K-Drama As the Cultural Gene: Digital Replication of “Squid Game” Memes

The cultural content of K-drama Squid Game has been globally reproduced, reinterpreted, and recirculated beyond the Netflix platform through internet memes. This paper examines the meme phenomenon of Squid Game and considers it and itself as a global genre and the object of analysis. The digital images of Squid Game memes transmit and propagate contagious ideas and cultural behaviors through imitation. “Meme,” a neologism coined by Richard Dawkins in 1976 is defined as a self-reproducing information structure analogous to a gene in biology that affects human evolution through an algorithm of replication. The origin of meme came from the biological revolution of genes that survived by replications, yet Dawkins expands it to memetic evolution without the biological advantages. The cultural behavior learned by imitation can be considered a meme. The global viral of the Squid Game memes shows what I call “cultural gene” that proliferates through a digital algorithm of replication and jumps from brain to brain, not tied to biological advantages, race, ethnicity, or national origins. How is this digital mimetic behavior different from or similar to the politics of mimicry in post-colonial discourse? How does it transform the hybridity responding to cultural imperialism positioned in the center and periphery? In the analysis of both content and form of the digital memes, this paper questions the parameters of the Korean Wave, K-culture without K-origin, and Hallyu without institutional campaign.