I grew up on the icanhascheezburger sites, and for the longest time, I thought I knew exactly what memes were. All the pictures of cats and other animals (stuff that I would learn were later termed “advice animals”) with text, that’s what I defined as a meme. Later in life I joined the ranks of tumblr and Reddit, and my interpretation widened. On both sites I saw comment trends and jokes based on things people had said. Those also eventually fell into my interpretation of a meme. Up until now that had been my understanding of a meme. I had never really given it a second thought. But then this past week in class occurred.

“A unit of cultural information that replicates while still remaining whole.” This is the definition of a meme as it is presented in From Memes to Mashups: Creating Content from Content. I wasn’t entirely sure what to think of this definition at first. Then the TED talk with Susan Blackmore helped me understand exactly what that meant. Memes aren’t just the images and comment trends we see on the internet. Memes have been around for a long time before that.

How I understand it now is that anything we do over and over as a culture can be considered a meme. That puts an even wider umbrella over what can be seen as memes. For example, through this definition memes can be high fives, texting abbreviations, or even slang that’s become common place (ratchet, swag, etc.). Any cultural trend is a meme. It makes even more sense in the context of recent memes. The left shark meme is a good example. To some people now, and a bit down the line, it may seem like one of those “classic” internet memes that have popped up like grumpy cat, but as we know now, it has come out of a big aspect of our culture, the most recent Super Bowl halftime show. Left Shark is a cultural trend that is being posted over and over, which in turn makes it a meme.

So I wondered why the definition of memes narrowed so much for me and many other people. That reason is the Internet. The Internet is a system where people are able to easily create and share content on the fly. One of the easiest pieces of content to create and share is an image, so it makes sense that these types of memes would flourish. Social networking in particular has played a massive part in this. Think about how many times you’ve seen “typical” memes shared on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc. With all these new avenues to share content, people are making more and more. So much to the point that the term meme quickly became primarily associated with those sorts of images.

This actually connects back to a notion I developed on the first day of class. After our buzzword exercise, I came up with the idea that the Internet may have started out as way to share information around the world, but has developed into an entertainment center. This new understanding of memes actually changes that idea for me. The change isn’t massive, but does modify a key aspect of the idea. The Internet has still become an entertainment center yes, but that doesn’t mean it lost what it originally was. By defining memes as bits of cultural information, even those “typical” memes, whose sharing supports the entertainment center development, are information being shared. The Internet may have become an entertainment center, but it’s still wholeheartedly a center for sharing information. That information’s type has just greatly increased in regards to cultural information.