The Categorisation of Internet Memes – A Different Approach (original) (raw)
Related papers
2017
Nowadays a huge amount of communication is performed in an online environment. This tendency facilitated the realization of certain digital elements specific to online interfaces. Generally speaking, it can be stated that a new genre appeared in the past few years – the memes, which are a combination of pictorial and textual elements, created and shared online. Richard Dawkins and Susan Blackmore, who provided the traditional meme definition, argue that a meme is what travels from brain to brain. Digital meme has a narrower interpretation, since it focuses on the textual-pictorial elements. According to the Cognitive Linguistic point of view, the conceptual metaphors, metonymies and blends are used in our everyday conceptualization processes (based on Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By, 1980 and Fauconnier–Turner’s The Way We Think, 2002). So it can be assumed that these digital elements also operate exploiting cognitive devices like metaphors and blends. Yet many questions a...
Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America, 2022
Internet memes are a popular and long-standing genre of discourse on social media platforms used to express everything from emotional states to political opinions. Dancygier and Vandelanotte (2017) define internet memes as intertextual, multimodal discourses that combine text with images. Attempts to sort memes into paradigms or other categorical distinctions have come from the fields of new media studies and digital literature (Wiggins & Bowers 2015). While taking these categories and paradigms into account, we assert that linguistic methods are uniquely suited to analyze the language of memes due to the structural and thus diachronic nature of linguistic description. We utilize a discourse analysis approach to analyze visualtextual memes and offer a linguistic lens for understanding the creation of memes and their usage across contexts and time. In order to capture and compare these rapidly-changing discourses, we propose a descriptive dual classification system for memes with two components: meme composition and multimodal quality. Meme composition groups memes by their structure-beyond the individual images they employ-and thus explains how memes recontextualize images and text to create new meanings. For example, the composition we term Comic utilizes consecutive images and text in a highly narrative structure that cannot be reordered. Another meme composition, Comparison, juxtaposes two images paired with text that indicate an opposing reaction to two related concepts. Multimodal quality serves to describe the way(s) that the text interacts with the image in the meme: as a caption, label, and/or utterance. Combining one meme composition with one or more multimodal qualities classifies an individual meme structurally and provides a basis for explaining its intertextuality, modality, and meaning-making. In this study, we apply the dual classification system to English language data collected in its naturally-occurring context on the social media platform Instagram from 2019 to 2021. Analysis of this data shows that the dual classification system is a flexible and robust approach which provides a vocabulary for discussing the creative agency exerted by meme creators in a wide range of communities. We argue that the dual classification system affords researchers the ability to study memes linguistically across a variety of platforms and over time.
Defining and characterizing the concept of Internet Meme
Revista CES Psicología, 2013
The research aims to create a formal definition of "Internet Meme" (IM) that can be used to characterize and study IMs in academic contexts such as social, communication sciences and humanities. Different perspectives of the term meme were critically analysed and contrasted, creating a contemporary concept that synthesizes different meme theorists' visions about the term. Two different kinds of meme were found in the contemporary definitions, the meme-gene, and the memevirus. The meme-virus definition and characteristics were merged with definitions of IM taken from the Internet in the light of communication theories, in order to develop a formal characterization of the concept. Lastly, the use for characterization and research of the developed concept is exemplified by analysing two internet memes.
Internet Memes and Their Socio-Linguistic Features
2018
Social networks’ users as well as Internet portals, forums, web-pages, blogs etc. have developed their own unique communicational system that might seem incomprehensible to people above a certain age, with little to no internet presence. These systems enables them to communicate freely their ideas, thoughts, jokes, funny anecdotes as well as their critiques towards their societies and political leaders in a much more creative way than the traditional. This Internet-communicational system mostly relies on the usage of emoticons, GIFs and memes. This paper will focus on the memes as one of the internet communication phenomena and their specific socio-linguistic features that make them vastly interesting to both linguists and sociologists. Memes, as defined, are part of the online culture; mostly jokes, that are presented through mediums such as image+text or GIF+text combinations or just plain text and are spread virally on all Internet-based platforms, changing along the way. This pa...
What are Internet Memes and How They are Used for Different Purposes (PDF)
This article argues for a clearer framework of internet-based "memes". The concept of cultural memes of being 'replicating units' as given by Richard Dawkins' in his most celebrated work, The Selfish Gene (1976), can be related to internet memes in terms of contemporary information transmission and evolving setup. However, where memes are commonly seen as non-harmful humorous visual content that has been remixed, replicated, and changed to relate with diverse contexts and meanings but still adhering to the basic concept, adopted by the cross-cultural audience to be enjoyed at a broader level, they sometimes also have underlying purposes. From being a most crucial part of information warfare, propaganda, and advertising, they can be considered as the most overlooked yet impactful source of message transmission. The paper explores how memes have been used for such different purposes and how they have become another means of expressing taboo feelings and build communities as well.
Makes a Meme Instead: A Concise History of Internet Memes
New Media Studies Magazine, Utrecht University, 2013
The aim of this research paper is to investigate the ontology and history of the Internet meme (a piece of content spreading online from user to user and changing along the way) from the 1980s to the early 2010s. After looking at the question of defining the Internet meme, I will analyse the evolution of the phenomenon from social, cultural and technological perspectives, such as chaos theory, the new aesthetics, generative systems, as well as trace the origins of certain elements of the Internet memes from a media-archaeological aspect. Originally written for the course 'Software Studies: Codes and Images' in the New Media and Digital Culture Masters programme at Utrecht University. It was selected for publication in the seventh edition of the university's New Media Studies Magazine: https://studenttheses.uu.nl/handle/20.500.12932/19016 The Portuguese translation of this paper was published in the book 'A cultura dos memes: aspectos sociológicos e dimensões políticas de um fenômeno do mundo digital' (lit. 'The meme culture: sociological aspects and political dimensions of a phenomenon of the digital world') edited by Victor Chagas of Fluminense Federal University, Brazil. DOI: https://books.scielo.org/id/ptm2d
On the Language of Internet Memes [Dissertation]
Internet Memes transverse and sometimes transcend cyberspace on the back of impossibly cute LOLcats speaking mangled English and the snarky remarks of Image Macro characters always on the lookout for someone to undermine. No longer the abstract notion of a cultural gene that Dawkins (2006) introduced in the late 1970s, memes have now become synonymous with a particular brand of vernacular language that internet users engage by posting, sharing and remixing digital content as they communicate jokes, emotions and opinions. For the purpose of this research the language of Internet Memes is understood as visual, succinct and capable of inviting active engagement by users who encounter digital content online that exhibits said characteristics. Internet Memes were explored through an Arts-Based Educational Research framework by first identifying the conventions that shape them and then interrogating these conventions during two distinct research phases. In the first phase the researcher, as a doctoral student in art and visual culture education, engaged class readings and assignments by generating digital content that not only responded to the academic topics at hand but did so through forms associated with Internet Memes like Image Macros and Animated GIFs. In the second phase the researcher became a meme literacy facilitator as learners in three different age-groups were led in the reading, writing and remixing of memes during a month-long summer art camp where they were also exposed to other art-making processes such as illustration, acting and sculpture. Each group of learners engaged age-appropriate meme types: 1) the youngest group, 6 and 7 year-olds, wrote Emoji Stories and Separated at Birth memes; 2) the middle group, 8-10 year-olds, worked with Image Macros and Perception memes, 3) while the oldest group, 11-13 year-olds, generated Image Macros and Animated GIFs. The digital content emerging from both research phases was collected as data and analyzed through a hybrid of Memetics, Actor-Network Theory, Object Oriented Ontology, Remix Theory and Glitch Studies as the researcher shifted shapes yet again and became a Research Jockey sampling freely from each field of study. A case is made for Internet Memes to be understood as an actor-network where meme collectives, individual cybernauts, software and source material are all actants interrelating and making each other enact collective agencies through shared authorships. Additionally specific educational contexts are identified where the language of Internet Memes can serve to incorporate technology, storytelling, visual thinking and remix practices into art and visual culture education. Finally, the document reporting on the research expands on the hermeneutics of Internet Memes and the phenomenological experiences they elicit that are otherwise absent from traditional scholarly prose. Chapter by chapter the dissertation was crafted as a journey from the academic to the whimsical, from the lecture hall to the image board (where Internet Memes were born), from the written word to the remixed image as a visual language that is equal parts form and content that emerges and culminates in a concluding chapter composed almost entirely of popular Internet Meme types. An online component can be found at http://memeducation.org/
Memes, Macros, Meaning, and Menace: Some Trends in Internet Memes
Communication and Media Studies , 2019
This article maps some key patterns associated with how internet memes are conceived and how online meme practices have evolved and morphed during the period from 2000 to the present. We document the rise of internet memes during their early years as a broadly communitarian cultural engagement, mostly characterized by goodwill, humor, and an often “nerdish” sense of shared cultural identity. With the massification of internet access and participation in online social practices employing Web 2.0 and mobile computing capacities, changes occurred in how internet memes were conceived and created (e.g., image macro-generators). Since around 2012, many online meme practices have become intensely politicized and increasingly used for socially divisive and, often, cruel purposes. We explore some of these shifts and argue that what we call “second wave” online memes have been used as weapons in personal, political, and socialcultural wars. We conclude that internet memes scholarship would benefit from revisiting the original conception and theory of memes advanced by Richard Dawkins, and attending closely to what motivated Dawkins in this work.