Helen Brown / BBC:

To most of the world they are just amusing pictures of an adorable cartoon bunny sitting beside, or sometimes inexplicably amidst, a bowl of rice. But in China, where these images have been circulating on social media, they carry a deeper, and more serious meaning.
“Rice bunny” (米兔), as this collection of images and emojis are known, emerged in 2018 as part of the global #MeToo movement among women to expose sexual harassment. In China, where state censorship saw hashtags related the campaign being blocked, internet users had to find an alternative to coordinate the movement in their country. Enter the rice bunny. As an image it looks innocuous enough, but when the words for the two seemingly unrelated subjects are said aloud, the true meaning becomes clear – they are pronounced “mi tu”.Through the use of this translinguistic homophone, women in China were able for a time to share their stories and spread the word about the #MeToo movement within a country that can be highly suspicious of organised social movements.
On the surface, internet memes are a ubiquitous source of light entertainment – a way for people to express themselves through cleverly remixed templates of text, images and videos. They are arguably the wallpaper of our social media feeds and often provide us with a few minutes of idle, amusing fodder for procrastination during our day.But memes also have a serious side, according to researchers looking at modern forms of communication. They are a language in themselves, with a capacity to transcend cultures and construct collective identities between people. These sharable visual jokes can also be powerful tools for self-expression, connection, social influence and even political subversion.
Internet memes “are one of the clearest manifestations of the fact there is such a thing as digital culture”, says Paolo Gerbaudo, a reader in digital politics and director of the Centre for Digital Culture at Kings College London.
Gerbaudo describes memes as a “sort of a ready-made language with many kinds of stereotypes, symbols, situations. A palette that people can use, much like emojis, in a way, to convey a certain content”.
According to social media site Instagram, at least one million posts mentioning “meme” were shared every day in 2020. But what is it that makes the internet meme so popular and why is it such an effective way of conveying ideas?Of course, memes have been around long before the rise and reproduction of familiar internet memes like the Distracted Boyfriend or the many wise faces of “Doge”.
Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist, coined the term “meme” in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, likening discrete bits of human culture that propagate between people to genes. Dawkins shortened the ancient Greek word “mimeme” – with an apology to his classicist colleagues – to meme, to rhyme with “cream”. He suggested that memes were melodies, ideas, catchphrases or bits of information that leap from brain to brain through imitation, expediting their transmission. He coined the term to highlight just how human culture can replicate itself. And in that sense memes have been around probably since humans have had cultures they have shared. But we can also see the kernels of what makes modern internet memes so successful in ancient forms of popular culture.
“We see the replication of mundane reality in many forms of art,” says Idil Galip, a doctoral researcher at the University of Edinburgh, and founder of the Meme Studies Research Network. “Even going back to, let’s say, Hellenic times, you’ve got something like tragic theatre, that takes things that happen to you that are upsetting and real-life and makes them into comedic things, which is what memes do.”With the arrival of the internet, however, memes have become a more tangible phenomenon that can be observed as they grow, spread and mutate. “In a way, it’s like internet users paving the way for academics to look at memes more scientifically,” says Limor Shifman, a professor of communication at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Researchers at Facebook showed in a study in 2014 just how widely memes posted on the social media site can spread and evolve. In one example, they found 121,605 different variants of one particular meme posted across 1.14 million status updates.Shifman’s definition of memes, now widely used in the field, describes them as “a group of texts with shared characteristics, with a shared core of content, form, and stance”. Broadly, “content” refers to ideas and ideologies, while “form” to our sensory experiences such as audio or visual, and “stance” to the tone or style, structures for participation, and communicative functions of the meme.
Fundamentally, no meme is an island. “A text that just spreads well, and a lot of people see it, is not a meme,” says Shifman. “It’s viral. But if a lot of people create their own versions then it becomes a group of texts and then it’s a meme.”
Memes tap into collective consciousness online and have been referred to as digital folklore – or “Netlore”. “We can see not just the new ways people do things or the new ways people express themselves in public but also some of the themes, some of the anxieties or desires people have. All of these complex issues are reflected in things like memes,” says Gerbaudo.
But for an idea to become a meme, it needs to be shared. Most successful internet memes – in that they spread wide and far – share a few key attributes. “Usually the most viral, most loved memes are memes that are about things that are very recent in public memory,” says Galip. But often they are also “something that was important to many people”, she says. “Viral memes usually appeal to the most common denominator. So you don’t have to necessarily be embedded in internet subculture to understand what it’s saying. And the final thing I think is, it’s the most basic thing but it’s very hard to replicate, is that it should be fun to look at, and fun to share.”
One study found memes sparking a stronger emotional response were more likely to be shared. People were also more likely to forward funny videos over cute, disgusting, or anger-inducing ones.
Many of us gained a new appreciation for memes during the pandemic as a welcome source of light relief. Research conducted during the 2020 lockdown in Spain by Lucía-Pilar Cancelas-Ouviña, a professor of didactics of language and literature at the University of Cadiz, found humour was a core feature of memes shared using the messaging application WhatsApp. Cancelas-Ouviña suggests it helped take the sting out of the fear and uncertainty that was widespread at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, a finding supported by other studies elsewhere.
Reese Witherspoon’s 2020 Challenge was one viral pandemic meme that summed up the year in a highly relatable calendar format, which subsequently spurred versions featuring other celebrities such as Mindy Kaling and Oprah Winfrey.
But memes don’t always have to tickle our funny bones to get our attention. “Humour is important in popularising this form of expression and people like spreading cheerful content,” says Shifman. That being said, “even if it’s not funny, if it’s disturbing, if it makes them angry, if it makes them feel things, they would still circulate it”, Shifman adds. The sharing of memes about the war in Ukraine could be regarded as one example of this.