Round up the usual suspects: Black is beautiful; I’ll have what she’s having; We are the 99 percent; We’ll always have Paris; Read my lips--memes that have survived over time. They are cultural carriers transmitting ideas and concepts that spread, person to person, almost virally as they travel through the Internet, social media, TV (think Saturday Night Live), movies, text, and so on. Meme content as a rule is funny, and usually loaded with ironic satire. A really popular meme will be copied, with many variations, and spread almost virally through social media and the Internet--remember some that spread with great rapidity through the 2016 political year--and may just as quickly disappear.

The word “meme” was taken from a pre-HyperCard concept developed by Vannevar Bush in “As We May Think“ [1] in which the “Memex” acted as a container for documents that accumulate when saved by users for access when needed. Researchers inferred that a frequently accessed Memex document meant that it was important to a large user base, that is, culturally important. Using Memex as a source, Richard Dawkins [2] coined the word “meme” to use as part of his theories of cultural replication. Researchers link his theories to the current use of memes with their shared jokes, popular catchphrases, and buzzwords.

In The world made meme, the author describes the scope and reach of memes like “binders full of women,” grumpy cat, Kanye interrupts, and so on. He notes that memes created in a multimodal environment will promote easy reuse, frequent copying, and rapid circulation through all forms of digital access, including Twitter, Facebook and other social media, Internet sites, and print. Milner zeros in on

the emerging patterns in public conversations and about the social participation essential to those conversations. [He] focuses on Internet themes--the linguistic, image, audio, and video texts created and transformed by countless cultural participants across vast networks and collectives. [...] Memes are used to make jokes, argue points.

The book is divided into sections and contents in which the author describes the development and rise of memes through a profusely illustrated text.

He notes that the integration of word, image, video, and hypertext “facilitates vibrant creative expression and conversation ... within which participants weave novel expression out of found material.”

For anyone interested in learning more about this phenomenon, this study goes beyond the superficial. It is an academic work, highly detailed, and pedantically written, as the outgrowth of a PhD dissertation. Unfortunately many of his illustrations, although they serve admirably to illuminate the text, are no longer quite current, because memes that are extremely popular can lose their sting and fade away. Nonetheless, the depth of the research will serve anyone interested in learning more about the growth and social connotations of this phenomenon.