I am fascinated with memes. The insistence with which they descend on me through an assortment of technological devices is overwhelming. I do my best to ignore them — but to no avail. 

Recently, I took the opposite approach: I spent several days looking at thousands of memes I had inadvertently accumulated in my garbage file. They included videos where Hillary Clinton’s lips pronounced words she never uttered. (Sound familiar?) There were pictures of World Cup players being lampooned for missing a decisive penalty kick. (I already had trouble identifying them.) In one meme, a tweet was recalibrated to make me laugh about Mexican “bad hombres,” but it upset me instead. And a press release about diversity from Starbucks was repositioned to announce a new coffee blend from Colombia designed to exonerate white people for their sins against humanity. In between, I came across numerous photoshopped pictures of public figures (film and TV stars, Washington politicians) in compromising sexual positions.

Time and again, I have thought about how vulgarity has become commonplace. But in part what actually interests me isn’t the content but the very existence of these memes. What really is a meme, anyway? Could there be a science called “memetics,” devoted to studying the mimetic activity of these small units of culture?

One person’s waste is another person’s treasure. Think of the discarded outtakes of a movie; or a symphony’s unused sections; or the drafts a novelist destroys before a book assumes its final form.

Not that memes are art forms. Not yet. The power of a meme is found in its ephemeral nature.     

My interest in them requires some background. Years ago, I became obsessed with selfies. I wanted to know the degree to which these instant self-portraits change us psychologically. Are we more narcissistic nowadays than at any time before the disposable cameras made by Kodak and Fuji came into existence? The more I thought of selfies, the easier it seemed to connect them with artists like Rembrandt, Vermeer, Van Gogh, Warhol, and Cindy Sherman. At its core, the history of self-portraiture is the history of humankind looking at itself in the mirror. That mirror is now an iPhone.

In collaboration with Nuyorican artist Adál, I ended up writing a book-long essay on selfies (another spelling is “cellphies”) called “I Love My Selfie.” The conclusion I reached isn’t that we are more narcissistic than our predecessors. It is just that there are more and faster ways to express that part of ourselves.

Memes are equally enthralling. The origin of the word is uncertain. In Ancient Greek, mimesis means imitation. That’s the function of art: to copy reality. This etymology is useful in that it points to artifacts as cultural capsules passing from one individual to another. A treatise by Aristotle, a poetic trope by Homer, a play by Sophocles are all such capsules. They have a producer and a recipient: The producer endows them with a message that is confined by a specific set of parameters; the recipient shares those parameters and thus is able to decode that message. 

To exist, a meme — like a selfie — must travel. The traveling of memes creates insiders and outsiders: The former are those in on the meaning; the latter are those deliberately left out. That is, the meme creates its own imagined community.

I recognize that this definition is too loose.  However, I’m not frustrated by this openness because what’s important isn’t what a meme is but the life it leads, the impact it has, and the subtle ways in which it culturally transforms us all. 

The young traffic with memes at astonishing speed. I see them creating memes, laughing at them, celebrating or condemning them. They see memes as democratic items. Through these memes, they proclaim their ideological loyalties, even when it feels as if those ideologies are hyper-sarcastic. They proclaim pop culture to be everyone’s property: There is no private property, especially online; every theft is a type of appropriation.

This is unusual because, in our age, the concept of appropriation is highly contested. It is ironic that the young often protest when the narrative of a disenfranchised group is stolen. Yet to create memes, they steal left and right without an ounce of shame.  

Anyway, all this to say that my spam file has become an incredibly fertile site for a lover of semantics like me.

Ilan Stavans is the Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities and Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College, the publisher of Restless Books, and the host of “In Contrast” on NEPR.