(intriguing electronic music)
Do you glance around sometimes
and wonder what everyone's looking at?
What they're looking for?
By 2021, it's estimated more people around the world
will have smartphones than running water.
On the face of it, we seem distracted
and fragmented by digital culture,
but are we perhaps craving connection in new ways?
Creating, sharing, reacting as never before?
As we film this, every second,
8,000 tweets are send into the Twittersphere,
850 Instagram photos are uploaded,
and there are 68,000 Google searches.
In amongst the digital traffic,
millions of jokes, videos, music samples, and images
are being shared from friend to friend
or anonymously on message boards.
These are memes.
(upbeat electronic music)
Internet memes can often appear frivolous,
sometimes almost random and frequently uncomfortable.
But they're being churned out 24 hours a day,
competing in an attention economy
that draws web traffic and advertising revenue.
The circumstances of what it means
to be a human being that's connected
in this world has completely changed.
I think it's exciting and weird
and strange and interesting.
It is a bit scary, though.
To try to grapple with this brave new world,
I'm going to experiment with inventing
and distributing some memes myself,
meeting anyone from scientists ...
That would be a good meme.
And internet gurus ...
It's posted. It's gone!
Yes!
To YouTube stars ...
Oh, that's disgusting, actually.
And a troll ...
Meme shared.
Will tell me how to get more shares.
How do we make something go viral? (laughs)
To understand our world today,
I think we need to decode memes,
how they've worked and spread in the past,
and how they work and spread
with dizzying speed in the present,
how they don't just represent what we think
but also shape what we think.
(soft electronic music)
Memes have been around a lot longer than the internet.
(ecstatic music)
You can copy this at home if you like.
The V sign, said to have started 600 years ago
at the Battle of Agincourt,
when English archers defiantly showed the French
the fingers they'd used to draw longbows against them.
It became a gesture of abuse,
but then had a new lease of life in the Second World War.
(planes whirring)
Churchill adopted the V as a symbol
of resistance to fascism.
The Allies used mass communication
to encourage people across occupied Europe
to graffiti Vs for victory as a symbol of defiance.
("Symphony No. 5" by Beethoven)
When American president Richard Nixon
started using V for victory as he wound up the Vietnam War,
hippie protestors recycled it as a symbol of peace, man.
So up yours, victory, peace.
A catchy cultural symbol that caught on
with different generations and spread from person to person,
mutating, changing its meanings, and being passed on again.
In today's terminology, it's a meme.
The intriguing questions is, why do certain memes,
like the V sign, become so successful,
subject to seemingly endless reuse and reinterpretation,
while most memes are just forgotten?
(typing)
Today, technology and mass literacy
mean we produce and consume memes as never before.
But which internet memes are gonna have
the viral success of something like the V sign?
Luckily, someone is cataloging the needles
in the internet haystack.
(horn honking)
Launched in 2008, Know Your Meme is a kind of Wikipedia
of memes but, more than that, a benchmark.
When Know Your Meme catalogs a new meme,
it gives it official status as a notable cultural event.
(intriguing electronic music)
So perhaps editor Brad Kim can tell me
what's going on, and why, just why.
Why should we take memes seriously?
You don't necessarily have to take memes seriously.
But to be serious, we have a daily craving
for things that are just so ...
dumb that it leaves you with the feeling
I laughed a little harder than I should have.
I think it's an escapism.
Certain literary devices that are used in memes
are timeless.
Non-sequiturs, for instance,
not making sense intentionally,
going against logic, WTF.
One of my favorite videos on the internet is actually
a five-second video of a waffle falling over.
The name of the video is "Waffle Falling Over."
The reason why I love it is it's very compact
in setting up all the right jokes,
which is you click on a video that says
"Waffle Falling Over," and you're anticipating,
you're trying to imagine what this is gonna be like.
It's exactly what it is, and you're left with this feeling
that's kind of empty, but it's also like,
what else did I really expect?
Do you have any advice for me in making a meme?
Hey, this is a people-approved idea.
Don't try to focus too much about how far it's going to go.
Intent shows through, especially if it doesn't deliver.
Then it's the worst-case scenario,
which is it's the try hard,
failing at an attempt to make virals.
I like that notion of the meme as a people-approved idea,
a unitive culture that lives or dies
depending on whether people share it.
This is the key to the internet's irresistible rise.
It's been driven be here today, gone tomorrow fads,
unpredictable moments when jokes and technology collide
and capture the imagination of internet crowds.
The history of memes is littered with unlikely hits.
Look at this.
(upbeat electronic music)
This is dancing baby from 1996.
(record scratching)
Actually, this isn't dancing baby from 1996,
but you get the rough idea.
A bit like the waffle,
we couldn't actually source or afford the clip,
because this is regulated TV,
not the unregulated internet.
This is dancing baby from 1996,
a short repeating clip, known as a GIF, or is it a JIF?
There's a whole website devoted to the debate
of how to pronounce it?
10 years later, this video of a boy biting
his brother's finger was watched by 766 million people.
Similar pratfalls and epic fails
have become a staple of internet culture.
Original content started to be created,
which generated fads that simultaneously existed
in the real world and online, for example planking,
which exploded across the internet after 2011.
And remember this, the ice bucket challenge,
that went viral in 2014?
Crucially, the web gave users the tools
to copy original work, images, and music,
mash it up, remix, and share,
sometimes reaching millions more people
than the original work did.
It's a bit like when Andy Warhol
took mass-produced and iconic photos
from popular culture and turned them into garish,
exclusive, limited edition prints.
To me, Warhol's prints aren't a million miles away
from internet memes that use existing content online.
These DIY graphics, image macros,
pictures combined with text, have become so common
that they're often simply referred to as being memes.
To millions of people, this is what a meme is:
easy to share, easy to create or change.
On the internet, the boyfriend is distracted.
Movie star Ryan Gosling says, "Hey girl."
And poor Harold grimaces for a vast range of reasons.
But why do these macros need text when Warhol didn't?
Back in the 1960s, the French philosopher Roland Barthes
offered us a way to understand this phenomenon.
Barthes deconstructed a pasta advert,
paying it the attention usually reserved
for an art masterpiece, exploring the ways
in which rich and complex meanings were conveyed
by the deceptively simple combination of words and images.
The text, he argued, helps us
to anchor the meaning of the image.
It's all a bit like Marcel Duchamp's 1919 take
on the singular masterpiece, The Mona Lisa.
He took a mass-produced poster of this one-off painting,
added a mustache, and anchored and relayed new meanings
with text: L.H.O.O.Q,
or in French, (speaking in a foreign language).
In other words, she's got a fine posterior,
which Duchamp said helped explain her smile.
On the internet, everybody is doing a Duchamp,
using pictures and text.
The difference now is that we own
the means of production and dissemination.
Now audiences can be reached by almost anyone
at a previously unimaginable speed.
Back in Duchamp's time, or even Warhol's,
you needed huge amounts of money
and often a lot of political influence
to get to that tipping point.
Just as a quick aside, with my art historian hat on.
Perhaps that's why we visit museums
in unprecedented numbers today,
hungry for a one-to-one encounter
with a unique, unanchored symbol:
Museums, like a clearing in the forest of modern symbols.
Thanks for indulging me there.
Now back to the memes.
These are arguable the most famous picture
and text combos: the lolcats.
Laugh out loud cats.
It's simple: a picture of a cat and a superimposed type.
It'd be easy to dismiss them as trivia,
but this simple format has spawned a complex subculture
with its own rules and norms,
popularizing new spellings and words.
(energetic electronic music)
Amanda Brennan is the meme librarian at Tumbler,
and she's a big lolcat fan,
even though she's actually allergic to cats.
Lolcats were a great way for people
who weren't very into computers
to experience meme culture for the first time.
The format of image macros, where text on the bottom,
text on the top, that really comes out of lolcats.
I think it does resonate with people wanting
to find their expressive part of themselves
and really express themselves in ways
that they might not be able to do in their everyday life.
And a lot of people identify with cats
because they have such strong personalities.
A lot of meme culture is about finding your identity,
figuring out who you are.
And if you can do it through the expressive nature of a cat,
whether it be through lolspeak
or in a GIF or video, a lot of people
can just explore their identity
in a really playful way with cats.
What is lolspeak?
Well, the LOL part is "laugh out loud."
And "speak" is the structure of the language
around a lolcat.
Lolcats came up in a time when people
wanted to be way less serious about the internet.
The image didn't really matter;
it was more about the text and learning the lexicon,
showing that you know it, taking these typical words
like "eat," "human," and flipping them
into something like "eated," very cutesy.
It's like when you step out
and you get into a good book or a good movie.
In lolspeak you're getting into the world of lolcats
and that kind of freedom that lolspeak provides.
Before meeting Amanda, I made some lolcats.
Now I'm not sure I got them right.
Is this your first time making a lolcat?
Yeah.
All right.
No shame.
It's everyone's first time sometime.
So this first one, this is a great image.
It's very stark.
It's gonna draw someone in.
That paw's really good.
The text, unfortunately, is totally off.
It definitely needs to feel a little more cutesy.
So I would scrap this text
and make it something about like a high five.
Like, "invisible high five!"
Or like, "I'm ready for my high five human!"
But spelled human with OO instead of U.
So how about this one?
We take a bit of a political turn?
Politics doesn't always really work in a cat meme.
You want to stick with something more wholesome,
more positive, and that's really what resonates the best.
It would probably be a caption about like,
"I can be prezident instead!"
'Cause I'm sure people on Tumbler
would want a cat to be president.
So we've had a go at a meta meme.
I love this. Lolcat.
You love this one?
I do.
I love meta.
I love memes that are making fun of other memes.
'Cause meme culture, when you think about it,
is just absurd.
It's fun and it's playful, and so is this.
This picture is incredible.
This cat's face, on point.
The language can just be ...
Cute it up a bit.
So have you got a recommendation?
Maybe something like "I can haz meta meme?"
To make it even funnier,
just really playing on this incredible photo.
We're gonna send the good one.
And ...
it's posted! It's gone!
Yes!
So excited!
Lolcats have got pedigree.
Cats were a popular subject for early photography
in the 19th century, featuring as part
of a craze for picture postcards.
In the 1870s, a Brighton photographer, Harry Pointer,
started photographing cats in funny ways.
He doubled down on the joke with written captions.
But he could have made a killing
if he'd known about lolspeak.
Let's explore this a bit more.
The internet is so a part of our lives
that the norms and behaviors we associate with it
beg the question, how new is all of this?
After all, as we've seen, throughout human history,
communities form, give themselves identity,
and accord meaning around visual symbols.
Very sticky symbols have always been flexible enough
to be interpreted in new ways as the world changes
and still make sense,
sometimes over the course of centuries.
Take the skull and crossbones.
We all know immediately what it means: danger.
But it's hugely flexible in describing that danger.
You can't trust anyone these day.
Or what about the Christian cross or the Islamic crescent?
Both are centuries old and it's been argued
were adopted from even earlier cultures.
Both were flexible enough in their meaning
to be valued by diverse groups of people
with different worldviews at the same time.
Like many other sticky symbols, they are rallying signs.
They help people figure out who else is same,
and who is other.
Talking of which ...
(grandiose music)
Flags are among the most recognizable symbols
of the modern world, used and abused endlessly.
Like the best memes, flags have different meanings
to different people who value the symbolism
for often radically different reasons.
Taking a longer view, biologists would argue
that our ability to generate memes
has been a motor of change, so beneficial to us over time
that our genes have adapted to make us really good at it.
Do we have to go to distant worlds
to find other kinds of replicator
and other consequent kinds of evolution?
I think that a new kind of replicator
has recently emerged on this very planet.
It is staring us in the face.
(relaxed hip hop music)
In his 1976 book The Selfish Gene,
the biologist Richard Dawkins used memes
as a way to explain how religions,
folk tunes, ways of making pots, and even origami
spread over generations, long before the web.
Already it is achieving evolutionary change
at a rate which leads the old gene panting far behind.
The whole point about The Selfish Gene
was it all about natural selection at the level of genes
becoming more numerous in the gene pool,
more numerous in the population.
I wanted to make the point at the end of the book
that genes are not the only possible replicator
that could serve as a unit of natural selection.
So instead I use cultural viruses.
I actually called them mind viruses.
And then said I want a noun that sounds a bit like gene,
and so coined meme.
My meme comes from a suitable Greek root,
but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like gene.
I hope my classicist friends will forgive me
if I abbreviate my meme to meme.
(heavenly music)
Do you think that, historically,
there are groups of people who've been
very successful at generating memes?
Absolutely.
Just as Genghis Kahn was incredibly adapt
at propagating his genes, almost an entire world
is descended from Genghis Kahn,
there are extremely fertile meme fountains
who are giving off memes all the time,
people like Martin Luther, Jesus.
These are immensely productive generators of memes
which have spread throughout the world
in the same kind of way as Genghis Kahn's genes.
Do you think that, in early human history,
our ability to transmit cultural information
gave us a survival advantage?
If you take something like a really important
cultural invention, like the wheel, or fire,
or something like that, once that had been invented,
it would have spread as a meme,
and would certainly have contributed
to survival of civilizations and individuals,
and to the survival of the meme itself.
Memes are competing for brain space or something like that.
It's a revolutionary way of looking at it,
because one naturally thinks of it
as a competition between people.
But just as I changed that, in the biological world,
to competition between genes, I suppose I'm trying
to do the same thing at the level of memes.
Susan Blackmore has actually suggested
that it has changed the way our brains are.
Once people started to imitate each other ...
(upbeat hip-hop music)
Then you would acquire status by being good at imitating.
I mean, if you were the one who could light the fire
or keep the fire going, you would acquire status,
probably better mates, and pass on
whatever genes you had for that ability.
There's a kind of coevolution between genes and memes.
This is my argument for how we got such huge brains.
This is a big idea, that memes
might have evolved in parallel with or genes
to give humans big brains, big enough to make lolcats
and do planking, big enough today, perhaps,
to filter out and disregard irrelevant,
annoying, or unhelpful memes.
Perhaps this is why some memes stick and others don't,
a Darwinian survival of the fittest.
Creating a successful meme
is certainly an iterative process.
99 out of 100 don't work.
The meme world is red in tooth and claw.
Why can't I clean the stains
off my dental plates with toothpaste.
Nowhere has there been a more exacting testing ground
for memes than advertising, a daily dirty battle
between clever meme creators
and our limited and readily distractibile attention.
(relaxed hip hop music)
Robin Wight is an advertising legend.
He knows.
When Richard Dawkins invented
the concept of memes in the mid-'70s.
(heavenly music)
He was explaining what ad men
had been practicing intuitively.
The idea of jingles, the idea of slogans.
People had found out by trial and error
that some things work better than others.
This was, if you like, an evolutionary battle
which the strongest memes won.
You remember a jingle, a brand,
and a slogan even after the brand is dead.
One we created back in '94
was "the future's bright, the future's orange."
That brand is now dead, but in service,
the ninth best remembered slogan
is "the future's bright, the future's orange."
Can you give me an example from your career
of something that really stuck
and what made it sticky?
We were given 118 118,
and we knew there'd be lots of other brands,
all starting with 118.
How can we make ours stand out
where we are helped by the numbers.
So, first of all, twinning is an iconic concept.
Castor and Pollux.
Twins are already special.
So we made our brand characters echoing the 118 118.
And then we made them memorable.
We put mustaches on them.
We made them iconic.
We made then runners.
We used some other mimetic tricks.
Repetition.
Got your number, got your number,
got your number, got your number.
Then we used Rocky, the music of Rocky.
We borrowed iconography, so a lot of a message
is adding all sorts of layers and symbolism
to the core brand proposition.
Symbolism, layers of meaning, humans-built connections.
These are all clearly staples of a successful meme.
But back in the digital world,
if we were to translate those ingredients,
would this be the result?
Simple, hackneyed, weird.
Emoji are said to be used more frequently on Twitter
than hyphens or the numeral 5.
Here are the eye worms of our 21st century lives.
I think the official number
is something like six billion or so per day.
Six billion?
Yes.
Amazing.
(energetic electronic music)
I'm sitting for my emoji
by the pioneering UK emoji designer Emma Hopkins.
Now, if you'll just look to the right.
And slightly turn your head up.
And give me a smile.
Okay, I think we're done,
if you want to come and have a look.
Yes, please.
(chuckling)
It's a Clay emoji.
Does that really look like me?
(Emma laughing)
For a difference in expression ...
Yeah, that's much more me.
(Emma laughing)
I look about 12.
The set expands and grows
as society calls for a new emoji.
Last year, an avocado emoji was released,
and it was because there was such a demand.
Like, it makes major headline news.
Lovers have successfully wooed one another with emoji.
Recruiters for ISIS, sometimes also known
as Daech or Islamic State,
have used emoji in their promotional tweets.
Someone even translated Moby Dick into emoji Dick.
Living in such a digital age,
we have most of our conversations
over WhatsApp or messengers or social media.
I think it's important to add
an emotive cue to what we're trying to say.
They add atmosphere to a conversation.
For instance, if I am sending you a message
and I'm trying to joke around or I'm being sarcastic,
you might not necessarily understand that tone.
But if I put a little laughing face on the end,
you'll be like, "Oh, she's only joking,"
whereas otherwise it could be perceived as quite blunt.
So are emojis doing the work that body language
and facial expression do in conversation?
Yes.
Yeah.
A 2015 survey by Bangor University
found that almost three-quarters of participants
aged between 18 and 25 felt more comfortable
expressing themselves using emoji than words.
So what do you think the future of emojis is?
Samsung and Google now have apps
where you can create your own emoji
based on like a picture of your face.
So it will scan the image of you.
It will scan your hair length and your eye color
and the shape of your face,
and then that will become your emoji.
This is the most massive dissemination
of self-portraiture in history.
Yeah.
Like lolcats, emoji aren't as new as you might think.
The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein,
during a lecture in the 1930s,
argued simple expression can convey emotion
far more articulately than people using words.
He sketched three simple faces.
He said, in fact, if we want to be exact,
we use a gesture or a facial expression.
From cats to Darwin, from advertising
to little pixelated faces, here's what I'm discovering
about why internet memes snaffle our attention,
tug at our emotions, or make them want to pass them on.
It begins with the blueprint of mimetic engineering.
(energetic electronic music)
Simplicity.
Keep it simple, stupid.
The best memes are direct and very simple
with a low barrier to entry.
Many successful image macros and GIFs
have got punchlines already,
and people can easily rework them
by simply creating a new and surprising feed line.
It's the same in political protests.
Simple gestures that can be easily replicated
can be hugely powerful.
A clenched fist symbol,
or kneeling during the American national anthem,
is authentic and not approved.
It's by the people, for the people.
And it's an effective, free, repeatable symbol
anyone can imitate.
(glitching)
Humor.
Meme humor plays with our expectations,
giving us what we want, like the imagined dialogue
between Barack Obama and Joe Biden,
or it plays against expectations,
from pratfalls to something a little edgier.
Humor is the way that people
have been talking back to power for millennia.
(relaxed electronic music)
The whole point of the court jester was to couch
sharp critiques in a humorous way.
Insight.
Memes don't always have to be funny.
They can offer quite serious observations
about human nature.
A meme can tell us a truth about ourselves.
"This is fine" is a two-panel image of a dog
trying to reassure itself that everything is fine,
despite sitting in a room that's engulfed in flames,
playing on self-denial in the face of a hopeless situation.
It speaks to something deep in the human condition.
We copy things to other people
'cause we want to show off,
'cause we want to be liked, because we frightened.
We just will go on pouring stuff out there.
Visuals.
The most successful internet memes
communicate using visual content.
TL;DR.
Too long; didn't read.
That's the common response to the sheer volume
and complexity of material on the internet.
Quick and direct, images beat text
in the competition for attention spans.
Humans were a visual species long before we started to talk
and well before we started to write.
It's estimated that the first cave paintings
were created 40,000 years ago,
the first writing 5,000 years ago.
Some visual memes echo through history.
Here are the precursors of Hollywood CGI monsters
and hard-bitten heroes.
Pictures have a way of resonating,
allowing us to read between the lines and tell a story.
Controversy and debate.
Remember this?
An interrupted financial interview that went viral in 2017?
It was simple, visual, unexpectedly funny.
But the thing that really sent it stratospheric
was the furious debate that followed
about why people assumed the women
snatching her children away was a nanny, not a wife.
My apologies. (chuckling)
When there are two opposing camps,
there will always be a longer trail of memes left behind.
Sharing.
Great memes are memes you want to share.
They say something to your peers, your in-group,
about your personality and crucially what you feel.
Many people feel that little says more about them
than the videos they choose to share.
(energetic electronic music)
That's the theory anyway, for the people
who call themselves social publishers.
These are the offices of Lad Bible.
One of the top three publishers of viral content globally,
Lab Bible reaches a billion people a month.
Elle's just put a video out.
So, very quickly she'll be able to ascertain
how it's doing compared to previous pieces of content
we've done, and just by looking at
the engagement rates we've gotten so far.
So, we've just put out a video
of a dog rolling in the mud, basically.
It's a submission, so one of our audience has sent it in,
and it's got seven shares, 25 comments.
So what would you be hoping for after five minutes?
Usually about 200 comments, 100 shares.
They're the main things that we focus on.
And every one of those shares
could lead to hundreds more shares.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it just goes viral
by that point, right? Exactly.
So this video should do, after 24 hours,
do about three million, three and a half million?
Yeah, something along those lines.
2.5 to three mill it should do.
And that's just another day at the office.
Yeah, it's another good day at the office, yeah.
(chuckling)
(whacks ping pong ball)
Social publishing's very much driven
and led by the audience.
If they engage with your content, if they comment,
if they share, they click, you know within seconds,
and you know to do more of that.
So, a lot of content online can seem really niche,
but it actually reaches a massive audience.
What do you think that reveals about us?
I think a lot of us can sometimes think
that maybe individually we're about weird
or we might be interested in things
that maybe other people aren't.
I think the internet is potentially a bit of like a lens
for actually other people who like
the same weird things that we do.
And you want to share that and be proud of it.
It becomes almost like a social badge of honor
that you and 10 million other people feel exactly the same.
Some people think that social media is quite shallow.
Do you think that's fair?
The reason I ask this is that I've been impressed
by their editorial meeting earlier.
Next, original ideas.
Who wants to kick us off?
Stu?
We have a veterans retreat,
which has actually been opened to victims of terrorism.
We haven't done anything on Ed Gein before.
He's the guy who's literally inspired
the movie Psycho, Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
We could speak to a mental health charity
and see if there was a rise in phone calls
and things last week.
Looking into Crocs and the material
they're made from being found not to be biodegradable.
Veganism is not cruelty free, apparently.
All right, yes.
Good ideas today, guys.
So, we'll get our hustle on and have a good day, yeah?
I think when we talk about our editorial tone of voice
or what we cover, someone positioned it as
you want to hang out with someone that can be funny,
can be serious, can have an opinion, can host a conversation
all at the same time and kinda mix it up.
If someone tries to be funny all the time,
they get annoying.
If someone's really serious, they're too heavy,
and you're not gonna hang out with them too much.
So how do you get a video to go viral?
We've done a few pieces where we've got
people who you wouldn't expect to be together.
I think there's a piece of Judi Dench and Lethal Bizzle.
One's kind of a beloved actress, one's a grime artist.
♪ One more time, let's go! ♪
♪ Pow yeah I'm Judy to the D ♪
♪ Pow if you don't know about me ♪
♪ Pow ♪
It's just things you wouldn't imagine to see
in your day to day that kind of tap into a feeling that,
because it's so out of the ordinary,
you share it with your friends, go, "Have you seen this?"
♪ Pow ♪
It's that, "Have you seen this?" kind of essence
that translates across the internet.
Okay.
Time for our next meme.
I'm going to pitch Lab Bible an idea for a viral video.
It'll involve another national treasure we've just met:
Richard Dawkins.
Richard Dawkins invented the notion of the meme in 1976.
Do you think we can make a viral film about Dawkins?
I think one of the really important things
is the first 10 seconds.
So, those 10 seconds are where you need to capture the user.
No, I don't know.
It's like the headline of an article,
so you pick the biggest hook,
put the best part of the video,
show a tiny clip of it at the start, get 'em hooked.
You can say that again.
It's gotta be snappy.
It's gotta have imagery that they're gonna be hooked
on watching and they're gonna watch to the end.
If the last clip is something that you really engage with,
then that's gonna be the feeling
that you carry through after that, into your actions.
So that's the bit that's gonna make you share it.
How long do you think it should be?
Maybe like a minute and a half
to two minutes, I would say.
So it's like the Charlatans said:
always leave them wanting more.
Yeah.
(dinging)
So here goes.
Nobody knows what the (bleep) a meme is anymore.
(light-hearted music)
It should be pronounced to rhyme with cream.
Meme, you keep using that word.
I do not think it means what you think it means.
So that's a bad meme.
I coined the word meme, but now it just means
some text over an image.
You can say that again.
So we've seen how memes evolved.
We've found out that they appeal to our emotions
and help us build connections.
Now the big question is, what does it all mean?
How do these global cultures of memes
impact on our societies and politics,
especially our politics?
Perhaps the answer lies once again in symbols from the past.
Long before the internet, before TV and radio,
another technological change spread a meme
to powerful effect.
In 1830s France, Charles Philipon,
a Parisian publisher of lithographs,
began to answer cheap, popular prints
that depicted King Louis Philippe as a pear.
The pear quickly became a popular image
scrawled on the walls of Paris.
Lithographs had amplified the spread of a meme
in the streets in the form of graffiti.
Today, the pear has its equivalent
in literally millions of images and cartoons
proliferating across the internet.
And graffiti and the internet
sometimes still feed each other,
rather like lithographs and graffiti of pears,
like the radio and scrawled Vs
on walls in Nazi-occupied Europe.
There's always been a potential multiplier effect
between mass media and the street.
Come close to hear your future.
You're really, really pathetic.
Do you people see this loser?
Get him outta here!
At the Design Museum in London,
this exhibition explores a shift in political memes
since the election of Barack Obama in 2008.
It traces how the so-called alt-right,
on anonymous message boards,
took children's cartoons like Pepe the Frog
and turned them into symbols of hate.
With their directness, appeal to tribalism and emotions,
memes are deployed as weapons to get a rise or reaction.
The exhibition, titled Hope to Nope,
hints at how online and offline politics and culture
have become intertwined.
It's almost like TV turned politics into entertainment,
and social media's turned it into a virtual playground
full of funny kids, bullies, victims,
using memes as their means of attack and defense.
These rival factions are fighting
what some see as a culture war,
raging through the disruptions of Brexit,
and Donald Trump's election to the U.S. presidency.
Digital entrepreneur Kennyatta Cheese
sees 2016 as the critical turning point
when the internet meme hit the mainstream.
That was the moment.
(upbeat electronic music)
Where all of a sudden you have U.S. presidential candidates
talking about Pepe the Frog being a symbol of hate.
You have memes being turned--
Image macros being turned into
sort of ideological IEDs and being spread
in places like Facebook.
You have a lot of people who have never seen this before,
who have never really truly understood the cultures
that went along with it,
or understood what people were actually doing with memes,
coming in and all of a sudden passing judgment,
but also having a lot of fear around these things,
the idea that image macros, that viral videos
can be taken and used in a different context
in order to try to sway opinion.
It's been happening forever, right?
But here was a time where it felt like it mattered.
I don't care.
I really don't.
There's a lot of anxiety,
especially in the mainstream press nowadays,
around information bubbles,
that people just get fed the same old thing.
I don't think it's a negative, though.
I don't think it's a bug; it's a feature.
It's how we find commonality
and we maintain those connections.
To me, the difference between our grandparents,
sort of in their own groups, reading the same information,
the effect that you could have on the world
was fairly limited, where now,
we're all nodes on a giant network.
It is really easy to get an idea from St. Petersburg, Russia
to the Facebook feed of somebody in Kansas, right?
Almost any symbol can become a weapon
in anyone's efforts to shape other people's thoughts
and feelings: just cut, paste, and share online.
I wonder if this is the awkward teenage years
of the global society, right?
It's the time where you start to question who you are.
All of a sudden, you start using these labels
in order to not just identify yourself
but identify other as well.
And so, if I'm labeling the mainstream,
I'm maybe gonna call them "normies".
Normie.
Or if I'm politically right, but I'm not going to,
I don't want to identify with the 60-year-old politicians,
maybe I call myself the alt-right.
Alt-right.
You have a group of people who feel disaffected.
You have a group of people who, whether justified or not,
feel as if their identity is being challenged,
and they're trying to find ways to express it.
The alt-right and the people who are affiliated with that
are people who have been engaging in meme making
and are sort of at the heart of the culture
that spawned meme culture, so there is this deep level
of digital, cultural literacy that was happening.
The spread of memes has always meant trouble for someone.
They're recycled to cause outrage or to provoke debate.
Is offense just part of the process?
On the internet, these heavily ironic
and edgy memes are called dank.
(upbeat electronic music)
I'm meeting YouTube comedian Tom Walker
to explore the boundaries of humor,
satire, and politics on the internet.
Where is dankness leading us?
I think there is a general anarchy to it
by its very nature of people just throw stuff out there
and see what kinda happens.
It doesn't have to go through this filter of this sort of
political correctness
and commissioning editor before it ends up
in this very diluted manner on television.
So, maybe that's what's distinctive;
it's that it's unfiltered, that it can be offensive,
that it can be brilliant, that it can be immediate,
that it can actually just be a bit shoddy.
In other news, Muslims are bad, China's bad,
but not as bad as it used to be, and Russia is always bad!
This is Tom Walker's comic creation,
the irascible reporter Jonathan Pie.
A way of sending up the news
that has scored millions of hits.
What Pie allows people to do is they go,
"This is what I think."
He's venting their frustrations about Brexit,
about Trump, about the Tories, to a certain extent
about the Left and their censoriousness
and their snowflakiness, if you like.
No, no, no, no, no!
I'm doing, no, I'm doing the new--
I'm doing the (bleep) news!
Look at this piece of satire, but this ...
He represents my brand.
That's what makes him sticky.
A kind of identity shortcut?
In a way, yeah, yeah.
This guy believes in what I believe.
I think, also, people thought it was real.
Right, look at this British journalist losing it.
Morning, Tim!
Morning!
Howdy!
How was Washington?
The biggest video by far that I've and will ever have
is my response to Trump winning the White House.
And that's on how many now?
Over all the platforms, it's roughly 150 million.
It's crazy.
Hillary Clinton!
Don't get me wrong, I wanted Hillary to win.
I'd personally vote for Lucifer over Donald Trump.
Trump!
The pussy-grabbing, wall-building, climate-change-denying,
healthcare-abolishing, tax-dodging, shit-spewing demagogue!
How shit have you got to be to lose to that?
So why did this one do so well?
It blamed everyone, so annoyed everyone,
so it got a discussion going.
It's a vent.
The reason this one worked so well
is because me and my co-writer didn't think it would work.
We decided to let go.
We decided we'll write what we think we believe
rather than what we think other people will believe.
Intent shows through.
Thanks, Brad.
A fascinating question is whether
all this venting and irony can go too far.
Is there a too far?
Well there is a too far, depending who you're talking to.
Offense and humor are so closely linked.
It's subjective.
What makes you laugh might not make him laugh.
Neither of you are wrong.
A real laugh, as well as a real (groans),
so closely linked.
But it is an emotional reaction that you can't hide.
Lots of inane comments like "lol".
Memes can certainly split opinion.
A distinctive element of our culture today
often seems to be visceral disagreement.
Tom defends the right to free speech on the internet,
but he's been attacked bitterly for it.
It was a (bleep) joke, you (beep).
You think slightly differently to me
when it comes to freedom of speech,
therefore you must be alt-right,
therefore you must be a Nazi apologist.
There's no way to win a political debate
going, "You're a bigot, la, la, la, la, la."
That seems to be their modus operandi:
if you disagree with us, you must be a bigot.
(tapping)
The world of memes is direct.
It provokes emotional responses,
and it can polarize; a perfect environment
for those who like to shout "boo" anonymously and run away.
(startling music)
(screaming)
We used to think of trolls as sad, lone individuals
taking out their personal issues on the world
under a cloak on online anonymity.
Trolls have gone mainstream.
Sometimes a troll is a paid social media user
twisting online discussions.
Other times, a troll is actually an automated bot
rapidly spreading invective and disinformation online.
Some regimes have cottoned onto the idea
of using trolls to manipulate public information
and disinformation in rival states,
influencing people to support their interests.
I've had email chains smearing me.
I've had troll attacks on Twitter,
harassment on Facebook.
(upbeat music)
The Finnish journalist Jessikka Aro
has been investigating the impact
of Russian propaganda in Finland since 2014.
A thing that the trolls and propagandists wanted to do
was silence me, to make me so scared
that I would stop myself of continuing my investigations.
But instead of that, I did the opposite.
As the months and years went on, more and more hate speech
was all the time produced about me.
I was being sent memes all the time.
So here they are saying that I make home visits.
They basically frame me as a prostitute.
Here, trolls made music video.
(singing in a foreign language)
They are framing me as some kind of mentally ill person
who has made up all this Russian troll phenomenon
only from my imagination.
Another photo manipulation, the trolls say
and the neo-Nazis say that I am restricting
their freedom of speech.
How does all this make you feel.
Well, how would you feel,
when you had a text message from your dead father
who's observing you, having ...
unknown people sending you death threats
because they have been reading
just trash about you and believing in it?
Obviously, it's nasty.
The Russian information operations are designed
specifically to target my emotions,
to target everyone's emotions.
Whatever they write online,
I understand that they get paid for it.
And I get paid for what I do,
so we have these different jobs,
and I really feel pity that they have such jobs.
Jessikka Aro's is an extreme case amongst many.
Trolling with fake news is the new currency
of politics in the mimetic age.
The dishonest, lying media!
The sad thing is it's effective.
A 2018 MIT study found that fake news
can spread faster and deeper than real news.
Analyzing 126,000 contested news stories
over 10 years on Twitter, tweeted by three million users,
it found hoax and rumor were more widely shared than truth.
On the internet, it would seem noise wins.
Then again, have we ever lived in a time of truthful news?
All news is just a representation of actual events,
a selective take.
To explore this further,
I went to actually meet a troll under a bridge,
a troll on a mission to combat online racism and xenophobia.
A troll is somebody who goes on the internet
just to make people upset.
A liberal troll is somebody who goes on the internet
to make a conservative upset.
Christopher Blair, aka Busta Troll,
is a self-proclaimed liberal troll
who makes a living publishing fake news stories
that might appeal to the alt-right.
He puts in plausible content out there
to provoke a reaction.
The alt-right unwittingly steal his satirical posts,
sharing them online without irony.
After the economy crashed in 2008,
I was left with a family of four, without a job,
after working construction for 20-some-odd years.
I was angry.
Angry at my government.
So I took the anger, I went to Facebook,
and I started a page, and I started to make memes,
liberal memes, supporting liberal causes.
And the conservative trolls started to come to my page.
They started attacking me.
So I had to create a persona to fight off the trolls,
which is where I came up with Busta Troll.
We market our page at conservatives
in the are of 60 years old and better.
They are extremely biased, they are extremely uneducated.
And what we do, we pull them into the comments,
because these are some of the worst racists
and xenophobes on Facebook.
They comment racist things.
The trolls that are patrolling the page report them.
They get their little Facebook timeouts.
It may seem trivial, but when you do that
30, 40, 50 times sometimes in a day or a week,
you're eliminating a lot of hate from Facebook.
So that's one of the reasons we do what we do.
Can you show me a recent example
of the kind of thing you've done?
Yeah, this is a great one here.
Illinois state senator introduced legislation
that would give Wakandan refugees a sanctuary city
of Chicago a monthly income of $2,000.
Of course, Wakanda is the fake country
in the new Black Panther movie.
It's an absolutely ridiculous story
that was shared almost 400 times
by people who don't care that it's ridiculous;
it confirms their bias that they hate refugees
and so on and so forth.
This is probably the greatest,
our greatest meme of all time.
Sharia law must be stopped.
If you mention Sharia law, these people go crazy.
Under Governor Brown, students in California
are now required to learn Arabic numerals.
That's right, zero through nine.
Comment one to 10 how much this angers you.
Oh, the irony.
You can see all the angry reacts
from all the 36,000 people who think their poor children
are gonna have to learn how to right zero through nine.
36,000 shares.
11,000 comments.
Lookit: "I'm so angry about Sharia and all of their habits.
"You come to my country you obey my countries laws."
3.6 thousand people hit the love react on that,
because they agree with this woman.
It's amazing how absolutely uneducated people can be
over something so simple.
And this isn't something
that you couldn't Google in five seconds.
Your site's a satire, but your critics say
that they're fake news.
It's funny, 'cause I get emails from reporters
all the time wanting my sources. (chuckles)
And I tell them, my source is in my head.
You are fact checking fiction.
This is satire; I made it up.
So when over 100,000 people share one of your parodies,
how does it make you feel about human nature?
It makes me sad.
That there can be so many people that would be so willing
to just believe something and send it along so easily.
The one bit of solace that I get out of that is
it doesn't last long.
People believe them, and then they get told
by reasonable people who say no, this is not real.
My reason for hope doesn't come from my page;
it comes from my kid.
I've got a 16-year-old daughter
who lobbied me to take her
to March for Your Lives in Washington.
So my reason for hope lies with the younger generation.
So, Chris, we've been trying to cook up
some memes of our own, see whether we can get a response.
Do you want to have a look?
Sure.
So here's our first one.
What do you make of that?
Is it gonna go viral?
Feminazis are running British TV.
God bless America.
That's wonderful.
I love that.
The problem that you're gonna have is,
see all this stuff here?
These are words, syllables, and they mean things.
This is what we call TL;DR.
Too long; didn't read.
Your average American liberal will read 200 to 300 words.
Your average American conservative
will read six to eight syllables.
So we keep the headline and--
You keep the headline, you put a picture of a cat
wearing an American flag, and you're good to go.
Okay.
So, second time, lookie.
Sure.
This one's a bit more visual.
Okay.
Oh, that's much better.
British PC madness.
BBC bosses enforce Ramadan dress code.
Welcome to Britainistan.
They're gonna love that.
Ooh boy, you know?
What you've done here is you've taken 16 syllables
and you've put them together in a way
that really will appeal to your average ...
ignorant American.
So it's powerful imagery.
You've got a woman in a hijab.
You've got a reference to Muslims.
The fact that it's British and BBC may ...
decrease the amount that this could go viral,
but that absolutely could work, without a doubt.
That would be a good meme.
So we put it out there and see
whether people pick up on it?
Sure.
We can.
I'd be happy to.
You'll know within the first 10, maybe 15 minutes, tops,
if you've got something that's gonna go places.
I mean, this looks like a great meme,
but it could get zero shares.
So you're out there now.
Your meme has been presented to about 400,000 people.
Meme shared.
As Busta thought, the British angle
meant that our Britainistan meme
didn't do so well across the Atlantic.
But Buster then re-versioned it for an American audience,
and it got traction.
And as a quick roundup for full disclosure,
our Richard Dawkins video got ...
on Lab Bible, and our lolcat got five like.
So that's a bad meme.
Well, I'm more of a dog person anyway.
In the longterm, I have a lot of faith in people.
I have a lot of faith in us.
We learn.
Billions of people on the planet
choosing to watch this and not that,
or to pass on this and not pass on that,
or to take that and go, "I'll do a little quirk,"
and pass that on.
So, here is the most amazing, new,
evolutionary explosion of creativity.
Memes come and go in a culture so sped up
as to sometimes seem almost meaningless.
But that production and reception are and always have been
a window into popular culture as it really is:
impulsive, derisive, bawdy, contested,
skeptical of experts and of authority.
Memes are also testimony
to human inventiveness and playfulness.
At their best, memes are about engaging people,
about our senses of belonging.
They're little packets of digital information
flying around.
But also deeply human.
("Never Gonna Give you Up" By Rick Astley)
♪ We're no strangers to love ♪
♪ You know the rules and so do I ♪