{"id":5289,"date":"2026-07-14T08:30:04","date_gmt":"2026-07-14T07:30:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.napier.ac.uk\/library\/?p=5289"},"modified":"2026-06-23T13:55:45","modified_gmt":"2026-06-23T12:55:45","slug":"from-genes-to-lolcats-the-history-of-memes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.napier.ac.uk\/library\/2026\/07\/14\/from-genes-to-lolcats-the-history-of-memes\/","title":{"rendered":"From Genes to LOLcats: The History of Memes"},"content":{"rendered":"

From Genes to LOLcats: The History of Memes<\/h1>\n

Memes feel like a pure product of the internet, born somewhere between dial-up modems and group chats. But the idea is older than the web itself, and its journey from a scientific term to a cat photo with bad grammar is one of the stranger stories in modern culture.<\/p>\n

The biological beginnings of the Meme<\/h2>\n

Before any image or GIF, there was just a word, and it didn’t come from the internet at all. In 1976, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins<\/a> introduced the term meme in his book The Selfish Gene<\/a>. He shortened the Greek word mimema<\/em>, meaning imitated thing, so it would rhyme with gene. Dawkins used meme to describe any idea, tune, fashion, or behaviour that spreads from person to person through imitation, much like a gene spreads through a population. He wasn’t thinking about cats in sunglasses. He was thinking about how culture itself evolves, with ideas competing to survive and replicate inside human minds. For nearly two decades, the word mostly stayed in academic circles. Then the internet arrived, and it found a much stranger home.<\/p>\n

The Dancing Baby: The Internet’s First Viral Hit<\/h2>\n

\"GIF\"<\/p>\n

The first true internet meme wasn’t a joke at all. In 1996, a 3D animated GIF of a baby dancing to a snippet of music started life as a software demo, meant to show off new animation tools. Office workers found it funny anyway and began emailing it to each other. It spread slowly across early newsgroups and personal homepages, picking up remixes along the way, including a kung fu version and a samurai version. By 1998, the Dancing Baby had become so well known that it appeared as a recurring hallucination on the TV show Ally McBeal. It proved something new: a joke could travel from someone’s inbox all the way to a primetime television script.<\/p>\n

The Hampster Dance: Going Viral Before “Viral” Was a Word<\/h3>\n

<\/p>\n

If the (Creepy) Dancing Baby proved memes could spread, the Hampster Dance<\/a> proved they could explode. In 1998, Canadian art student Deidre LaCarte built a single page on GeoCities filled with dozens of looping cartoon hamster GIFs, set to a sped-up sample of a Disney song. For months, almost nobody visited it. Then, in early 1999, word spread through email chains and early blogs, and the site went from a few hundred visits to millions within weeks. People used the link to prank colleagues and friends, an early ancestor of the modern rickroll<\/a>. It even spawned a chart-topping novelty single. The Hampster Dance showed that a meme didn’t need to be clever to take over the internet. It just needed to be impossible to stop sharing.<\/p>\n

LOLcats: When Memes Found Their Format<\/h3>\n

\"i<\/p>\n

By the mid 2000s, anonymous forums gave memes room to mutate into something more structured. Around 2005, users on the imageboard 4chan began posting captioned cat photos as part of a weekly tradition called Caturday, reportedly started as a joke pushback against another recurring thread. The captions, written in deliberately broken English known as lolspeak, gave the format real personality. In January 2007, the blog I Can Has Cheezburger turned this into a movement, launching with its now iconic image of a grey cat looking up hopefully, captioned “I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER?” The site went on to post hundreds of cat photos a day, helping LOLcats become one of the first true mainstream internet memes. This is where I first encountered memes. I used to go to the blog on my break for a pick me up giggle…sorry LoL. This was the moment the image macro was born: a picture, bold text up top, a punchline below. That simple template became the blueprint nearly every meme afterwards would follow.<\/p>\n

The Harlem Shake: Memes You Could Join In With<\/h3>\n