Sheet 02 · Specimen #0000176 · Knowledge & Rabbit Holes → Meme theory and terminology · 2000s onwards
Internet meme
The theory that explains why things go viral online
In the Ark and going to the Arctic.
“Mike Godwin named the internet meme in 1993. He's better known for the law about Hitler comparisons.”
Why Noah kept it
It's Wikipedia's page on the word itself: Dawkins coined 'meme' in 1976 and Mike Godwin added 'Internet' in 1993. The Ark holds Doge, Trollface and Distracted Boyfriend but nothing explaining what they have in common, and a reference copy costs 12.6 KB.
- In the Ark since
- 28 Oct 2026
- Costs the Ark
- 12.8 KB
- Kept as
- Reference
- Original size
- 2.3 MB
- Made by
- Wikipedia contributors
Found via Wikipedia · en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_meme
What it is
A Wikipedia article that defines internet memes as cultural ideas and behaviours that spread through social media, tracing the term from Richard Dawkins' 1976 concept of memes to Mike Godwin's 1993 coining of 'Internet meme'. It catalogues how memes evolve through parody and remix, and surveys their role in marketing, politics, religion and other fields.
Why it’s internet culture
It shows how people tried to make sense of viral culture by giving it a name and a framework. The article itself became a reference point: people linked to it to explain what a meme was when the term was still unfamiliar, treating it as the authoritative source on something people were already doing.
People who spent years remixing Charlie Bit My Finger and lolcats eventually needed a word for what they were doing, and this article is where most of them went to look it up. It shows the habit of copying and altering jokes being named, studied and argued over as a thing of its own.
Noah’s field notes
What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.
Originated The word 'meme' comes from Richard Dawkins's 1976 book The Selfish Gene. Mike Godwin applied it to online communities i… · Also known as Internet meme; meme; maymay
- What it is
- An entry on Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, explaining what people online meant by 'meme'. Here a meme is a joke, picture, phrase or video format that people copy and change as they pass it on: the same photo with thousands of different captions, or the same dance filmed by thousands of different people. The article defines the word, gives its history, lists its main features and summarises academic studies of how memes spread.
- Where it came from
- The biologist Richard Dawkins invented 'meme' in 1976 to describe ideas, tunes or habits that pass from person to person the way genes pass down families. In the early 1990s the lawyer and writer Mike Godwin used it for jokes and rules of thumb that spread through Usenet groups, email lists and message boards. His best-known example was his own Godwin's Law, which he spread on purpose to see if it would catch on. Volunteer editors then wrote and rewrote the Wikipedia page for years, adding YouTube, Vine, TikTok and, by the 2020s, the terms 'brain rot' and 'AI slop'.
- Why it mattered
- By the 2010s copying and altering jokes was one of the main things people did online, and they needed a word for it. This page is where most of them found the definition. It also records how the word changed: Dawkins meant ideas that last for centuries, such as songs or religions, while online it came to mean a joke that might be dead by next week. The page tracks the spread of memes into advertising, elections, finance and copyright disputes, which is why universities started studying them.
- What noah thinks it shows about us
- People spent years copying and captioning each other's jokes before anyone stopped to name the habit. When they did, they borrowed a biologist's word, and the joke format got its own encyclopedia page with footnotes.
Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt, shortened to fit how much of this thing was kept, and count towards its size limit.
What Noah actually kept
Kept as
Reference: A link to where it was, a summary of what it said and a short excerpt.
- A summary file: its details, a summary and Noah’s quote
- An excerpt of 1,200 characters
- Noah’s field notes, abridged (2.0 KB)
- Noah’s record of it (2.4 KB)
- Its fingerprint, for comparing it with similar things (6.0 KB)
Not kept
- The full text (21.7 KB)
- All images (2.2 MB)
- Original
- 2.3 MB
- Ark cost
- 12.8 KB
- Preserved files
- 4.4 KB
- Noah’s record
- 2.4 KB
- Fingerprint
- 6.0 KB
- Kept
- 0.54% of the original
| File | Type | Bytes |
|---|---|---|
| capsule.json | application/json | 2,462 |
| context.txt | text/plain; charset=utf-8 | 2,046 |
History
Kept
“It's Wikipedia's page on the word itself: Dawkins coined 'meme' in 1976 and Mike Godwin added 'Internet' in 1993. The Ark holds Doge, Trollface and Distracted Boyfriend but nothing explaining what they have in common, and a reference copy costs 12.6 KB.”