a lot of electrical potential energy in the sky.)

This means that during intense thunderstorms at sea, the mastheads of old sailing ships would begin to glow. You can see a video of it here. Rather than seeing this as terrifying, sailors who saw these lights claimed that it was a sign that Saint Elmo, the patron saint of sailors, was there with them to ensure that they would make it through the storm.

Now, is that explanation true? Probably not. What makes the idea “a glowing mast in a storm is a good omen” memetic is that it’s a thought that’s nearly impossible to disprove. Think about it: the sailors who saw St. Elmo’s Fire and made it back to shore could tell everyone the story of Saint Elmo guiding them through an impossible and terrifying storm. Those who saw Saint Elmo’s fire and didn’t make it back to shore… well they couldn’t tell their tale to the contrary, could they? As such, with plenty of sailors to confirm the legend, and none to speak out against it, the legend – or should I say meme - spread.

This meme also had two other things going for it that helped it spread. The first is that it benefitted from some “pre-existing infrastructure.” Saint Elmo was a figure in an already-established and incredibly popular belief system, in this case, Christianity. [Christianity, as well as every other religion, is also a good example of a meme.]

The second factor that helped this meme spread was that it was generally a comforting thing to believe in. During a terrifying storm, a captain probably felt a lot better shouting “Saint Elmo is with us!” to his crew than “We are all so screwed…”

Saint Elmo’s fire is just one example of a meme. I mentioned religion above, but faith in science is also a meme. If you feel the urge to share this blog post with your friends, then the ideas inside are also memetic.

I could go on for hours listing examples of memes (any cultural/social norm for instance) but we’ve got a lot of ground to cover. But before we move on, I should also mention anti-memes – ideas that terminate themselves. A great example of an anti-meme is the idea “melee weapons are more useful than guns during warfare.” This idea died a rapid death in America right around the time of the Civil War. Care to take a guess as to why?

So that’s what the word meme used to mean….

But what does meme mean now…

The science of memetics has hit something of a stalling point in recent years. There are several reasons for this, but a rather salient one is the fact that the word meme has taken on a somewhat different definition.

Today, the word “meme” most commonly refers to pieces of media – be they images, gifs, or blocks of text, that are passed around the internet usually as a joke or to make a political point. Probably the most famous of these is Pepe the Frog. These are often thought to have started with the internet but it’s not too difficult to find historical examples. During the 40’s it was popular for WWII GI’s to scrawl the words “Kilroy was here” on walls and structures. In the 60’s and 70’s it was popular to wear buttons or make graffiti that said “Frodo Lives.” Or if you wanted to get really old fashioned, people have been drawing a square that reads “SATOR AREPO TENET OPERA ROTAS“ since around the birth of Christ. (That last example looks much cooler when it’s arranged into a five by five square, rather than written out.)

Two thousand years is a long time for a five word message to hang around, wouldn’t you say? What makes those five words have more staying power than all the other Roman graffiti out there?

I guess I’m asking what makes certain memes have so much staying power. Or, in other words…

What makes a meme go viral?

Every year we post an estimated 1.8 billion images to the internet. (Just to give you an idea of how big a number that is, if you dedicated a single second to looking at every one of those pictures, you’d finish sometime in 2075.)

With such a massive number of pictures, it’s likely you could only view a tiny fraction of them, and share an even tinier fraction. And the fraction you see is almost entirely composed of pictures that others decided to share themselves.

What makes that fraction special? Why have over a hundred million people looked at this dress, but not this one? Why is this frog so damn popular, but this one isn’t?

Today on Fifty Shades of Brain, I’m going to endeavor to answer these questions. It turns out there’s not one answer as to what makes a meme more sharable than another. However, I’ve found that almost all memes have one or more of the following things in commons. The first of which is:

1. Pre-Existing Infrastructure

Up above, we talked about pre-existing infrastructure being important in the spreading of the legend of St. Elmo’s Fire. Turns out having a “fan base” helps your meme immensely. In fact, as this Daily Dot article about the ‘wistful Javert’ meme explains, most memes become famous as derivatives of other memes.

If you have a favorite meme – and who doesn’t – you can track its evolution on the surprisingly comprehensive website Know Your Meme, where you can see not just how that meme started, but all of the ways that that meme has crossed over into other memes.

But why would we prefer derivatives? Shouldn’t we like originals just as much, if not more?

Not exactly. The answer lies in something called the Mere Exposure Effect. The Mere Exposure effect is a logical fallacy that causes us to like things more that we’ve seen before. It applies to pretty much everything. We’ll even think that Chinese characters mean nicer things if we’ve seen them before.

In fact, things become funnier the more you’re exposed to them. The more people are exposed to a newspaper comic, the funnier people think it is. [I have a hypothesis that this repeated exposure effect is why comics like Dagwood and the Family Circus have stuck around for so many years.]

Now sometimes memes can be a reference so obscure, that it’s almost impossible to know what the original topic being referenced was without the aforementioned Know Your Meme website. In fact sometimes the joy of spreading an obscure meme is…

2. The ability to be part of a cool secret club.

When we look at some of the ancient memes above we find that a lot of them have a component that is difficult to read to outsiders. For example, the phrase “Frodo lives” doesn’t mean much to people who don’t know about Lord of the Rings. And “SATOR AREPO TENET OPERA ROTAS” doesn’t mean much if you don’t speak Latin.

So why all the secrecy? Don’t we like it when people understand what we’re talking about? Isn’t that the whole point of communication?

As a rule, humans don’t like keeping secrets. A 2013 study in the journal of adolescence found that keeping secrets was toxic to your health. Their exact words were “secrecy was associated with increased delinquency, physical complaints, depressive mood, loneliness, and with lower quality relationships.” Yikes.

However, humans do love feeling superior to an outgroup. It’s even been argued that it’s crucial to our self-esteem to believe our ingroup is better than our outgroups.

What better way to feel superior to others than to possess relevant information that they don’t have? And what better way to make the information you have relevant than by plastering it everywhere you can?

This love of having special information (or, at the very least, appearing to have it) would explain the internet’s love of increasingly obscure memes. Intentionally incomprehensible memes have become so common that some have likened memes to Contemporary Dadaism. (For those out of the loop, according to Wikipedia, original recipe Dadaism “consisted of artists who rejected the logic, reason, and aestheticism of modern capitalist society, instead expressing nonsense, irrationality, and anti-bourgeois protest in their works.”

So we like memes that build on infrastructure and memes that make us look like part of a knowledgeable ingroup. What else do we like in our memes?

3. They make an argument without making an argument.

Here on 50 Shades of Brain, I try not to get political. I tend to leave that to other edgier blogs. That said, this argument is best done with political example

It’s not too hard to find a Facebook page that’s willing to share political messages in the form of pictures. But out of a very strong desire to stay out of current politics, why don’t we hop on a time machine to the year 2009 and look at this picture. In case you didn’t click on it, it’s a photo of Obama’s Inauguration that says, “One Million people attended Obama’s Inauguration and only fourteen missed work.” It doesn’t take much googling to find that both of those numbers are demonstrably untrue. A quick check on Wikipedia will tell you that roughly 1.8 million people attended the inauguration, including thousands of currently-employed security personnel]

Still the implication of this message is clear: “The people who voted for Obama didn’t have jobs and voted for him because he’d help them stay that way.”

But here’s the fun part about posting that picture to your Facebook page, you didn’t actually say that thing about Obama’s supporters. You implied it. So when your crazy/sane liberal Uncle Jeff comes to your wall and says that plenty of people who attended Obama’s inauguration had jobs or that it’s totally normal for people without jobs to vote against the party in power, you can tell him that it’s only a joke.

Isn’t it great? You get to be snarky and sarcastic with none of the consequences or commitment.

And we do love not being committed to an argument. People may like arguing online, but they hate being locked into things they can’t get out of. A study by Dan Ariely shows that we like keeping our options open. We’ll even throw away potential profits to keep options that we know are bad for us open, just because we can’t bear to be hemmed in. Even if we are completely aware that those options are worse for us than the path we’re on now.

Now, disliking Obama in 2008 wasn’t exactly a rare opinion. Roughly 47.1% of the country agreed with you on it. But just in case you’re confronted by that persnickety 52.9%, you can claim it’s just a joke and get out of the argument. This also helps if you’re not as well versed in politics as your aforementioned uncle since we hate losing arguments.

But if we didn’t like engaging in arguments then why even post this stuff? Well that brings us to the final thing that makes for a good meme.

4. Memes that allow us to declare our allegiance.

To understand this next bit, it might help to learn a little about signaling. In both Psychology and Biology, we have a term called “Signaling.” Basically, anytime we have an aspect of ourselves that we want to show off, we need to find a way to “signal” it to the world. In the (non-human) animal world, a peacock “signals” how sexy and well fed it is by showing off a nice coat of feathers. In the human world, a man might show off how much money he has by buying an expensive sports car.

One of the most important things in signal theory is understanding that every signal has a cost. Basically, the more time and effort you put into broadcasting a signal, the more others will assume you care about what you are signaling. For instance, if you donate $200 to breast cancer research, one would think you’re way more dedicated to ending breast cancer than if you just tweeted about it. Granted, what is considered a high-cost signal for you is probably not what would be considered a high cost signal for Bill Gates or Elon Musk.

Now, memes are pretty clearly low cost signals, but sometimes quantity can matter more than quality.

Signaling dovetails nicely with the innate human desire to belong to a group. A lot of popular memes allow you to declare your allegiance to something.

For instance, we talked about this dress earlier. The entire controversy around that dress was based around picking a side. Did you see it as black and blue or white and gold? Either way you get to belong to a new ingroup. An ingroup you get to be in with celebrities.

If you want to get more elaborate you can declare a side within declaring a side. Do you remember Team Edward vs. Team Jacob? [If you don’t, it’s a reference to the Twilight novels where the main character’s two love interests were the sexy brooding vampire Edward and the sexy brooding werewolf Jacob. Now that I told you, you can feel like you’re part of the in-the-know ingroup. You’re welcome.] You could declare your team on t-shirts, coffee mugs, posters, and of course, with internet posts. Now this is a double declaration of your team, not only can you show off that you’re a Twilight fan (a Twihard, if you prefer) but also you can share your allegiance within the Twilight Fandom.

But hey, isn’t shouting Team Jacob also a way of building upon something that’s already part of “pre-existing” infrastructure? Isn’t it also a way of being understandable to your ingroup (Twihards) and not your outgroup? Weren’t those things we talked about earlier in the post?

Yeah, maybe instead of taking a look at these four things separately, we should be talking about them all together.

Bringing it all together

So if you’ve been counting, we’ve narrowed it down to four things. We like memes that are the following.

1. Build upon some “pre-existing infrastructure”

2. Be understandable to your ingroup but not your outgroup.

3. Make an argument that you can walk away from.

4. Show off your allegiance.

Now, it’s not too hard to see that these four objectives do dovetail nicely with each other. The ideal meme would signal to your ingroup that you’re a member (possibly with a humorous reference), but leave your outgroup with no information. This meme would also present an argument you can easily dismiss as ‘just a joke.’

If we wanted to keep going with our Twilight example (and honestly, why would we want to stop talking about Twilight for any reason?) When you shout, “Team Jacob,” you are 1. Referencing the well-known love story Twilight. 2. Showing off knowledge that is potentially-unknown to your outgroup. 3. Making an argument that you can walk away from (after all, isn’t the other side ridiculous for starting an argument about a book?) 4. Showing off your allegiance to the chiseled werewolf known as Jacob.

Almost every meme we’ve mentioned in this article falls into one or more of these four categories. The Obama election meme above is a very clear way of signaling your allegiance and making an argument you can walk away from. Saint Elmo’s Fire allows you to build off of the pre-existing infrastructure of the Catholic Church and also show your allegiance to that same Catholic Church.

Now there may be a few other factors that help memes spread, and we’ll talk about them and a few other things in this blog post’s appendix, which you should expect to see on this blog in the next month. (Unless I decide I want to do the next post first)

Until then that’s all for this blog post. Be sure to share the ideas in it with literally everyone you can.