By Chand Rajendra-Nicolucci and Ethan Zuckerman

Social media has changed the way memes—cultural building blocks—are produced, transmitted, and selected. In particular, social media has expanded the diversity of memes and accelerated their evolutionary process. Framing social media as an evolutionary environment for memes is a useful analytical tool for understanding the digital public sphere.

In January 2021, GameStop, a video game retailer and mall mainstay, saw its stock price increase 1500% over the course of two weeks. The shocking rise was due in large part to a coordinated effort by the subreddit WallStreetBets, who for months pushed the idea that GameStop was primed to “go to the moon.” The idea, which had little basis in reality, was “memed into existence” nonetheless, resulting in Redditors making fortunes, while Wall Street pros, many of whom had bet against the stock, lost billions. As an example of the fallout, one of the leaders of the effort on WallStreetBets, Keith Gill, a marketer at an insurance company who went by the handle “DeepFuckingValue,” saw his $53,000 investment turn into almost $50 million, while Melvin Capital, a hedge fund that bet heavily against GameStop, lost $6.8 billion and eventually shut down.

GameStop isn’t the only “meme stock.” (Though it was the first and most prominent.) AMC, Bed Bath & Beyond, and Blackberry have all seen their stocks go through similar cycles. (Cryptocurrencies were arguably the first meme stocks. Take Dogecoin. Dogecoin was a joke. Software engineers Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer wanted to create a payment system that would make fun of the speculation in cryptocurrencies. So, in 2013 they created a cryptocurrency based on “Doge,” a popular meme at the time featuring a picture of a smirking shiba inu. A lot of people liked the idea, and, to Markus and Palmer’s dismay, took it quite seriously, eventually pushing Dogecoin to a peak market capitalization of nearly $100 billion.)

Meme stocks illustrate both meanings of the word “meme.” The popular meaning of “meme” describes the content format preferred by Redditors for whipping up interest in a stock: “An image, video, piece of text, … typically humorous in nature, that is copied and spread rapidly by internet users, often with slight variations.” The broader, more academic meaning of “meme” describes the core idea, “buy this stock, it will go up,” that spread among Redditors and eventually throughout the investing world: “A cultural element … whose transmission and … persistence in a population, although occurring by non-genetic means (esp. imitation), is considered … analogous to the inheritance of a gene.” Memes defined this way are as old as humanity—religions, political systems, and cuisines are all arguably memes.

The parts of social media that make the meme content format possible—democratized production, rapid speed, and massive scale—have important implications for the broader, academic meaning of meme as well. More ideas, behaviors, and styles can be spread farther and faster than ever before. This acceleration and diversification of the cultural evolutionary process has a number of effects. We’ll highlight a couple. The first could be called the “long-tail” effect: because there’s a broader set of memes circulating, more people can find cultural building blocks tailored to their interests, background, and beliefs. It’s easier for people to be themselves thanks to social media, which offers a much wider variety of cultural building blocks than comparatively homogeneous legacy media. The second could be called the “superstar” effect: the speed, scale, and diversity of social media intensifies the cultural evolutionary process, making it more competitive and more unequal—the popular memes are more popular than ever before. Social media is ruthlessly efficient at directing attention at the most competitive memes—this is why it can seem like everyone on Twitter is talking about the same thing, even though it’s a platform with hundreds of millions of users.

Beyond those two examples, all kinds of important dynamics in the digital public sphere, from the breakdown of shared facts and narratives, to information overload, to social comparison, are better understood in the context of social media’s transformation of the memetic environment. Framing social media as an evolutionary environment for memes can be a useful analytic tool—thinking about how a platform affects meme production, transmission, and selection can yield valuable insights.

Ultimately, memes, in both senses of the word, reflect and illuminate fundamental dynamics of social media. A platform’s algorithm (what does it prioritize?), affordances (can you repost? can you easily remix content?), and governance (can you link to other platforms?) affect how memes are produced, transmitted, and selected. And the meme content format reflects social media’s irony-inflected, participatory, viral character—if the medium is the message, then the meme is social media’s message.

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See Algorithms, Alt-Tech, Irony, Popularity Virality