Memes; They’re literally everywhere.
If you log onto any social media site, within an hour I’m sure you’ll come across at least one.
Since around 2005 memes have been showing up across the internet. Since the rise of social media, this phenomenon has escalated. Success kid, bad luck brain, The Office memes, and countless others are just a few examples of the endless possibilities that can be made into memes.
Twitter is like a giant pool of internet memes. Some sink, others swim.
Kermit the Frog has made multiple appearances as a meme during his years on social media. Just this year ‘Evil Kermit’ memes have made their rise to stardom, and a year ago, ‘Tea Sipping Kermit’ memes were in the spot light. Kermit may perhaps be one of the biggest meme producers on twitter.
The Tea Sipping Kermit meme originally was an advertisement for Lipton Tea.
Evil Kermit memes have evolved from a Muppets movie Muppets Most Wanted.
By analyzing this social media phenomenon through memetics, we can better comprehend how Kermit the Frog movie and advertisement snapshots became popular internet memes. Incorporating spreadability and originality with the memetics, I was able to see why Evil Kermit memes have been more successful virally than the Tea Sipping Kermit memes.
Tea Kermit and Evil Kermit are the two memes that were chosen by twitter users out of the vast pool of Kermit memes. The two memes proved to users they were the best variations of Kermit the Frog memes and so their longevity of the transmission/ replication stage gave rise to their success as a viral meme.
The level of success is determined by each meme’s capacity to meet a standard of spreadability, and also prove their originality.
Evil Kermit memes out performed Tea Kermit memes because they had more connecting principles to enhance their spreadability, and they also had the originality aspect on their side. Tea Kermit memes lacked one of the components applicable to Evil Kermit memes, and they also weren’t as original in their content.
This analysis helped me understand how memes of the same origin (Kermit the Frog) could take on such vastly different levels of spreadability.
And thus, I introduce to you: Kermit The Social Media Frognomenon.
So, memes. what exactly is a meme?
In a cultural context, memes are “stories, songs, habits, skills, inventions, and ways of doing things that we copy from person to person by imitation.” (The Power of Memes, 2000).
This idea of imitation is what drove Richard Dawkins’ theory of memetics. In his book The Selfish Gene, Dawkins describe how his theory of memetics explains the evolution of human culture. This theory focuses on how the replication or coping of memes—ideas, songs, habits etc.— is impacted by variation. These variants are then subjective to the selection of some variants over others.
25 years after Dawkins released his theory of memetics, social media has adopted his term ‘meme’ to describe these viral photos, phrases, and videos. (Solon, 2013)
When interview by Saatchi & Saatchi Richard Dawkins was asked about what he thought of the internet reappropriating his term ‘meme’. Dawkins replied:
“The meaning is not that far away from the original. It’s anything that goes viral. In the original introduction to the word meme in the last chapter of The Selfish Gene, I did actually use the metaphor of a virus. So when anybody talks about something going viral on the internet, that is exactly what a meme is and it looks as though the word has been appropriated for a subset of that.”
Studying the memetics behind the evolution of Kermit the Frog on social media is a good way to begin analyzing the phenomenon. Because of internet meme’s relation to Dawkins’ original theory of memes, we can look at the memetics and further our understanding of the background about why certain Kermit the Frog memes are successful and others aren’t.
The memetics behind The Evil Kermit and Tea Kermit memes shows us why there is more success virally for both of these memes as opposed to the countless other Kermit memes not as virally known. From there we can incorporate aspects of spreadability in the selection process laid out by Dawkins.
These spreadability principles are what the authors of Spreadable Media argue are key factors in whether something will be successful or fail online.
My two memes, Evil Kermit and Tea Kermit, have made it the viral stage. However, in comparison the Evil Kermit meme reached a higher or more successful level than the Tea Kermit meme. The components that both memes had, were Humor and reference, and Evil Kermit memes also included timely controversy. All of these principles are defined in one of my earlier blogs (click here).
The last piece included in my analysis was the use of originality across social media. If the content in a meme isn’t original or has already been done, it will decrease the viral success levels. In a study done for the WARC Prize for Social Strategy, 83% percent of case study authors felt that “the originality of the idea was most important to success”.
Despite the memetics behind memes and the success levels through spreadability and originality, it is important to understand why memes are so significant in our society today.
As social media becomes a larger and larger part of popular culture, the number of users get larger too. According to a Pew research study, approximately 67% of internet users use social media of some kind. As of this year, a little less than half of the world (3.5 billion people) were internet users. That numbers only growing. (Internet Live Stats, 2016)
So if 67% of the 3.5 billion internet users are using social media, that means there is an extremely large amount of people getting exposed to internet memes.
As the number of social media users and internet users continue to grow, so does the importance of memes. These are no longer just humorous fads making their way through people’s feeds, it’s become something much more important.
The Evil Kermit meme and Tea Kermit meme have importance that is larger than just providing laughs. In order for them to be spreadable like they are (especially Evil Kermit), it’s got to mean something to people. It has to communicate to them.
Engelbreght Advertising company says this:
“The true power of a meme comes not in how humorous it is, but in how many people can identify it. These forms of Internet memes are intended to be inside jokes, passed around by people who are “in” on the joke. This is what makes them so successful; who wants to be the person who’s left out on a popular joke?”
The humor does impact the memes ability to be viral, but so does the reference or ‘inside joke’. Like stated above, people want to be “in” on things, it gives them a sense of belonging. This plays an important role when dealing with the Evil Kermit and Tea Kermit memes. Both involve humor and references, but the way each meme goes about portraying them is a little different. This impacts their individual abilities to elicit strong enough feelings for twitter users to share those memes. It also impacts who their audience is.
This use of humor and references involved in both Evil Kermit and Tea Kermit’s memes is the deciding factor of who the audience is, and what that audience will feel. Whether it be a feeling of belonging because the audience understood what was going on, or a feeling of confusion because they didn’t, this is important when analyzing the successfulness of both memes.
Social media & society 
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