Meme vs. Viral

Besides the differentiation of various Memegenres, further distinctions have to be made. In this digital world, memes play an important role. According to An Xiao Mina (2019), nowadays, the internet is crucial for social movements, which imply the spreading of memes and the subsequent creation and diffusion of new memes. Aside from the popular meme, there is another term that is of high importance in the digital world though: the viral. Kevin Pauliks even extends this distinction and differentiates between viral, meme and series. In the following section, I will focus on the definition of virals and examine the difference between memes and virals.

2.3.1 The definition of viral

In the article “Knowlegde and Knowlede Management in the Social Media Age”, Jeff Hemsley and Robert Mason (2013) talk about virality and viral information events, examining how and why certain posts, articles etc. go viral. They state that virality plays an important role in various fields just as political science, communications and many others. Hemsley and Mason define virality as a

“cascade diffusion process wherein a message is actively forwarded from one person to others, within and between multiple weakly linked personal social networks, resulting in a rapid geometric increase in the number of people who are exposed to the message”

(Hemsley & Mason, 2013, p. 144)

In other words, a viral is any form of message, just as a video, photo, text etc., that is passed on from one person to another and thus spreads quickly on social media and goes viral. Therefore, a viral can be identified as a single unit that runs through this process of rapid and great diffusion. The two researchers mention three key characteristics in regard to virality and the viral information events, as they call the virals (Hemsley & Mason, 2013):

1) The continuous diffusion of information from one person to another 2) The high speed of information spreading through social media platforms 3) The broad reach that is achieved by bridging various networks

The original definition of the term viral can be found in the medical world and describes something epidemic. An infection or a virus is passed on from an infected person to a person who is not infected yet. As a result, the other person gets infected as well and passes the infection on to the next person. It becomes viral (Hemsley & Mason, 2013). A brilliant and easily understandable example for this would be Covid-19. Coronavirus has become viral within a few months and spread all over the planet, affecting not only certain parts of the world but humanity as a whole. Hemsely and Mason (2013) say that the same happens with messages, videos, photos or texts on the Internet. A person creates or receives a message and passes it on to another person who has not gotten that message yet and the message is passed on to numerous people until it goes viral. Taking the example of Coronavirus, certain articles, videos or photos concerning Covid-19 have become viral on the Internet as well. Therefore, one could say that this virus did not only spread from an epidemic and medical point of view, but also on a digital level. Though, the most important factor of a digital viral is the following: it is always a single unit that is somehow diffused.

2.3.2 The difference between meme and viral

Virals and memes are both forwarded from one person to another and they both widely and rapidly spread all over numerous social media platforms and networks. Therefore, the question is: where is the difference between a meme and a viral? The answer is simple. As already mentioned, a viral is a single cultural unit. This single unit can be anything, a video, a picture, even a joke. A meme, as opposed to this, is a collection of units. An original video itself is not a meme yet, it is only part of the meme. As I already stated, a meme is often an imitation or a

remix of an already existing photo or video. As such, the use of remix and the act of imitation are the fundaments for a real meme. Thus, the difference between the two terms is simple: a viral is a simple message of any form that broadly and rapidly spreads all over the Internet.

From that point of view, a meme is analogous to a viral, with the slight difference of it being modified. A meme can vary, it can change and there can be many versions of a meme. A viral only exists in its original form and does not undergo any form of modification (Shifman, 2014).

According to Shifman (2014), a purely viral content does not exist anymore nowadays. She states that with the increasing level of awareness and fame of a video or picture on the Internet, the chances of it being modified, remixed and imitated augment as well. This again implies that a memetic video is the product of a once viral video (Shifman, 2014). Therefore, viral videos or pictures are often the basis for memetic photos and videos. She differentiates between a viral, a founder-based meme and an egalitarian meme. A viral is a single unit that has a single version of its message. It has numerous agents who spread it and millions of spectators who look at it.

A viral can cause imitations though. That is how a founder-based meme develops. The latter is based on a certain text, video or image that is going to be remixed and imitated. The several versions of the founder-based meme spread quite a lot, but mostly less than its original version.

Finally, Shifman (2014) mentions the egalitarian meme, which is a meme that does not have a clear origin. It contains many different versions that apparently developed simultaneously and are often based on a specific genre or a certain pattern.

Shifman (2014) highlights another difference between virals and memes, which is their form of communication. Besides the fact that they are associated with two different kinds of communication, which I will shortly discuss, the focus lies on passive and active communication through memes and virals. While virals seem to be a more passive way of communication, memes are more actively communicating with their audience through added texts and other sorts of modification. She argues though, that virals can contain an active way of communication too, for example, through the insertion of meta-comments just as “please do not try this at home”. Therefore, both memes and virals can communicate actively with their audience, but it becomes quite clear, that memes give their agents and spectators more design freedom and thus freedom of active communication.

Concerning the two different kinds of communication mentioned above, one must differentiate between communication as transmission and communication as ritual (Shifman, 2014).

Communication as transmission means communication as a method for passing on information only. It focuses on spreading its message as quick and much as possible, without any

interferences and with information transmission as a main goal. In contrast, communication as ritual aims at communicating a message. Its goal is to transmit values, symbols and similarities between cultures and societies. It does not focus on the spreading of a single information, but it is rather seen as an enduring process of building new constructs of culture, news and identity and transmit feelings of community and belonging (Shifman, 2014). Virality, as a single, unmodified unit, is associated with communication as transmission, while memes represent communication as a ritual.

As opposed to this, Pauliks (2017) states that the example of the Socially Awkward Penguin shows, to which extend digital memes use communication as a ritual. In order to understand, why this meme perfectly represents the communication of rituals, a brief explanation of the meme’s origins and developments is necessary. The Socially Awkward Pengiun first appeared in 2009 on the online platform 4chan. The format and scheme of the meme is comparable to the Advice Animals, as their typography and background layout resembles, but the Socially Awkward Penguin represents and depicts, as the name already says, socially awkward situations. It is a meme based on unpleasant or embarrassing life situations, which, on top of that, resulted in clumsy responses (Pauliks, 2017). The origin of this meme are photographs of the Adeliepenguin taken by George F. Moble. Even though the Adeliepenguin is considered a very sociable bird, its clumsy appearance called certain cultural stereotypes into existence.

Thus, the meme of the Socially Awkward Penguin was created and, in comparison to many other digital memes, it got its own personal meaning. Everyone has similar or same associations to this meme and uses it equally, which is why its recurring use made it, what Pauliks (2017) calls it, a series. According him, a plausible explanation for the memes popularity is the fact that it addresses topics that, up to that point- meaning the year 2009-, have not been discussed publicly via the use of memes. The Socially Awkward Penguin takes up the issue of social fears.

This meme allows its creators and spectators not only to express personal and social fears and communicate social problems, but it also normalizes and generalizes them. The Socially Awkward Penguin is applicable to various situations, from everyday situations as for example embarrassing encounters or fails to forms of exclusion and general disappointments as being friendzoned (Pauliks, 2017). Therefore, the meme’s success lies in the depiction and addressing of those recurring situations and contexts. This recurrence is what is meant by ritual when one speaks of “communication as a ritual”. Thus, it becomes clear why the Socially Awkward Penguin and Internet memes in general tend to be associated with this form of communication.