> What was the creative outlet of regular people before the meme culture? Still memes; albeit in the form of jokes, idioms, quotations, fables, etc. The novelt

> What was the creative outlet of regular people before the meme culture? Still memes; albeit in the form of jokes, idioms, quotations, fables, etc. The novelty here is the tools that now allow us to create pictorial content and share it ad infinitum for virtually free. There are many illustrations/postcards/woodcarvings from Victorian England/Edo japan/etc that are all but memes in names (they even had the same disproportionate representation of cats!), they just couldn’t be shared as broadly and instantaneously.