Introducing The Hall of Memes

Remember 1998? It was a simpler on the Internet: Less than half of the American adult population were online^[1]. Microsoft was the biggest company in the world. Google had been just incorporated as a garage startup in California. AOL reigned supreme as America’s biggest internet service provider. You’ve Got Mail hit the box office and became an instant classic romcom of a new era. But then again, 1998 was a momentous year for internet culture. Dancing Baby made its prime TV debut on Ally McBeal, while some of the earliest known memes like "All Your Base Are Belong to Us," Hello My Future Girlfriend and Hamster Dance began sweeping across the world wide web.

Fast forward a decade. In 2008, three out of four American adults were online.^[1] Facebook, YouTube and Twitter began eclipsing their predecessors Digg, LiveJournal and MySpace. Computer games like Starcraft and Half-Life paved a new road for online gaming culture. As viral videos and social media seeped into our everyday conversations, the word "meme" soon came to encompass the ever-expanding belt of miscellaneous content we clicked on and passed on. That summer, a group of “internet scientists” in New York City undertook the monumental task of mapping the evolution of internet culture, by researching one meme at a time. So began the mission of Know Your Meme.

In celebrating our 10th anniversary and two decades of internet culture, we are paying a tribute to the ten most influential memes of our times Two Decades of Memes, a special weekend event we are hosting at the Museum of the Moving Image (MOMI) in September. We want YOU to help us determine the first ten choices that will be inducted into the Hall of Memes!

If the poll is not displaying properly on this page, proceed to Google Forms to fill out the survey.

^[1] Americans’ Internet Access: 2000-2015 and The Internet Circa 1998, Pew Research Center.

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