The Categorisation of Internet Memes – A Different Approach

Abstract

Memes have unwittingly been used in human communication for millennia already, but it is only recently that they have been defined as a concept. Just like in everyday life, memes also developed online. They are to be seen as part of the larger general definition of cultural memes as Dawkins defined them in his work “The Selfish Gene” (1976). In this paper a new approach for the categorisation of internet memes will be presented. In contrast to previous methods, it takes multiple characteristics, like the medium, the ratio of visual vs. text, the content and the type, into account and grasps the core idea – the transmission of a unit of cultural information – behind memes.