In the News Harambe one year on: How the gorilla became an internet meme
Johnson is Professor of Law and Kern Family Chair in Intellectual Property Law at Drake University Law School in Des Moines, Iowa, and has made a study of memetic theory and how it applies to the proliferation of social media in the modern age. She says: “Today, the internet meme [what most people now just call a meme] is a piece of media that is copied and quickly spread online. One of the first uses of the internet meme idea arose in 1994, when Mike Godwin, an American attorney and internet law expert, used the word ‘meme’ to characterise the rapid spread of ideas online.”
