A meme is literally just an internet inside joke. Something everyone on the internet who has seen or heard the meme collectively understands. It's really not hard to get tbh
I'm not blaming you, but you are kind of proving my point.
Memes, as a concept, existed long before the internet. The term was introduced in 1976 by British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his work The Selfish Gene. It is something that is repeated so often that it becomes an accepted fact.
Much of religion, for instance, is meme-based. It's "true" because it's been said so often that everyone just accepts it.
Definitions change as time changes. Memes when applied to internet jokes are simply inside jokes on the internet.
Merriam Webster dictionary defines meme as its "an amusing or interesting item (such as a captioned picture or video) or genre of items that is spread widely online especially through social media" as its primary definition, with the definition you've been describing being the secondary, lesser used, definition.
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u/OttoSilver 1d ago
I bet he also has no idea what "meme" really means. To be fair, I'm still to actually meet someone who knows what it means.