Meme, old style?

Do you know what a meme (pronunciation: meem) is?

Most of us associate the term with funny images posted online with varying captions. However, the term has a broader definition and basically refers to a cultural replication of an item around the Internet, often on social media.

There have been some fun ones. And some strange ones like Planking and Owling.

20 years ago when I first started blogging, memes were passing around the blog network. 

The blogging communities that I studied often engaged in memes, which would start on one blog and then move around to the others. We did the iPod shuffle, Friday cat blogging, BBC book meme, memory lane meme, and the one where you open a book to a random page and post a sentence or word. I thought about looking for and linking examples, but I'm lazy. Anyway, here's a pretty good blog post about blog memes. And another. And here are some examples from a book blog.

I'm not sure exactly when or how memes transitioned into the primarily-visual format we associate with them now (and video format, on TikTok, but we typically call them trends over there and not memes). 

I'm thinking about memes today because I was reading the NYTimes and came across this quiz (very un-NYTimes, but kind of fun). It immediately reminded me of the good ol' days. Someone would have done this quiz, posted their results, editorialized on it, and challenged the rest of us to do the same. We'd probably have ended up in some funny discussion linked across blogs and comments about who among us is a butterfly vs a firefly, evergreen or wallflower (I'm a firefly, BTW). 

Have any of you participated in a meme before? Have you started one?

Challenge to someone feeling goofy: try to start one and see if you can get the class to pass it around this week