Know Your Meme is a web series and database that documents Internet phenomena: viral videos, image macros, catchphrases, web celebs and more.

Recently, PopTech interviewed me about the science of SERIOUS INTERNET MEMEZ, how the KYM community evaluates memes, and meme spread. In the interest of not spraining your scroll wheel finger, I’ve pasted half of the interview below. You can click through for the rest.

Life After Memes: Kenyatta Cheese on Susan Blackmore’s Third Replicator

At PopTech 2005, psychologist Susan Blackmore talked about two types of replicators: genes and memes.

Recently, Blackmore published an article imagining a new evolutionary process, inviting others to submit names for this third replicator of processed binary information.

We asked kenyatta cheese, Co-Creator and Producer of the web video series “Know Your Meme” to talk with us about memes and online replication.

PopTech: Do Susan Blackmore’s meme categories (that she gives in her PopTech talk) of “good, true, beautiful, and useful” hold true online? What are some basic meme categories that you see?

Kenyatta Cheese: Unfortunately, Dr. Blackmore’s categories don’t map well to the memes that we’re tracking online. Internet memes tend to be culturally specific–so Goatse, for example, could only be described as good, true, beautiful, and useful to a small subset of human beings. Or at least I would hope.

Our initial categorization of internet memes is based on form. While we’re still developing our basic meme set, we’ve found major clusters around image macros, viral videos, catchphrases, and mashups. Clearly, our Internet Menome Project has a long way to go, but we’re pretty excited about our prospects for getting it done. Between us, the Web Ecology Project, Jason Scott, and Andy Baio, I expect someone to have the entire space mapped out sometime around 2041.

PT: What’s the criteria for a meme to enter the online meme canon (be significant enough to merit a “Know Your Meme” episode, say)? How are memes submitted to the KYM community site evaluated?

KC: Well, anyone who thinks that they’ve spotted a meme in the wild can submit an entry to the Internet Meme Database. Once in the MemeDB, entries are evaluated by the KYM community based on six primary concepts:

1) Viral Spread: search results, social media mentions, forum posts, route of spread.
2) Point of Origin: Find out where the meme first appeared and provide proof that it spread beyond its original subculture.
3) Derivatives: Existing volume of spoofs, mashups, remixes, parodies, recontextualizations, and re-enactments. Is it mutating?
4) Appearance in Memetic Hubs: Websites and communities that have been made famous for spreading and culturing memes.
5) Organic / Forced Memes: Was the meme spread peer to peer or was it astroturfed? Even astroturfed phenomena can become memes.
6) Spin-offs / Sub-memes: Many memes spawn entire trees of sub-memes.

Our members tend to be fairly rigorous — as much as one can be about a bunny with a pancake on its head. Our lead Community Manager once spent the good part of a day debating the non-canonical interpretations of Ceiling Cat and Longcat in the Lolcat Bible.

Once a meme has been confirmed, the KYM Chief Scientists — Jamie Dubs, Elspethjane, and I — go through the new entries and look for ones that have reached some sort of stable state. If we like what we find, we do more research, we form our hypotheses, we find the real social or information theory to support our assumptions, and then we present the whole thing in an easy-to-digest four-minute package, complete with our own set of pseudo-scientific graphs and matrices that we like to call ‘mememath’. In the end, we probably make Blackmore cringe.

PT: Blackmore says, “According to meme theory, humans are radically different from all other species because we alone are meme machines.” Do you agree? Do you think this is related to the number of animals in online memes?

KC: Aren’t there lots of birds out there actively protesting this concept by learning and handing down new birdsongs over time? That being said, the idea of humans as mere meme machines is a novel one. I’m fascinated at the possibility that we may be the only species to subjugate our genetic interests to other interests. But does that necessarily mean that we are superseded by the systems that emerge out of our own activity? Must the memes really control the people? Maybe we are to memes as bees are to pollen. btw, here’s a video of a dog in a swing.