All About Meme Formats
By Courtenay Adams
Now that we’ve built a definition of memes (that’s admittedly but necessarily nebulous), let’s break down the different types of meme formats.
There’s a Multiplicity of Meme Formats
Whether you agree or not that pretty much anything can be a meme, it’s hard to deny the options for meme formats are near endless. Scholars Wang and Wang spotlight how memes can take the shape of things like images, videos, forum threads, blog posts, and more; they even note that rumours have a meme-ness to them. Similarly, García López and Martínez Cardama posit that memes are any cultural object that’s primary home is the internet. Dawkins himself—original coiner of the term “meme”—loosely brands anything that’s “gone viral” as a meme.
Images Are One of the Most Well-Known Formats
While memes come in all forms and sizes, there’s one format that comes to mind before all others for many individuals thinking about memes, and that’s the image + Impact font type of meme.
The common misconception that memes are images with joke text likely has a couple origins. For one, a quick Google search for “most popular memes” leads to articles that heavily favour classic image memes like Scumbag Steve, Condescending Wonka, and First World Problems (exhibits 1, 2, and 3). Second, crowd-sourced definitions of memes often reinforce the idea that memes are predominantly image-based. A poster on Quora, for example, asked, “Do memes have to be images?” and at the time of this writing, the most popular response is “Yes, memes do usually have images in them with text…usually the image adds to the humour value of the meme…only text is usually a joke, not a meme.”
To be fair, this fixation on the visual is likely for good reason. As scholar Woodworth points out, humans are “visual creatures” and “if you think about it, an image with a line of text is how we are first introduced to the world of reading.”
Image Memes Are Often Meant to be Ugly
One of the hallmarks of image memes is that they’re often…rustic in nature. Nick Douglas notes that memes are defined by an “Internet Ugly Aesthetic,” which entails “a celebration of the sloppy and the amateurish” utilizing a multiplicity of genres, with attributes including “freehand mouse drawing, digital puppetry, scanned drawings, poor grammar and spelling, human-made glitches, and rough photo manipulation.”
It follows that there are two interesting implications of the Internet Ugly Aesthetic: First, meme creation has a low barrier to entry; second, the questionable design quality is a feature, not a flaw. A system of visual joke production that everyone can participate in fortifies the ground-floor community aspect of memeing, making slick corporate promotions all the more cringe by contrast.
Popular Meme Formats Are Always Changing
Over the past few years, TikTok has seen a meteoric rise in popularity and by some counts is now the third most popular social media platform in the world. Much of its popularity stems from the ability of users to create, share, and remix audiovisual content. Where images once comfortably reigned supreme in the meme world, soundbites are now starting to edge out their dominance. Charlotte Shane, writing for the New York Times Magazine, welcomes readers into “the era of the audio meme, a time when replicable units of sound are a cultural currency as strong as — if not stronger than — images and text.”
Shane discusses how easy TikTok makes it to take a soundbite and remix it into a new spin on the original, and offers a host of reasons as to why this is so appealing: familiar but remixed sounds blend the expected with the novel in an enticing way; voice modulation is inherently interesting to the human brain because humans “like information, and expressive voices give us still more to process”; sounds, and music in particular, are “related to empathy” and “the ability to connect to another person.”
Why All the Fuss About Format?
If virality is like a metric of relatability, it’s important to think about what, exactly, is relatable and why—and what this means for modern culture on a larger scale.
Meme Formats Make Them Hard to Preserve
First, if we agree with the partial definition of memes as being important units of culture, all of a sudden we’re tasked with having to find ways to preserve that culture. García López and Martínez Cardama’s fascinating article on “Strategies for preserving memes as artefacts of digital culture” (also linked above) makes a couple insightful points about the importance of tracking down memes and assessing their formats. The authors classify memes using the term “ephemera,” which in the heritage preservation world refers to “documents generated around an event or article of current interest with no intention of outliving the topicality of their message.” Because of the ephemeral nature of the various meme formats, some scholars worry that these touchpoints of contemporary internet culture will be lost or undiscoverable in the future, leading to a kind of “digital dark age” in the historical record.
But challenges abound with preserving memes; not only does the format of each meme have to be accounted for, so does the context within which the meme lives. As García López and Martínez Cardama state, “Memes involve highly intertextual discourse, with one building one on top of another,” and preserving this context and the reproductive mechanisms of memes “entails technical difficulties” (to put it mildly).
Meme Formats Make Them Seem Falsely Inconsequential
A second consideration, which Tessa dives into more deeply, is the importance of recognizing that the perceived trivial format of memes gives them the potential to become dangerous. Are memes just images and videos of kids doing dumb things and people making jokes?
Certainly many memes are just play and community building, but a 2017 study by Lyons on perceptions of political memes concludes that individuals who perceive “partisan memes as trivial” are less likely to challenge the message behind the meme. As they do not feel personally affected by the meme, they devalue its effect on others, leading to an increased likelihood of the message’s spread: “For this reason…memes may present a highly effective vehicle for the spread of misleading claims or outright misinformation. Not only are they often more likely to be shared than traditional news links…they are less likely to attract corrective efforts of professionals or peers.”
Conclusion: Meme Carefully, My Friends
With these points in mind, next time you’re out in the internet wilds checking out all the dank memes your online world has to offer, remember that a meme is more than just an image or video or trend—it’s an atom of information, a unit of meaning in our cultural tapestry, and it should be enjoyed, remembered, and held accountable accordingly.
For a list of sources, please view our references list.
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