Sometime back in 2000, Allen S. Rout, a systems programmer from
Gainesville, Fla., posted a few photos of his 5-month-old son, Stephen, on his personal website. They were the kind of photos that every parent takes, but one in particular stood out: Stephen wearing a pair of red overalls, smiling in a crib. "We're really blessed," Mr. Rout wrote as the caption. "
Stephen is an amazingly happy baby."
The photo had faded from memory until last July, when Mr. Rout, curious about his online reputation, did a Google search of himself. Deep within the results pages, he found the picture of Stephen. Only, it wasn't exactly the same picture.
He was surrounded by cartoonish word bubbles filled with Japanese writing: "Don't call me baby!" they read. "Call me Mr. Baby!" And there were other images in which the photo was transformed further: Stephen has a pompadour in one, a head full of snakes in another. His face was pasted onto Kurt Cobain's head, carved into Mount Rushmore and tattooed onto David Beckham's torso. He was an eight-bit video game character. He became a three-dimensional sculpture.
Somehow, Stephen's smiling face had permeated a corner of Japanese visual culture. It showed up on wacky television game shows, and occasionally it blotted out images of genitalia in pornography, to comply with Japanese law. There are so many iterations that, for a time, if you did a Google Image search for "happy baby," the original photo of Stephen was the first result.
In other words, the photo of Mr. Rout's son had become an Internet meme: an idea, image, catchphrase or video that goes viral, mutating via amateur remixes into unexpected forms. Often, memes revolve around an inside joke -- say, a screen capture from an obscure video game -- but just as often they make jokes of the source material.
Memes may be image-based, involving a kind of visual pun. Think of LOLcats, the ubiquitous photos of adorable kittens with captions like, "I can has cheezburger?" Or they can be videos, like parodies of the Old Spice ads starring Isaiah Mustafa.
Memes may bear little resemblance to the original material, such as when a local news segment in Alabama about an attempted rape ("He's climbin' in your windows, he's snatchin' your people up," ranted the victim's brother, Antoine Dodson) mutated into the song, "Bed Intruder," by Auto-Tune the News, which made the Billboard charts.
So how did an innocent baby photo become a Japanese meme? That's a question for KnowYourMeme.com, a Web site that catalogs Internet memes and produces funny videos that explain how certain memes came into existence. When a reporter asked about the Stephen Rout meme in August, KnowYourMeme sprang into action, creating a page for what it dubbed "Aka-San" ("Mr. Baby" in Japanese).
With the help of its multilingual readers and Google Insights, a tool that tracks Web searches by time and location, KnowYourMeme pieced together a timeline: It started in 2004, on 2chan.net, a so-called imageboard in Japan that allows users to post images anonymously -- essentially a petri dish for meme manipulators.
Who first found Stephen's picture is not known, nor how it was found. What's known is that a 2chan user superimposed Stephen's face over an illustration from a manga comic book, and turned it into an image macro -- a simple Web form that allowed users to put words into a cartoon-like thought bubble. The meme-ification of Stephen began.
As Mr. Rout uncovered new permutations of the meme, he was anything but freaked out. An Internet dweller since the days of Usenet, he wasn't afraid for Stephen's safety. Plus, he knew that there was nothing he, or any parent, could do to prevent the use (or misuse) of an image of his child, once it was uploaded to the Web.
Furthermore, Mr. Rout, now an information technology expert at the University of Florida, understood that the meme really had nothing to do with Stephen qua Stephen -- the photo was being treated as a kind of open-source stock image, stripped of any identifier or context.
"The meaning that a piece of work has, comes as much from what the observer brings to it as it comes from what the artist put into it," Mr. Rout said. "I'm perhaps over-dignifying baby pictures when I talk about them as art, but I think the abstraction applies."
Mr. Rout's laissez-faire response was a far cry from that of other parents whose children became Internet memes. Take Ghyslain Raza, the chubby 15-year-old from Canada who earned Internet infamy in 2003 when his classmates secretly uploaded an embarrassing video of him whipping around a golf-ball retriever as if it was a light saber. The clip was remixed and mashed up: Mr. Raza doing battle with Agent Smith from "The Matrix," kayaking through whitewater rapids, and satirized on the animated series "American Dad."
THE "Star Wars Kid," as the video was nicknamed, was viewed 900 million times by 2006, according an estimate by the Viral Factory, a London-based marketing firm. The blitz of attention caused Mr. Raza so much stress he left school and was eventually treated for depression, according to court documents his parents filed in a lawsuit against the classmates' families. (The parties settled out of court.) According to recent news reports, Mr. Raza is now studying law at McGill University in Montreal.
At another end of the spectrum is David DeVore, who recorded his groggy son, also named David, in the backseat of their car after a dental appointment asking existential questions like "Is this real life?" and "Why is this happening to me?" Mr. DeVore uploaded the video, "David After Dentist," to YouTube, where it went viral, with more than 67 million views.
Within weeks, there were a rash of parodies, including one of Darth Vader asking similar life-searching questions, and a satire by the Upright Citizens Brigade called "David After the Divorce," in which a young man is dazed after signing divorce papers. It has been viewed on YouTube more than 4 million times.
The DeVore family has reportedly made $150,000 off YouTube advertising and related merchandise. David even appeared in a low-budget commercial for a toothbrush manufacturer, FireFly, disguised (sort of) as a follow-up video. As for the Routs (who are, it turns out, friends of friends of the DeVores), neither lawsuits nor money seems to be in the offing. "Everybody says, 'There's got to be money in this' But gosh, what a vile response," Mr. Rout said. "I don't want to use this as an opportunity to squeeze some money out of somebody for some purpose. It's an amusement."
Stephen, who is now 10, echoed his father's sentiment and seems to have taken his meme notoriety in stride, spending his summer instead on karate lessons and the Honor Harrington series of science-fiction novels. "Surprised and really amazed and really weirded out" is how Stephen described the experience by telephone.
But certain aspects of his overseas fame intrigued him -- the appearance of his baby face on Japanese television, his placement on Mount Rushmore and particularly the plastic bust created by a fan. "It gets weirder the more you look into it," he said.
