28 January 2026, by Claudia Sewig

Photo: Adobe Stock/TShirt Empire

Memes have become an integral part of communication, primarily in social media. But how exactly does the interplay of text and image create meaning? Prof. Dr. Stefan Hinterwimmer’ project Visual and Non-Visual Expression of Perspective, Part 2 investigates this with funding from the German Research Foundation (DFG); in the interview he also explains how memes relate to evolutionary biology.

When did memes emerge and how can they be defined?

Initially, the term meme had nothing to do with the Internet. Its original meaning, thought up by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, was much more general. During the late 1970s and 1980s, he used the term in the broadest sense to describe cultural products, which are passed on and thus disseminated and imitated while being subject to permanent variation. This can be anything: a style of clothing, a certain type of glasses, a certain way of trimming your beard, a phrase, a joke, a picture, or even a song.

Dawkins, as an evolutionary biologist, used this analogous to the concept of the gene. Accordingly, these cultural products also have a life of their own, and certain memes are particularly successful and prevail. This means they appeal to a particularly large number of people. But, and this is significant, they are always varied slightly. Typically, like genes, they are not just copied. Though picked up by cultural studies, this comparison has also been assessed somewhat critically. It raised the question as to how far the analogy to evolutionary biology really holds.

And how did it enter common usage eventually?

The term meme only really caught on in the Internet age, especially from the 2010s, with the rise of social media. Since then, the term has been used almost exclusively to originally refer to combinations of text and images that are distributed via the Internet, mainly via social networks. They are relatively easy to create, which has been a key factor for meme success. And that also fits in very well with how social media work.

Are memes limited to a certain age or user group?

No, memes are used across different age groups, but younger generations, meaning digital natives, interact via memes and actively shape them much more than older people do. I am a pretty good example of that myself: To me, memes are much more an object of research than a means of communication. I sometimes have to ask my young colleagues to find something for me on social media.

What characterizes a meme?

Viral memes can typically be read on multiple levels due to their inherent ambiguity but can still be understood by a large circle of people. This requires that they are embedded in a particular cultural narrative. Many also have humorous aspects. This is often achieved by using the top line to call up a certain scenario that is confirmed by the image and thus conforms to the expectation. This is followed by a surprising punch line at the bottom that suddenly requires a completely different reading.

Do you have any specific examples of this?

A very well-known example of this would be the so-called Woman Yelling at a Cat meme, which originally came from the series The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills and which exists in many different variations. It always shows a woman who appears to be very upset, screaming with her mouth wide open and pointing at something. On the other side you always see a cat sitting completely unmoved in front of a set plate. One version, which I find particularly effective, includes a house with the inscription “No smoking safety first” above both. But you could also read it as “No safety smoking first.” The first version is then assigned to the screaming woman and the second to the stoic cat. This is a very successful play on the fact that you can read this text in 2 directions.

Just like the Pepperspraying Cop meme with a US police officer deploying pepperspray in the faces of demonstrating students, which has been copied into many different contexts, including historical scenes. This meme works on the visual level only.

In other memes, such as the The Moment When, the linguistic level is more important. There are sentences like “The Moment When You Realize It’s Friday” that comes with the image of a dog with sunglasses sitting in a deck chair and sipping a cocktail. As a linguist and especially a semanticist, I find it exciting that we actually only have an incomplete sentence here, because there is only the temporal subordinate clause— the rest is complemented by the picture. We can understand the statement only based on the visual component and different aspects we select to fully grasp the message. I find it particularly exciting which aspects are chosen exactly.

Memes can be read on different levels.

Could the language in the memes become part of our language use?

You can find actual examples of this. For example, “The Moment When” had already being used in journalistic texts, although it was quite clear that this alluded to the meme.

Language is a dynamic system and is constantly evolving. Many expressions that we take for granted today and that have become part of the standard language originate from youth language or certain subcultures. I think this will happen to some meme sayings.

What will your meme research focus on?

On the one hand, we want to explore the fundamentals of how text and images are interacting in detail. What interests me the most: Based on what criteria do we actually interpret certain aspects of what is depicted? So, how do we make a choice in the face of a permanent overabundance of information? As the old saying goes: “A picture is worth a thousand words.” A very long text representation may convey much less information than a schematic pictorial representation.

Our second goal is to create a classification of existing speech-image interaction types. There is, for example, the abovementioned The Moment When meme, where entire parts of the linguistic utterance are replaced by images. Or there are cases where the image forces us to read a sentence in a way, which in itself would be completely absurd.

One of my research subprojects will investigate why specific memes are so successful at the political level. 

And how will you research this?

Our research methods take a fairly traditional approach. We select memes and try to categorize them into different groups. Initially, we investigate probable interpretations of this meme and analyze how these have likely come about. In the next step, we also want to carry out experiments by presenting memes to test subjects and asking them to explain in a few sentences what they see and how they interpret it.

First of all, we aim to find out whether it is true that all people interpret certain memes more or less in the same way or whether there are major differences. We plan to then use technological alienation to manipulate certain elements of the memes before presenting them to the test subjects again to establish exactly what elements evoke a different interpretation. We may supplement this with gaze analysis, to assess what the test subjects look at in the memes and when.