Dominant Meme: What Are the Units of Culture?

How It All Began

In his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins proposed the existence of universal components of culture—memes. But he wasn’t the first: even earlier, academic psychiatrist Vladimir Bekhterev had the idea of “small mental particles.” In his article “Different Views on the Nature of Suggestion,” he wrote:

“…it is worth recalling the ‘psychic contagion’ that leads to mental infection, the microbes of which, though invisible under a microscope, nevertheless act everywhere and are transmitted through words, gestures, and movements of those around us, books, newspapers, etc. In short, wherever we are, in the society around us, we are at risk of being mentally infected.”

In the same 1970s, sociobiologists Edward Wilson and Charles Lumsden spoke of “gene-culture” coevolution, driven by the “culturgene”—a unit of mental processes like learning or perception. Through these, humans understand their environment. Neither Bekhterev nor Wilson and Lumsden developed their ideas further, so Dawkins is considered the father of memes. Dawkins himself emphasized that he used the concept only to illustrate the power of the physical gene and did not propose a universal theory of cultural evolution.

The Essence and Status of Memetics

Dawkins believed that all living things evolve thanks to self-replicating units. In nature, this creative component is the DNA molecule, and the survival of a species depends on the constant transmission of genes to the next generation. From the chaos of the universe, Dawkins pulled out a similar unit for culture and called it the meme (from the Greek root mimētḗs, meaning “imitation”). These ideas became the foundation for a new discipline—memetics.

Memetics does not have official scientific status, but we encounter its subject—memes—every day. And not just the jokes from social media feeds, but anything whose core is an idea. Physicist Douglas Hofstadter, in a Scientific American debate, suggested the term “memetics,” and soon scholars from various fields began to argue about the nature of memes: “internalists” believed memes originate in individual consciousness, while “externalists” thought they are born in the cultural environment.

The first approach makes it difficult to study “cultural genes,” since the birth of a meme is hard to pinpoint, and brain activity or mental states can’t (yet) be quantified. One of the most significant works on this topic is anthropologist Robert Aunger’s book The Electric Meme.

Sociologist Gabriel Tarde wrote that for a social system to remain intact, it must consist of homogeneous elements. At the core of any society lies imitation, which socializes individuals and controls their behavior. If we recall that Dawkins called memes cultural replicators, we can note that a meme is a transmitter of experience in a concise form, making it a building block—at least in the media sphere. In the age of “clip thinking,” memes act like viruses, with their main goal being to become a trend.

Many researchers agree: a meme is like a replicator, constantly reproducing and attacking the cultural space. The more contagious a meme, the more successful it is. Dawkins believed that catchy, concise, long-lasting memes mutate as they are passed on. Such information units can form “meme pools” or complexes of ideas that influence humanity for centuries. One example: archetypal religious images.

Are Memes a Joke?

Today, the language of memes amplifies influence. Virtual and real communication are merging, and online communication techniques are flowing into offline life. The ancestor of the internet meme is the joke, but now a joke is no longer just a verbal construct—it takes on new forms. Memes have much in common with catchphrases, but through transformation, they gain new meaning.

Some believe memes narrow the meaning of public discourse. A meme can be deliberately introduced into the media space to label reality in a certain way, freeing the speaker from fully justifying their point of view. Howard Becker touched on this in his theory of stigmatization: according to him, members of influential social groups tend to label members of less influential groups, leading to stereotypes (for example, that lower classes have more potential criminals).

Our brains are always saving energy, so stereotypes that already contain a socially assigned meaning are convenient to use and, like microbes, penetrate even the minds of educated people. Labels also help protect against information overload. This construction becomes a new tool, reducing complex situations to a label: think of clichés like “foreign agents” or “the party of crooks and thieves.”

People who regularly consume internet memes are not just having fun—they are decoding the cultural code of the era, year, decade, day, or even hour. With the ultra-fast spread of information and trends, there’s a need to latch onto something, to have a stable identity that helps distinguish like-minded people in a flood of junk messages. That’s why speech memes are often used in comments: it’s a way for users to signal their belonging to a particular virtual community.

Because of endless automatic replication, a meme can lose its original meaning. This simplifies the concept it was meant to convey. Nevertheless, memes reveal the collective unconscious, as they often play on taboo topics. The fertile ground for this is internet communication itself—massive and relatively anonymous.

Memes and Linguistics

Memes affect the recipient in a complex way, with form often more important than content: verbal and nonverbal means merge into a single whole. One goal of a meme is to provoke an emotional reaction and reduce social distance, so they often use colloquial, informal, or even obscene language. The image and text in a meme are combined so the user perceives the situation dynamically, not statically.

Creating a meme is similar to making an advertising slogan. There are many ways to form such a speech construct: using neologisms, puns, playing on homonyms, paronyms, and anachronisms. There are many anachronisms in the “Suffering Middle Ages” public page, where modern language and concepts are superimposed on medieval realities; a typical paronymic meme is “I have to suffer early tomorrow.” Some memes are built on sound similarity: “The chameleon bites. Has he become chame-mean?”

Memes feature tropes and stylistic devices. Most common are antithesis (e.g., “expectation vs. reality”), hyperbole (“+100500”), and irony (“oh, go ahead, tell me”). Notably, the meaning of such a joke is based on the form of expression, especially the artistic device. Memes often break language norms at the phonetic and other levels and lower the style—like changing the letter “v” to the non-existent “ff”: “preved,” “dratuti” instead of “zdravstvuyte” (“hello”).

A meme does not exist outside of context; it always relies on relevance, referencing widely known information, events, or people. It becomes a way to transmit sociocultural signs and forms of language, allowing the media to build new communication strategies and visualize the agenda.

Svetlana Shomova, author of the book Memes As They Are, identifies five phases of meme development that can determine the success of a joke:

1. Generation of the meme as a reaction to an event or process.
2. Repetition in the original context.
3. Acquiring new meanings and breaking away from the original context, opening up channels of association.
4. The meme becomes part of mass culture and enters communication, used in mass media.
5. Transition to offline as a physical object (as happened, for example, with the “Zhdun” meme).

The creative possibilities for making memes depend on the development of information technology, and their scope expands as virtual reality increasingly takes over the world.

Expert Opinion

To analyze the topic, we turned to an expert for some clarification. Linguist Alexandra Rusakovich shared her view on the development of memes.

How do you assess changes in youth communication after the spread of internet memes?

“The changes began not even with memes, but with the spread of abbreviations (like ‘thx’ and others), and later with the emergence of emoji language. Overall, there’s a trend toward shorter messages and higher concentration of meaning—now you can express your reaction or opinion with a single symbol. In my opinion, memes are mini-narratives; they are more complex than signs like emojis. Moreover, memes have different target audiences, divided by age, profession, and sometimes social status, so the message becomes multidimensional—a meme can convey a story, emotion, show you’re ‘one of us,’ introduce someone to your taste, show attention, etc. You could say a meme is one of the most concise and universal communication tools.”

Do you think memes overly standardize language and communication?

“I don’t think memes simplify communication. The way we read and receive information has changed in just a few years. Many complain that people read less today—but they don’t consider that we now get much more information per day than a few years ago, thanks to new media formats: interactive storytelling projects, literary works in the form of games, and other ‘hybrids’—all of this affects our methods of processing information. So memes are a continuation of this trend—new carriers of cultural and social information. Some users learn about news from memes, which meet modern requirements: they’re visual, interactive (you can change elements yourself), viral, and evoke emotions.”

Do you think the use of memes in language will expand? If so, what could this lead to?

“Already, there are hardly any limits to where memes are used. They’re used in marketing, to illustrate articles in the media (‘Lentach’ uses only memes on its Telegram channel, and ‘TJ’ has a meme column). Memes can be not just illustrations but the news hook itself; popular lecturers use them (I’m not sure about school lessons, but soon the trend will reach even the most conservative institutions). Educational projects like ‘Arzamas’ actively use memes. In the future, more people will unlock the potential of memes, and the stigma of them being ‘childish or unserious’ will gradually disappear: after all, memes are a great way to express the opinion of the masses on any issue, and there’s no better alternative in this context yet.”

What’s Next?

Internet memes dominate youth communication. Since this social group is connected to education, it’s worth considering using memes as an additional motivation for learning, visualizing scientific topics, finding new ways for teachers and students to communicate, or drawing attention to certain fields of knowledge. Memes have already become a lever for popularizing self-education: semi-intellectual social media pages informally set the criteria for users who want to join their community.

Memes are neither good nor bad. They’ve already found their niche and serve social functions, and they can be used in different ways: for educational and enlightening purposes, or as a tool for propaganda or negative influence on mass consciousness. In the end, even conspiracy theories are memes.