Understanding memes and their structures requires a degree of critical thinking as well as cultural literacy. There is more than a glimmer of truth to the running joke that someday there will be meme historians. “Editorial cartoons were the precursors to memes,” DeFoster said. “I’ll just shout out the website Know Your Meme,” DeFoster said. An emerging discipline and new medium, we need to understand memes in both sentiment and convention to understand ourselves.