You don’t have to visit “knowyourmeme.com” to know about Pepe the sad frog or Grumpy Cat. You didn’t need access to internet in middle school to encounter “Bad Luck Brian” on a quirky teacher’s powerpoints. Most don’t have to wait until April-fool’s day to get Rick-Rolled. And everyone remembers the “Gangnam style” internet phenomenon.

Whether you’re familiar with the term meme or not, that’s what these are.  Memes are something that even celebrities of the day are becoming (e.g. Drake and “Poot” Lovato). These memes are not simply transferred from brain to brain, but from username to brain, @ to @, IP address to IP address.

I think the internet is spiraling out of control more than memes are, but memes are the larger than life result.  

Do memes have any defining quality, and why does it make sense that memes are the reason the internet is taking over our consciousness? With nearly all of our information transmitted technologically, anything can be a meme. This makes the term ambiguous and difficult to grasp.

By scientific definition, a “meme” is “any idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture that may be considered to be passed on by non-genetic means.” So, that song stuck in your head is a meme, and so is that hip 80’s sweater you think you’re alternative for wearing right now. These are all ideas that have non-genetically wedged themselves in your brain; ideas that you have therefore adopted via the “imitation” process.

Internet provides a  basis for memes to spread like a web and stem from each other. Because it is so widely accessed, one does not have to directly access it to come across someone whose ideas are affected by it. So if you are unfamiliar with Pepe the frog, you most likely are familiar with someone who is, whose ideas have been affected by him. Thus your ideas are affected by him, too, via exchanging non-genetic information through simple conversation.

Due to the amount of non-genetic information the internet spreads that can be accessed by anyone, ideas have consequently lost originality. Though this doesn’t prevent innovation,  all innovations are influenced by someone or something else; no innovations are or will be a direct product of the innovator’s mind.

The internet is transmitting so many memes, directly and indirectly, that our minds and the world around us is/will be essentially controlled by a machine.  And the scariest thing: the memes emitted from these machines will outlive us (yes, the Pepe kind, too). They won’t cease to exist until all the people who remember and are affected by those who remembered, and were affected by those people who …and so on, and so on, and on, cease to exist themselves. Spoopy.