  On the Internet, information circulates fast and widely, and the form of
content adapts to comply with users' cognitive abilities. Memes are an emerging
aspect of the internet system of signification, and their visual schemes evolve
by adapting to a heterogeneous context. A fundamental question is whether they
present culturally and temporally transcendent characteristics in their
organizing principles. In this work, we study the evolution of 2 million visual
memes from Reddit over ten years, from 2011 to 2020, in terms of their
statistical complexity and entropy. We find support for the hypothesis that
memes are part of an emerging form of internet metalanguage: on one side, we
observe an exponential growth with a doubling time of approximately 6 months;
on the other side, the complexity of memes contents increases, allowing and
adapting to represent social trends and attitudes.
