We tend to dismiss memes as trivial. Yet they may be one of the few cultural objects that still crosses the lines our algorithms draw — needing no translation, demanding no expertise, asking no allegiance.
My latest post explores the meme as a modern folk tradition: authorless, borderless, and quietly insisting that for all that divides us, we remain a single audience laughing at the same pictures of ourselves.
A reflection for anyone thinking about culture, communication, and connection in the digital age.
Core Message
Memes are more than internet jokes—they are the folklore of the digital age, serving as a shared cultural language that helps people across different backgrounds recognize common human experiences, emotions, and struggles.
In One Sentence
The memes we share and enjoy are modern expressions of our collective human experience, proving that even in a divided digital world, people still find connection through shared laughter and recognition.
The Folklore of the Feed: What Our Favourite Memes Reveal About Us
A reflection on memes as the shared language of a divided internet
Somewhere this morning, a cartoon dog is sitting in a burning room, a cup of coffee in his paw, telling himself that everything is fine. Somewhere else, a young man is turning his head to admire a passing stranger while his partner looks on in horror. Neither image is new. Both have been copied, captioned, recoloured and recirculated millions of times across every continent that has electricity and a signal. And yet, asked to name a favourite meme, most of us can answer without hesitation. That ease of answering is itself worth pausing over. It suggests that these small, absurd pictures have become something more than a passing joke. They have become a shared language.
When the question “what is your favourite meme?” is posed, the honest reply is that the choice matters less than what the choosing reveals. A meme is rarely loved for its artistry. It is loved because it names, with uncanny economy, a feeling we did not know was universal until we saw a stranger across the world laughing at the same image. To study why we love them is to study how a fractured, globalised, endlessly distracted internet still manages to speak to itself in a common tongue.
A word older than the internet
The term itself is older than most of the images it now describes. The biologist Richard Dawkins coined “meme” in 1976 to name a unit of cultural transmission — an idea, tune, or fashion that spreads from mind to mind much as a gene spreads from body to body. He had in mind melodies, catchphrases and the arch of a building, not captioned photographs. Yet the analogy proved prophetic. The internet meme behaves almost exactly as Dawkins described: it replicates, it mutates, and the variants best suited to their environment survive while the rest are forgotten.
What the digital age added was speed and scale. A cultural unit that once took a generation to travel a continent now circles the planet before lunch. The meme is therefore best understood not as a modern novelty but as the latest form of a very old human habit: the folk tradition. Like the proverb, the folk song and the schoolyard rhyme, the meme is authorless, endlessly variable, and owned by everyone who passes it on. It is folklore for a population that no longer gathers around a fire but around a feed.
The dog in the burning room
Consider the cartoon dog, the image usually labelled “This Is Fine.” It began life in 2013 as a strip by the artist KC Green, in which the dog’s denial ends rather more darkly than the cropped version admits. The internet, with its instinct for compression, kept only the first two panels: the seated dog, the spreading flames, the insistence that all is well. In that act of cropping lies the whole sociology of the meme. A culture took an artist’s private despair and refashioned it into a public shorthand for a feeling everyone recognises — the determined, slightly hysterical calm we summon when our circumstances are plainly not fine at all.
That this image surged during seasons of collective anxiety is no accident. Its popularity is a kind of communal confession. To send it is to say, without the awkwardness of saying it plainly, that one is overwhelmed but coping, frightened but functioning. Humour here is not denial of difficulty; it is a way of holding difficulty at a survivable distance. The meme works because it lets a person admit vulnerability under the cover of a joke — a manoeuvre as old as the court jester and the village fool, now rendered in two frames and shared a million times over.
The wandering eye
The second image — the man glancing back at a passing woman while his companion glares — became famous for a different reason. Drawn from an ordinary stock photograph, it offered something the dog did not: a ready-made grammar of three labelled positions. The wandering man, the thing he is tempted by, the loyalty he neglects. Almost overnight, people discovered they could pour any conflict at all into this template. Programmers tempted by a fashionable new language while a stable one looks on. Students drawn to a distraction while their deadline despairs. The specific joke is forgotten within a day; the structure endures.
This is the second great property of the meme: it is a form before it is a content. The most successful memes are not finished jokes but empty templates, frames into which any community can insert its own preoccupations. A doctor and a teacher and a teenager on opposite sides of the earth, who share no language and no news, can each take the same picture and make it speak about lives that have nothing else in common. The image becomes a small, portable theatre in which every culture stages its own quarrels.
A common tongue for a divided house
Herein lies the deeper significance, and the reason the question of a “favourite” meme rewards more thought than it first appears to. The internet is famous for dividing us — sorting us into ever narrower enclaves, each with its own facts and grievances. The meme runs quietly against that current. It is one of the few cultural objects that still crosses the lines the algorithms draw. It needs no translation, demands no expertise, asks no allegiance. It assumes only that to be human is to recognise, in a cartoon dog or a distracted man, something of one’s own predicament.
There is a gentle irony in this. The same technologies that fragment our attention have produced, almost as a by-product, a new folk art capable of momentary reunion. We laugh at the same images not because we have been persuaded to, but because the joke lands on a recognition that precedes argument. For an instant, the educated professional and the bored adolescent, the believer and the sceptic, the citizens of countries that distrust one another, are simply people who got the same joke. That is not a small thing in an age so practised at disagreement.
Why the question is worth asking
So when we are asked to name a favourite meme, we are really being asked something larger: what universal feeling have we found, unexpectedly, mirrored back to us by strangers? The answer is a quiet map of our shared interior life — our anxieties, our temptations, our weary good humour in the face of a world that refuses to be fine. The memes that endure are the ones that name a truth we all half-knew and were waiting to see drawn.
The folklorists of the last century travelled to remote villages to record the songs and sayings by which ordinary people made sense of their lives. The folklore of our own century requires no such journey. It is scrolling past, right now, in the feed — authorless, borderless, and quietly insisting that for all that divides us, we are still a single audience, laughing in recognition at the same small pictures of ourselves.
Over to you
Which meme do you reach for when words fail — and what universal feeling do you think it names for the people who share it with you? I would love to read your answer in the comments below.
Enjoyed this reflection? Rise & Inspire publishes daily — thoughtful writing on faith, culture, ideas, and the inner life, delivered straight to your inbox. Join our community by subscribing. You will never miss a post.
Written in response to the WordPress Daily Writing Prompt — 13 June 2026
Johnbritto Kurusumuthu
Founder
RISE & INSPIRE
Explore more at the Rise & Inspire archive | Daily Prompts
© 2026 Rise & Inspire.
Website: Home | Blog | About Us | Contact| Resources
Word Count:1461
Discover more from Rise & Inspire
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
