Meme-a defintion

‘Meme’ is a popular term for describing the noticeable and often rapid uptake and spread of a particular idea in the form of written text, an image, a language ‘move’, or other piece or unit of cultural information (e.g., a catchphrase, a video clip, a recount of an event).

In research conducted by Lankshear and Knobel the key criteria for identifying a meme as a meme included:
• the meme is contagious, replicable, and has longevity (i.e., is discussed or passed on for longer than a period of a days)
• the meme encodes a recognizable element of cultural information, where cultural information is defined as some kind of meaningful idea, pattern, or chunk of ‘stuff’ that embodies and/or shapes some aspect of the ways of doing and being that are associated with belonging to a particular practice or group
• the meme is more or less wholly transmitted via electronic vehicles (e.g., email, websites, online discussion forums, chat spaces)
• the meme passes outside the shared affinity space within which it first came to prominence (e.g., insider-jokes generated within collaborative spaces such as Fark.com or SomethingAweful.com but that do not extend beyond the members of this space are not included in this analysis, which aims at examining memes that have a wide reach)
• the meme can be deemed ‘successful’ because it is strong enough or salient enough to capture online and offline broadcast media attention in the form of fullblown reports through to side-bar mentions in newspapers, television news reports or talk shows, widely-read trade publications and magazines.


Three broad elements that a successful meme may contain:

• Some element of humour, ranging from the quirky and offbeat, to chortle-worthy potty humour, to the bizarrely funny, to parodies, through to the acerbically ironic
• A rich kind of intertextuality, such as wry cross-references to different popular culture events, icons or phenomena, and/or
• Anomalous juxtapositions, usually of images

Taken from Memes and affinities: Cultural replication and literacy education
Michele Knobel and Colin Lankshear
Paper presented to the annual NRC, Miami, November 30, 2005.