The term meme was introduced by Dawkins in 1976 as “a unit of human cultural transmission analogous to the gene”. So any idea that is transmissible is a meme (even the concept of a meme is itself a meme).
The meme of the meme has mutated over time from its ancestral form, and today to many people may mean the transmission of GIFs on the Internet.
However, even in a sense closer to the current meaning than the 1976 ancestral form, memes certainly existed in online communities in the 90s (not as images generally, however, but text certainly).
The term meme was introduced by Dawkins in 1976 as “a unit of human cultural transmission analogous to the gene”. So any idea that is transmissible is a meme (even the concept of a meme is itself a meme).
The meme of the meme has mutated over time from its ancestral form, and today to many people may mean the transmission of GIFs on the Internet.
However, even in a sense closer to the current meaning than the 1976 ancestral form, memes certainly existed in online communities in the 90s (not as images generally, however, but text certainly).