A brief history of the

From dancing babies to whatever's happening on TikTok right now

Bex Peterson, Editor-in-Chief

 

eme culture is so pervasive that I think people take its ubiquity for granted.

Nowadays, everyone is in on it. You’ve got “wine mom” memes, memes for nerds,
marketing memes, memes for just about every profession out there—if you want to get
really obscure, I’m part of a meme group on Facebook specifically geared towards music
engravers. “Sibelius is an objectively good music composition and notation sofiware,”
amirite guys?

It wasn’t always like this. The rise in popularity of memes is, of course, concurrent
with the rise of the internet as a minute-to-minute aspect of our daily lives. Smartphones
allowed us to take the internet with us wherever we go. Again, it seems strange to marvel
at a SkyTrain full of people checking Twitter and Facebook on their phones, but this
simply wasn’t our reality even just 10 years ago.

I know this because I remember what meme culture was like in 2009. J was there,
Gandalf. I was there for LOLCats, FAIL Blog, Rage Comics, and Philosoraptor. I
remember when auto-tuning viral videos was the fresh new comedy offering on YouTube
(in amazing, high-def 480p), and I could recite the entirety of the “Leeroy Jenkins” meme
beginning to end. I was there before that too—on Newgrounds and other early video
hosting sites for Badger Badger Badger (not to be confused for Honey Badger) and yes,
unfortunately, Salad Fingers. Thanks for the nightmares, David Firth.

I remember there was also a time where people would get pretty uppity about
conflating “viral videos” with “memes.” My previous paragraph would not have flown
on the message boards of yore; there was a clear difference between “going viral” and
“becoming a meme.” Nowadays, they seem to largely amount to the same thing. Viral
properties tend to spawn memes, by the very nature of what memes are.

Which of course raises the question—what exactly are memes?

Richard Dawkins was the first to approach the subject of “memes” in social theory
in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. Dawkins’ “meme” was a broad term to explain the
phenomenon of how “cultural information” spreads—often through the use of repeated
symbols or mannerisms passed along as people interact with one another. It’s far more
complicated than that, but you can see the roots of where the term was appropriated
into its modern context. Mike Godwin (yes, of Godwin’s Law) was the one who took
Dawkins’ term and applied it to internet culture in a 1994 issue of Wired magazine, as
early memes started cropping up in email chains or on message boards.

The “Dancing Baby” meme is often credited as the very first viral video/meme;
however, given how memes were spread at the time, it’s virtually impossible to pinpoint
any viral sensation as being the “first.” The Dancing Baby—also known as “Baby Cha-
Cha’”—was a 1996 short video of a CGI baby dancing to “Hooked on a Feeling” by Blue
Swede. The video was largely shared via email before, according to KnowYourMeme.
com, it was compressed into a GIF file and sent out further into the reaches of the World
Wide Web.

It would take many, many pages to do a thorough timeline of memes and viral web
content, but I can do a quick overview and hit on some of the old favourites. If you
remember “The Hampsterdance” from 2000—congratulations, you’re old now, but more
excitingly you remember another prominent early internet meme! Even more excitingly,
the meme was originally created by a Canadian: Deidre LaCarte of Nanaimo, British
Columbia, who created the “Hampsterdance” in 1998 as part of a competition with her
best friend and her sister to see who could attract the most internet traffic. The original
web page was simple, just a line of gifs of spinning and dancing cartoon hamsters set to
a 9-second, sped-up sample from the song “Whistle Stop” by Roger Miller (and yes, it’s
the song that plays over the opening credits of Disney’s Robin Hood). The web page went
oh 2 A viral in 1999 and attracted the attention of the Boomtang Boys, a Canadian band, who
ae ont , i ' i produced and released a full-length song based off the sample and the web page in 2000.

TTT 3 eo Video hosting sites such as Newgrounds helped provide a stable platform for viral

J q U re wy videos such as the explosive “Numa dance” video in 2004. Meanwhile, official dark

| hellhole of the internet 4chan.org launched in 2003 and is said to be the originator of
Rickrolling, LOLCats, “Chocolate Rain,” and more. The site has also acted as a breeding
ground for some of the absolute worst the internet has to offer (much of the rise of the alt-
right can be traced back to the anonymous nature of 4chan’s message board system, but
that’s another article entirely).

Of course, the real Juggernaut of viral videos is the site, the myth, the legend:
YouTube, the ultimate video hosting site. There’s not much to say here that isn’t already
widely known, other than that it was founded in 2005 by PayPal employees Chad
Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim. Over 14 years it has transformed from a simple
video hosting site to an enormous platform for content creators—who needs MTV when
everyone’s uploading their music videos to YouTube these days?