text: The advent of social media has provided data and insights about how people relate to information and culture. While information is composed by bits and its fundamental building bricks are relatively well understood, the same cannot be said for culture. The fundamental cultural unit has been defined as a "meme". Memes are defined in literature as specific fundamental cultural traits, that are floating in their environment together. Just like genes carried by bodies, memes are carried by cultural manifestations like songs, buildings or pictures. Memes are studied in their competition for being successfully passed from one generation of minds to another, in different ways. In this paper we choose an empirical approach to the study of memes. We downloaded data about memes from a well-known website hosting hundreds of different memes and thousands of their implementations. From this data, we empirically describe the behavior of these memes. We statistically describe meme occurrences in our dataset and we delineate their fundamental traits, along with those traits that make them more or less apt to be successful.
  @cite_5: * Self-Sent Messages and Mass Belief * A Missing Link: Memetics and the Social Sciences * Family Plans: Ideas That Win with Children * Sexually Transmitted Belief: The Clash of Freedom and Restriction * Successful Cults: Western Religion By Natural Selection * Prescription Beliefs: Thought Contagions and Health * Controversy: Thought Contagions in Conflict * Epilogue: Thought Contagions of Thought Contagion
  @cite_1: We are surrounded by information in the 21st Century: we are bombarded by advertising, attitudes, celebrities, news, wars, fashion, the latest fads...the sheer amount of information we have access to appears untameable, unworkable, and too much to gain sense from unless we pick and choose very carefully. However, our choices are very often made for us as the result of advertising, media companies, the government and popular culture. The results of these choices are called memes, and their impact is shaping not just society but us individually, and on a core level, beyond psychology, personal free will, and even genetics. The very first book on the subject of memes, and how they behave just like viruses, this is an incredible study into the power of communication and 'going along with everyone else'. "Virus of the Mind" explains just how we are 'infected' by the deliberate shaping of society's attitudes and behaviours - and how we can cure ourselves.
  @cite_12: 
summary: Finally, there are in literature also some publications about memetics, the proposed branch of science that should study memes. Some of the pioneering works are @cite_12 , @cite_1 and @cite_5 . Our work is different from these examples in literature as we are focused particularly on internet memes. Our approach is more data driven, as internet memes are more easily traceable as they leave a measurable footprint, this makes our paper a further contribution w.r.t these works.