Sticker stories
Where did the word “meme” come from? Who typed the first smiley? Why were chat stickers born in Asia? Short stories with sources, one question at a time.
Part 1
Where memes come from
A word from biology, and the jokes that spread before the internet.
Where does the word “meme” come from?It started in a 1976 book about genes — decades before anyone put a caption on a cat photo.4 min read
What did memes look like before the internet?Long before the word went online, a big-nosed doodle and a photocopied joke were already spreading the same way memes do.5 min read
Part 2
Memes on the internet
Smileys, GIFs and the first things that went viral.
Who typed the first :-) ?On one day in 1982 a computer scientist typed three characters as a throwaway idea — and made a face that outlived the machine he typed it on.5 min read
How did “internet meme” become a thing?A lawyer worried about lazy arguments coined a rule in 1990 — on purpose, as an experiment in memes. Within a few years the word had jumped from biology books to the internet.4 min read
The first viral memesBefore the web could reliably play a video, three things — a dancing 3D baby, a page crammed with hamsters, and a badly translated game — proved a meme could reach millions.5 min read
The life of the GIFA format invented in 1987 to squeeze a picture down a phone line turned out to be perfect for something its makers never planned — a few looping frames that say what words can’t.5 min read
Image macros, LOLcats and rage comicsBetween about 2005 and 2012, memes stopped being one-off jokes and got a grammar — a fixed layout, a signature font, and a cast of faces anyone could reuse.5 min read
Part 3
From emoji to stickers
How a row of tiny pictures turned into the stickers we send today.
How were emoji born?Emoji weren’t dreamed up by a big design studio. They started as 176 pictures, each twelve pixels square, drawn for a Japanese phone in 1999 — and then the whole world had to agree on them.4 min read
Why were chat stickers born in Asia?Emoji gave the world a fixed set of tiny faces. Asia wanted something bigger — a whole illustrated character as a message — and built it first, starting with a messaging app born in the months after a disaster.5 min read
How stickers went globalAsia proved stickers worked. Then, one by one between 2013 and 2021, every big messaging app added its own — and because there was no shared standard, each had to reinvent the pack, the store and the format.4 min read
Before pixels: a century of paper stickersA hundred years before you tapped a sticker into a chat, you peeled one off a sheet and pressed it onto your notebook. The digital sticker inherited more from paper than its name.4 min read
Everyone is a sticker maker nowFor a century, stickers were made by companies and collected by everyone else. That last wall just fell — the tools to cut out, letter and pack a sticker now fit in your pocket.5 min read