What is an internet meme?

What's Tech?

I remember my first meme. I was in my grade school computer lab — this was a time when computers were still novel, not mandatory. My fifth grade teacher was explaining email to our classroom, and how she could use it to talk with a friend in another country about what happened on this week's episode of Friends. Presumably Friends didn't air in said country. After an awkwardly long explanation of what Friends is to a couple dozen 11-year-olds, my teacher decided to show us something more our speed on the internet: the dancing baby. Then she showed us the dancing baby, but wearing a birthday hat. Then she loaded the dancing baby and a bouncing ball. That was my first contact with a meme, and the day I fell in love with the GIF. While the basic principle of the GIF has remained the same, though, memes have become more prominent and stranger features of society, both online and offline. To explain internet memes, I invited my friend, The Verge's senior reporter Adi Robertson to the show.

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