Smithsonian Magazine catalogues most popular Internet memes

Even though some of us may wish keyboard cat would disappear forever, the Smithsonian Institute is in the process of making sure the most popular memes live on.

A recent article in Smithsonian Magazine lists what they call 'Ten unforgettable web memes.' Some of the memes making the list are phrases such as 'boom goes the dynamite' and 'jump the shark,' the dancing baby, websites for failing and Chuck Norris, Rickrolling and of course the online video Keyboard Cat.

The Smithsonian provides a lengthy description of how each meme started, where it came from, what it means and why it became so popular.

They followed it with an in-depth article about what defines a meme in what appears to be justification for cataloguing ways people in the 1990s and 2000s have wasted time.

"Memes emerge in brains and travel outward, establishing beachheads on paper and celluloid and silicon and anywhere else information can go," author James Gleick writes in the article. "They are not to be thought of as elementary particles but as organisms. The number three is not a meme; nor is the color blue, nor any simple thought, any more than a single nucleotide can be a gene. Memes are complex units, distinct and memorable—units with staying power."

Gleick also goes into the history of memes saying that they started well before not only computers, but paper. "For most of our biological history memes existed fleetingly; their main mode of transmission was the one called 'word of mouth,'" he writes.

"It was obviously predictable that manufactured electronic computers, too, would eventually play host to self-replicating patterns of information," writes evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, as quoted in Gleick's article.

The Smithsonian Institution is the world's largest museum and research complex. It includes 19 museums and galleries including the Air and Space Museum and the National History Museum.

Allowing future generations to see these memes may not seem as important as them being able to see the space shuttle Discovery (which is also going to the Smithsonian), but there is no doubt that they are part of our culture and influence our communication.