It was 7th May, 2025. I remember we were glued to the television, trying to understand why India had attacked us across the international borders for the first time after 1971. This reckless action, especially between two nuclear-armed countries, without the luxury of a time lapse, felt like an extreme miscalculation.

And then a meme popped up on my phone.

Fierce, unapologetic and resolute, it kindled nationalism and passion deep inside my soul, capturing the conflict in a way that was immediate and visceral. It sharpened resolve, reinforced the belief in our armed forces and propelled a divisive society into a surge of collective identity of “Pakistaniat.”

In those few moments, I understood the power of a meme—its ability not only to reflect sentiment but to manufacture it.

The story of memes did not begin on the internet. It began in 1976, when the world-famous biologist Richard Dawkins introduced the term “meme” (as a shortening of the word mimeme from Ancient Greek mīmēma, meaning “imitated thing”) in his seminal book, The Selfish Gene. His genius was that he presented the meme for the first time as a unit of cultural transformation, which spreads through imitation and replication, similar to genes in the biological world.

The Oxford Dictionary defines a meme as “an image, video, piece of text, etc., typically humorous in nature, that is copied and spread rapidly by internet users, often with slight variations.”

It is important to note that long before memes came onto the internet, they existed in the form of religious beliefs, political slogans, folk tales, fables, songs and rituals.

However, when the digital volcano erupted post-1990, memes like emoticons in the late 1980s and the “dancing baby” of the 1990s became powerful engines of transformation in the communication world. But they were slow to evolve and had a marginal impact.

Once social media exploded, memes evolved from cultural artefacts into cultural currencies. They transformed the narrative paradigm in ways that were unthinkable before. A single meme would generate an emotion, both positive or negative, of a magnitude that pamphlets, books, slogans and other pre-internet media could only dream of.

A meme has the ability to be dismissed as a joke, even when it has a powerful ideological contour

A meme has the ability to be dismissed as a joke, even when it has a powerful ideological contour

Propaganda has always been a very powerful tool for the spread of ideas, simplifying complex realities into emotionally charged visuals and slogans. Whether in politics or religious propagation, it has served as a cornerstone, both for its proponents and the opposition.

Slogans and chants like “Liberté, égalité, fraternité” or “Yes we can” were pre-digital memes, which took years to impact public consciousness. Similarly, celebrated political cartoons compressed powerful signalling into a single image, but impacted only those who read the newspaper.

Today, contrary to the past top-down framework, memes have become bottom-up. Anyone can create one. Everyone can spread one. They have democratised influence and also decentralised truth. Being the ultimate compression tool, they take complex geopolitical conflicts, nuanced social issues, economic difficulties and deep ideological fissures and reduce them into a single image, a few words and a shared emotion.

Extensive research by Berger & Milkman (2012), Wong & Holyoak (2021) and Sundar et al. (2021) has identified four reasons why memes are so powerful.

Firstly, humans absorb visual stimuli very fast. According to Wikipedia, “A picture is worth a thousand words” was coined in the early 20th century by advertising executive Fred R. Barnard, appearing in the trade journal Printers' Ink on 8 December 1921. Thus, memes bypass analytical thinking and hit emotional recognition.

They create emotional resonance. They relate to the emotional frequency of the viewer, thus embedding humour, anger, irony, fear and other sentiments within seconds.

Thirdly, the core principle of memetic evolution is sharing. Their structure compels the viewer to share them with their contacts. Thus, as cells replicate, so does the meme, spreading within minutes across the planet.

Lastly, memes identify the side on which the viewer is standing. They tell others who you are, what you think and believe, and what your alignment is.

In the 21st century, conflict is no longer confined to battlefields. The virtual world of social media has become a crucial battleground. Memes sit at the centre of the realm of perception, belief and narrative. By the time facts are checked, the messaging has already taken root. Very few people are inclined to analyse and check their veracity.

Moreover, a meme has the ability to be dismissed as a joke even when it has a powerful ideological contour.

Thus, memes are being used today in election campaigns, advertising and geopolitics. They are manufactured and then spread organically and strategically for a host of aims, thus shaping public discourse. They also enable the have-nots to challenge power and can bring it into ridicule with wide public acceptability.

And with the ever-reducing attention span of the public, memes fulfil the psychological need to feel belonging. This illusion of completeness is what makes them so powerful and dangerous. They do not let the audience question—they simply invite reaction.

A meme is small. A few pixels. A few words. But the impact is profound. Being the DNA of the modern communication deluge, they compress ideology into emotion, complexity into simplicity and debate into reaction. Since they live in a control-free environment, they have the luxury of evolving without checks, thus creating a medium for every section of society to express itself.

The battle for control of the human mind is not won by the most rational, accurate or long message. It is won by the one who spreads unfettered.

And nothing spreads like a meme.

© The Friday Times