Entropy and complexity unveil the landscape of memes evolution

TL;DR

This study analyzes 2 million Reddit memes over a decade, revealing exponential growth and increasing complexity, suggesting memes form an evolving internet metalanguage that reflects social trends and attitudes.

Contribution

It provides a large-scale quantitative analysis of meme evolution using entropy and complexity metrics, uncovering their growth patterns and cultural significance.

Findings

Memes exhibit exponential growth with a doubling time of about 6 months.

The complexity of meme content increases over time, reflecting social trends.

Memes may serve as an emerging form of internet metalanguage.

Abstract

On the Internet, information circulates fast and widely, and the form of content adapts to comply with users' cognitive abilities. Memes are an emerging aspect of the internet system of signification, and their visual schemes evolve by adapting to a heterogeneous context. A fundamental question is whether they present culturally and temporally transcendent characteristics in their organizing principles. In this work, we study the evolution of 2 million visual memes from Reddit over ten years, from 2011 to 2020, in terms of their statistical complexity and entropy. We find support for the hypothesis that memes are part of an emerging form of internet metalanguage: on one side, we observe an exponential growth with a doubling time of approximately 6 months; on the other side, the complexity of memes contents increases, allowing and adapting to represent social trends and attitudes.