meta

Meta is when something refers back to or is about itself, like a book about books or a meme about memes.

Meta comes from the Greek prefix and preposition meta, which means “after” or “beyond.” When combined with words in English, meta- often signifies “change” or “alteration” as in the words metamorphic or metabolic.

The prefix meta- is notably used in metaphysics, a form of which is recorded in the 14th century for philosophy concerned with the first principles of things, the nuts and bolts of reality and existence.

Meta-, here, suggests “transcending” or “overarching,” helping it become a synonym for self-referential by the 1980s in postmodernism and popular culture, used for creative works that alluded to their own form, genre, tropes, or other conventions. Think art about art. One early instance, for example, described an appearance of a real-life TV news anchor of Murphy Brown, a sitcom about a fictional anchor, as meta.

In the 1990s–2000s, meta took special root in online gaming communities when discussing the most successful strategies, characters, or weapons. While some claim this meta is an acronym for Most Effective Tactic Available (a folk etymology), it is short for metagaming, using knowledge about the game itself to beat the “game” of mastering that game.

In the late 1990s, metagaming was used in games like Dungeons & Dragons to refer to an in-game character unfairly using information gathered outside of the game world by their player. Meta has gone on, in the gaming world, for anything out of the universe of the game used to affect the universe in the game—cheating, in a nutshell, and making the game less fun for more earnest players.

True to its history, meta can be prefixed (e.g., meta-definition). It can act as a simple modifier (e.g., He made a meta comment on Facebook). It’s often used in the predicate, though, as in: that video was so meta.

Examples of meta are often found in fine arts, with, say, paintings of paintings or photographs of photographers.

Popular culture has also gone meta, with cartoons showing their self-awareness as cartoons or films mocking the tropes of film.

The ironic, self-parodying culture of the internet makes it a hotbed for meta.

I haven't been tweeting much today. I suppose this is a meta-tweet, about tweeting.

— Jacqui Cheng, PhD Blogger School of Hard Knocks (@ejacqui) July 23, 2007

is walking by the Twitter offices in South Park. Oddly meta?

— ˗ˏˋ Chris Messina ´ˎ˗ (@chrismessina) February 5, 2007

Nowhere is this truer than memes, which, when they become quickly popular, instantly get remixed into other memes or into memes about their own viral meme-dom.

More examples of meta:

“One meta joke that didn’t make it into the film, however, would have poked fun at the fact that Benedict Cumberbatch and Robert Downey Jr. have both played a certain turn-of-the-century London-based detective.”
—Josh Weiss, Syfy, August 2018

In October 2021, Facebook announced the new company name Meta. The name Facebook will still be used—the change involves Facebook becoming a subsidiary of Meta, along with other products like Instagram and WhatsApp. The name change followed announcements about the company’s plans to develop an online platform called the Metaverse, incorporating elements of virtual reality and augmented reality. (The word metaverse has traditionally been used to refer to some form of virtual world.)

The name change came amid increased scrutiny of Facebook and its business practices relating to internal documents leaked by a whistleblower and other recent scandals.

It was not the first name change by a tech giant. In 2015, Google was similarly restructured to become part of a parent company named Alphabet. Both changes are thought to be part of rebranding efforts that serve to encompass the wide-ranging scope of the companies’ beyond their traditional core (advertising-based) products.

This content is not meant to be a formal definition of this term. Rather, it is an informal summary that seeks to provide supplemental information and context important to know or keep in mind about the term’s history, meaning, and usage.