The word “meme” first appeared in Richard Dawkins’ 1976 book “The Selfish Gene.” From the Greek word “mimema” for “imitation,” Dawkins defined a meme as “a unit of cultural information spread by imitation.” From the song to the printing press, and from the postal service to Librex, imitating ideas allows us a semblance of cohesiveness across subgroups in our tribes.

In an Oct. 22 column, the author posits that memes are “turning us into more empathetic individuals” by virtue of the cultural depth they carry. While memes allow us to express culturally shared ideas efficiently, the reductionism necessitated by commonality cripples our emotional understanding of the real feelings. The memes of today, transmitted through the imitation of picture formats, screenshots, drawings and photoshopped abominations, certainly accomplish the transmission of themselves. Dawkins claims that memes propagate similarly to genes, and that the process of evolution happens at the level of the individual gene — or meme. The memes that survive, like the genes that survive, are the most fit to reproduce themselves using their host. For both genes and memes, that host is humans, but memes require Instagram, Twitter, Reddit and Facebook as interpreters. By this theory, the memes that “survive,” or achieve cultural relevance are the most fit to reproduce — not the ones that convey the most depth or most effectively convey sentiment. As humans and as communicators, we overlay specific meaning onto memes. There is nothing inherently specific about graphic formats such as “stonks guy” or “screaming bald guy and blonde counterpart.” Memes, like parasites, use humans as hosts.

The author’s interpretation of memes in our interpersonal communication falls prey to a classic blunder: mistaking the map for the terrain. Their analysis would be accurate, were the memes themselves the substance of our communications. A meme, like all language, is a method of transmitting an idea. It is not the idea itself. A form of communication is a vehicle for the substance, and memes are an incredibly effective vehicle for sharing cultural information. 

If cultural exchange happens linearly, personal exchange happens perpendicularly. When information is packaged efficiently and invitingly and passed from person to person, it serves a cultural and societal purpose. When we communicate socially with our friends and peers, we must remember that we are doing so interpersonally — not culturally — and our methods of communication must reflect the difference.

As for the “nuanced sociolect” that our meme culture creates, like other sociolects throughout history, it is impossible to separate form from substance when making value judgments. It is not possible to determine whether our meme-based sociolect is more precise than one based on concrete concepts that require effort to understand. But it is possible to say that for the in-group, it is certainly easier to use. If a sociolect is the dialect of a particular social class then we, as internet-dwelling and intellectual classes of 20-somethings, only isolate ourselves from the rest of the world through hyper-specific content transmission. While our tribalism of memes is important to our sense of community and culture, is it worth the cost of narrowing our communication to only those who understand what exactly that watery-eyed cat is feeling?

While memes allow us to convey great swaths of cultural information in a single picture, the specific context cannot be divorced from the final conveyance. The quality that makes memes so powerfully culturally specific also inhibits their interpersonal specificity. The meaning that is conveyed is perceived against the backdrop of every previous iteration of that meme. 

That isn’t to say that we should stop making, sharing and laughing at memes. What we should do is stop pretending they are something they’re not. By evolutionary design, memes will never be the most effective means of personal communication, and asserting their status as such does a disservice to the ideas we would like to share.

LAZO GITCHOS is a sophomore in Trumbull College. Contact him at lazo.gitchos@yale.edu.