The Internet is a familiar thing to many of us, known for being the wondrous technological tool of communication. Over the years it has been shaped and modified for new functions. Through freedom of information transfer and through the clever and witty minds of individual users, there has been growing, over the last decade, a phenomenon that is carving its mark in mass communication history: the Internet meme.

Now, while many know fully about the Internet’s existence and use it frequently, this growing trend of the Internet meme is still surprisingly unbeknownst to many people that I have encountered.

Allow me to put the term into definitions. A meme (pronounced “meem”) is a cultural unit of information that is retransmitted and imitated. Concerning the Internet meme, this imitation revolves around a variety of inside joke, which oftentimes is not very funny originally. It undergoes widespread growth on a mass scale, involving the creative input of many users to achieve its humour and meme status.

The culprits behind the viral growth of memes are generally websites with social networking capabilities, such as image boards (4chan being the most notorious), blogs and YouTube. Search engines also help to magnify the scope of the meme.

The origin of the meme is most often linked to some case of perceived error or misfortune that is humorous. At other times, they will originate because the subject or topic at hand has acquired worldwide fame and mass appeal (or legendary infamy). And even then, there are memes that have no real reason to exist at all; they just happened to be distributed on the Internet to the right website at the right time.

The most common forms of mass Internet phenomena are viral videos and image macros. No, viral videos are not virus-carrying movie files; they are videos that have simply acquired a substantial number of views on the Internet for their humorous or controversial quality. Image macros are pictures edited with juxtaposed text that relates to the image and adds humour.

Some memes that, in my opinion, are among the most legendary of Internet phenomena:
Fail
The “Fail” meme involves a photograph or video, usually entitled fail or a variation of that word. “Fail” may involve almost any situation in which the subject has become the victim of misfortune. “Fail” likely originated from a fractured English phrase in an old video game, “You fail it” (correctly translated: “Game over”). Fail denotes a display of clumsiness or bad judgment, a sports mishap, a vehicle accident, etcetera. Interweb users call a failure an “Epic fail” when the failure is so devastating and so difficult to pull off that most words cannot describe it. Such examples include the half-capsized “Failboat” and the incorrectly answered yet very obvious $100 questions on Who Wants to be a Millionaire? among countless others. Fail images may also be tagged with the phrase “You’re doing it wrong.” Another variation of “Fail” is “Owned” or “Pwned”, which involves more than one participant, one causing misfortune to or physically besting the other. Also, the opposite of “Fail” exists in the form of “Win”, in which the subject of the image or video overcomes insurmountable odds and achieves a higher level of awesome. The event involving win is said to be “full of win”.

All Your Base Are Belong To Us
This meme was born in the ancient years of video gaming. The source of the humour was the failed translation to English in the script of the 1991 Sega Mega Drive game Zero Wing. A flash animation cut scene in the video game contained the phrases “Somebody set up us the bomb” and the renowned “All your base are belong to us.” The phrase was resurrected around the year 2000 on the Internet, and it has been retransmitted and parodied endlessly since.

RickRoll
Another meme of old origin, the RickRoll was the result of the cheesy music video by Rick Astley from 1987 to the song “Never Gonna Give You Up”. Revived by the Interwebs, and inspired by the previous meme the “DuckRoll”, this “worst popular song” can be contained within a web link, usually baited with a controversial or enticing title or caption. Clicking the link does not direct you to the content you anticipate; rather it will direct you to YouTube, and the video for “Never Gonna Give You Up” will annoyingly begin to play, complete with Astley’s lame eighties dance moves and pop beats. At this moment in time, you will exclaim to the world that you have just been “RickRoll’d”.

LOLCats
Combine a funny photograph of a cat and photo edit some purposely misspelled text and you get the “LOLCat”. This will usually involve an image of a cat performing very peculiar, hilarious, or adorable actions. The original LOLCat image was captioned “I can has cheezburger?” Later sub-memes followed, including phrases like “Om nom nom”, “You eated my cookie?”, “I has a [x]” and “I’m in ur [x], [doing y]”. Mythical feline entities, such as Longcat, Ceiling Cat, and Monorail Cat, were memefied simply based on their one-time appearance in a photograph. Spin-offs of LOLCats include other members of the animal kingdom, and even inanimate objects that appear to have faces.

There are many more examples of popular Internet Phenomena:

Demotivational Pictures: Take the lame motivational posters on your elementary school classroom wall and eliminate the positive influence.

Charlie Bit My Finger: Two British brothers aged three and one; the younger bites the finger of the older, and the dialogue is very funny to listen to.

I Like Turtles: when a boy, Jonathan, is asked about his face paint job, he replies, “I like turtles.”

Keyboard Cat: a video of a cat playing some keyboard music.

Powerthirst: fake commercials promoting an energy drink for manly men.

David After Dentist: David DeVore Jr. is loopy after receiving anaesthesia.

Pedobear: an image of a cartoon bear edited into photographs containing children; originally meant to mock Internet pedophiles.

“Chocolate Rain” song performed by Tay Zonday.

World of Warcraft’s Leeroy Jenkins: they made a meme simply because he yelled his name.

Anything with Vince Shlomi from ShamWow or Billy Mays the loud advertiser.

Miss Teen South Carolina: a famous speech blunder video.

The Dramatic Chipmunk (or Prairie Dog): it turns and faces the camera ominously.

Badger Badger Badger: an endless video depicting badgers, a mushroom, and a snake.

Making fun of Twilight and sparkling vampires.

Mudkip: A creature from Pokémon made popular through repetition in 4chan and YouTube videos.

In Soviet Russia…: First created by comedian Yakov Smirnoff, this phrase is followed by an ironic scenario with humorous antimetabole.

Numa Numa: Gary Brolsma lip-syncing to the song “Dragostea din tei” by O-Zone.

Hitler Rage Videos taken from the movie Downfall with edited subtitles taking the plot line severely out of context.

Star Wars Kid: a video of a high school student wielding a golf ball retriever like a lightsaber.

Dancing Banana to the song “Peanut Butter Jelly Time” by the Buckwheat Boyz.

Roflcopter: A combination of “Rolling on Floor Laughing” and “Helicopter”, first originating on forums.

Advice Dog: an image of a puppy’s face placed on a coloured background, giving terribly unwise advice. A genius variation of this is the Philosoraptor.

FFFFUUUU- : presented in a comic strip format, this poorly drawn cartoon person experiences mild misfortune and he overreacts.

Three Wolf Moon Shirt: A shirt design mythified by facetious reviews on Amazon.com.

Chuck Norris: Need I say more?