It me” appeared on Twitter in 2014, apparently coined by a user named Andrea Kats in a twist on James Franco’s texts with an underage fan. It rapidly became a popular way of signaling agreement and identification with other people’s tweets, photos, or found images. Today the phrase is part of our cultural vocabulary, firmly ensconced in urban dictionaries and casual diction. When used with an image or photo online, it quickly conveys a rapprochement that might otherwise need to be explained at length, but here achieves a telegraphic, kinetic clarity.
In these two words, “It me” also signals a rhetorical principle of meme culture so endemic and so intuitively understood that it is hardly necessary to spell out. Both the lack of a verb and the two pronouns are key. There is no verb because everything is stilled or looped. Most memes, especially visual ones, work through immediate, self-objectifying identification—a nearly childlike, exuberant finger-pointing.
“A unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation,” is how Richard Dawkins defined the term meme on his first use of it in The Selfish Gene (1976). Dawkins coined the term, an obvious portmanteau of gene and mimesis, to draw a parallel between the supposed “selfishness” of our genomes and of our cultures: while we might think of “selfishness” as an individual trait, he argued, both genetic tendencies and cultural trends gain their fullest expression on the level of large populations rather than individuals. And so any particular self serves merely as a temporary means by which a gene, or a meme, perfects itself and prolongs its survival.
Dawkins conceived this term broadly, as one that encompassed everything from miniskirts to images of saints and angels in Gothic churches. Though he could not have foreseen lolcats, it is to them and not to his chosen examples that “meme” owes its cultural survival and philosophical proof of concept. Like individual random mutations in evolutionary theory, any image or quip that becomes an internet meme begins as some particular user’s act of self-expression. But if it is successful it evolves into a piece of cultural syntax, cycling through many people’s perspectives and becoming divorced from its original context. Soon that original context—or any other single iteration of the meme—matters little to its current or its fullest meaning. At its most interesting, a meme is a cloud of variants and reuses, coming alive in each reenactment but meaningful only when one thinks of the abstraction at its center. When we use a meme, we self-identify with something that is both personified and rendered as other than a person, something at once more specific and more generalizable than a particular self. As people reconstitute themselves in memes, they often capture the id in motion: “It me” becomes “Id me.” This act of identification might paradoxically make us believe, for a moment, that we, too, under the right circumstances, could make our bodies give rise to an abstraction.
And it is here that the gene-meme analogy starts to break down. As a meme’s circulation increases, it evolves—Dawkins concedes as much—but usually does so in apparently self-conscious ways, growing ever more capacious and ironically reflexive. To take an example much in vogue in 2019-20: “distracted boyfriend” began as a stock image. Then it became a way of talking about distraction (and desire) in general. Then it became a way of talking about how we talk about distraction and desire.
