“How do memes change?”

Memes (photos or videos that are popular on the Internet) are no longer ‘kids‘ puns’. They have gone beyond simple Internet play culture and have become a powerful tool that determines the success of content.

Starting with ‘A cat walks on the frozen Han River’ early last year, countless memes have swept across pop culture, politics, economy, and even society, becoming the ‘lubricant of communication’. This means that you can’t have a conversation if you don‘t know about ‘memes’.

Memes appear and disappear quickly as they go through a reproduction process due to the characteristics of the Internet. Last year, countless memes were born and disappeared.

Just as the ‘Frozen Han River Cat’ is reproduced every year when the biting cold returns, there is a ‘meme’ that has been popular from last year to recently.

O“If you’re going to be a meme, come in right now, there are too many memes in the world”
As the extreme conflict between Hive and Adore CEO Min Hee-jin, which heated up the music industry last year, was revealed, unfiltered keywords such as “Come in right now” “Mr. Gae” came out, and various ‘memes’ were created such as ‘Come in right now’.

O“It‘s Lucky Vicky this year too”
‘Lucky Vicky’, also known as ‘Won-young thinking’, refers to a ‘super-positive way of thinking’.

Popular girl group I.B member Jang Won-young was lining up to buy bread at a famous bakery, but when the bread ran out right in front of her, she wasn’t disappointed and bragged, “Thanks to you, I can buy freshly made warm scones. I‘m Lucky Vicky after all”. Lucky is good fortune, and Vicky is Jang Won-young’s English name, Vicky.
O‘T라 아이숙해’
When actor Kim Sung-cheol‘s ‘Tiramisu Cake’ in a 2018 drama belatedly became a hot topic on social media, it developed into a ‘word play’ to wittily tease people with the ‘T’ personality type, who value logical and objective information among the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), by calling them ‘T라 아이숙해’.

Thanks to this, Kim Sung-cheol even enjoyed the unexpected effect of landing a model for a famous bakery brand.

‘meme’ is a word first used by British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in ‘The Selfish Gene’ in 1976, and is a portmanteau of the Greek words mimeme and gene. It means that cultural behavior patterns are reproduced and passed on to others like DNA. As times change, they are transformed into short moving images such as ‘GIFs’ and are used as Internet buzzwords. The challenge form of imitating the songs or dances of K-pop singers is also grouped into the large category of ‘Memes’.


Reporter Lee Jeong-yeon annjoy@donga.com

This article is automatically translated using Google AI. If you notice any inaccuracies, please let us know at allkstar@donga.com.