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Part of Memes and virality: methods, tools and useful context
How to make sense of memes and virality platforms
Memes and virality on platforms that bind them: four dependencies that stop a format traveling, and what actually crosses the boundary instead.
Some formats move anywhere. Others cannot leave the place they were made, and the reason is rarely that people elsewhere would not like them. It is that the format needs something to exist, and the something is a feature of one service. Move it and the format either mutates into a different thing or simply does not work.
This page is about that dependency: what binds a format to a service, how to tell a bound format from a portable one before you write about it, and what happens at the boundary when a bound format tries to cross.
What to take away
- A format is portable if a copy of it can be produced with a pen and a camera. It is bound if producing a copy requires a specific tool, a specific pairing, or a specific reply structure.
- Four bindings account for almost all of it: an editing affordance, an audio pairing, a threading model, and an expiry.
- Bound formats leave worse records, because the feature that produced them stops existing before anyone writes the history.
- A format crossing a boundary does not survive as itself. It survives as a description of itself, which is a different object.
The four bindings
| Binding | What the service supplies | What a copy needs | What happens at the boundary |
|---|---|---|---|
| Editing affordance | A one-tap way to make the variable part: overlay, crop, template picker, draw tool | The tool, or the patience to reproduce its output by hand | The format survives among people willing to do it by hand, which is very few, so it thins out rather than dying |
| Audio pairing | A sound attached to a clip that can be reused by anyone | The sound, legally usable, and the ability to time to it | The format cannot cross at all unless the destination supports sound reuse; it arrives as a still with the sound described in text |
| Threading | A reply structure that makes a chain of contributions readable as one unit | Somewhere to put a second contribution attached to the first | Becomes a single flat post that has to contain the whole chain, losing the participation |
| Expiry | A guarantee that the thing disappears | An audience that believes it will disappear | The format loses its point entirely; the joke was that it would be gone |
Expiry is the interesting one, because the binding is social rather than technical. A format built on the expectation of disappearance is doing something a permanent copy cannot do, and it does not transfer to a permanent container even when the container copies every other feature. Whether an audience believes a thing will vanish is not a setting. The general problem is set out under ephemerality, which is older than any of this and applies to a lot more than posts.
Why bound formats leave thin records
A format bound to a feature has a lifespan capped by the feature's lifespan. When the feature is removed, changed, or moved behind a different control, the format stops being producible, and it stops abruptly rather than fading. Nothing is deleted, so nobody reports a loss, but no new copies appear.
This is a preservation problem as much as a cultural one. What survives is copies of instances, which is the least informative layer: the instance without the tool that made it does not show what the format asked people to do. Reconstructing the rule afterward means reconstructing an interface from its outputs, which is guesswork. The four kinds of record available for this, and the gaps in each, are set out under internet culture archives.
The platform timelines page makes the matching point about dating: a feature that arrived quietly and left quietly has no announcement to anchor either end, so the format's span cannot be pinned even approximately.
Telling a bound format from a portable one
Ask what a copy costs to make from scratch, with no help from any service.
- If a copy can be made with an image, a text layer and no particular skill, the format is portable. It will travel, it will be reproduced badly, and it will outlive several services.
- If a copy requires a specific tool that a service provides free and nobody provides elsewhere, the format is bound to that tool.
- If a copy requires a specific recording, the format is bound twice: to the recording's availability and to the rights position around reusing it.
- If a copy requires other people to add to it in a particular structure, the format is bound to the structure, and the structure is the thing that will not cross.
The fourth case is also where a format stops being a format and becomes a local custom, which is a different subject: the shapes a group takes and what each shape allows are covered under internet communities.
The second and fourth cases are where writers get the history wrong most often. A format that flourished in one place and appeared nowhere else is usually read as a matter of audience taste. Far more often it is a matter of what the copy required, and the audience elsewhere never had the chance to decline it.
What crossing actually produces
When a bound format reaches a service that cannot support it, three things happen in sequence, and only the third leaves a record.
First, people describe it. The description is not the format; it is a report about the format, and it is what most later coverage is actually built on.
Second, someone builds an unbound substitute: the same joke rebuilt out of whatever the destination does support. The substitute usually loses the participation and keeps the punchline, because participation is the expensive part.
Third, the substitute is treated as the format. From that point the origin claims get made about the substitute, and the earlier bound version, which had no exportable artifacts, drops out of the account. The way that kind of error becomes permanent is described under memes and virality.
What this means for anyone writing about it
Write the binding down as part of the description. A format entry that says what the copy required is legible years later; one that says only what the copies looked like is not. If the requirement is gone, say that it is gone and say that the format is therefore not reproducible, rather than presenting a surviving instance as though a reader could still make one.
Take the same care with claims about reach. "It spread everywhere" is a claim about a network, and a bound format cannot have spread past the boundary of the thing it was bound to. If a format is reported in two very different places, the sensible first hypothesis is two similar formats rather than one that traveled. The network effect that made the service worth being on is also what kept the format inside it.
Common questions
Is a format bound to a service the service's property?
That is a legal question this page cannot answer, and the answer varies by what exactly is being claimed. The practical point is separate: a format can be tied to a service by dependence without anyone owning it.
Do bound formats ever become portable?
Yes, when the affordance becomes common. Once several services offer an equivalent tool, the binding dissolves and the format is free to travel, usually long after the interest in it has passed.
How do you write about a format whose tool is gone?
Describe the requirement in plain words, say the tool is no longer available, and stop. Do not describe the tool from memory unless you can support the description, and do not imply a reader could reproduce the result.
Why does the substitute usually keep the punchline and lose the participation?
Because a punchline can be carried by one person and participation cannot. Anything that needs a second contributor needs the destination to make that contribution easy, and most do not.
