All Your Media Are Belong To Us: An Analysis of the Cultural Connotations of the Internet Meme (original) (raw)
Online memes, affinities, and cultural production
2007
This chapter explores social practices of propagating online “memes”(pronounced “meems”) as a dimension of cultural production and transmission. Memes are contagious patterns of “cultural information” that get passed from mind to mind and directly generate and shape the mindsets and significant forms of behavior and actions of a social group. Memes include such things as popular tunes, catchphrases, clothing fashions, architectural styles, ways of doing things, icons, jingles, and the like.
Internet meme as meaningful discourse: Towards a theory of multiparticipant popular online content
Departing from the cultural studies semiotic approach, this chapter seeks to analytically review shift s in roles of media users given increasingly participation-oriented media tools. Drawing upon the re-interpretation of Stuart Hall's seminal encoding/decoding model of communication , the author proposes a theoretical concept of internet meme perceived as multipartici-pant popular online content combining modalities of traditional (vertical and culture industry-originated) and new (horizontal and peer-reproduced) modalities of media production and consumption. Th e author problematizes this concept by recontextualizing several aspects of Hall's theory: 1) theoretical appropriation of four stages of Hall's " chain of discourse " (messages' production , circulation, use, reproduction) to a new — highly converged — media environment; 2) ambiguous status of internet meme's authorship; 3) new contexts for analyzing internet memes, including: online pop-culture modalities, diff erent strategies of " old " and " new " culture industries, Intellectual Property Rights policies.
THE WORLD MADE MEME: DISCOURSE AND IDENTITY IN PARTICIPATORY MEDIA
This project explores internet memes as public discourse. 'Meme' is a term coined by biologist Richard Dawkins to describe the flow, flux, mutation, and evolution of culture, a cultural counter to the gene. But the term has evolved within many online collectives, and is shifting in public discourse. In this emerging sense, 'memes' are amateur media artifacts, extensively remixed and recirculated by different participants on social media networks. But there is reason to doubt how broad and inclusive this amateur participation is. If the networks producing memes are truly participatory, they will definitionally facilitate diverse discourses and represent diverse identities. Therefore, we need detailed empirical work on specific participatory sites in order to clarify questions of mediated cultural participation. My goal was a better understanding of discourse and identity in participatory media through an investigation of memes and the collectives producing them.
Internet Meme: A Virtual Visual Artefact of Digital Visual Culture
JURNAL RUPA, 2021
The internet is one of information, business and entertainment source to date. It’s also the apparatus for communication. Thus, the internet become one virtual world, it possessed almost the same mechanism as the real world, and subsequently rising new culture. One of the internet cultures is internet meme. Recent study conducted on internet meme conclude that the internet meme is another way of communication and the sample of the study is fairly obsolete. This study is an endeavor of new approach on internet meme, seeing it as a visual culture and phenomenon rather than mere communication phenomenon. This research also seeks to provide a novelty of understanding about internet memes. Three samples of internet meme were taken, ranging from 2018 to 2020. Samples is analyzed using visual methodology by looking at 3 sites of the sample image: production, image, and audience. Each of the sites contain 3 modalities: technology, compositionality, and social which will be elaborated throug...
Memes as the Phenomenon of Modern Digital Culture
WISDOM
The article analyzes an Internet meme as the newest information product of the society and a result of its intellectual and artistic practices. The analysis of the role of the Internet memes, created by means of the popular artistic images modification in the modern digital culture is made. Such methods as semiotic and hermeneutic analysis of the Internet memes are used in the research work. The authors seek to explore the reasons for the popularity of memes in the processes of symbolic production and exchange in contemporary society and the modern digital culture, which is the purpose of this study. We consider that Internet meme created by using and modifying artistic images is a new phenomenon in human public life and new type of communication. As a hypothesis, a distinctive feature of the Internet meme is the surprise and laughter it causes in the “man of the Internet”. The main result of this article is the analysis the role of Internet memes in the newest information space and...
This thesis examines Internet memes, a unique medium that has the capability to easily and seamlessly transfer ideologies between groups. It argues that these media can potentially enable subcultures to challenge, and possibly overthrow, hegemonic power structures that maintain the dominance of a mainstream culture. I trace the meme from its creation by Matt Furie in 2005 to its appearance in the 2016 US Presidential Election and examine how its meaning has changed throughout its history. I define the difference between a meme instance and the meme as a whole, and conclude that the meaning of the overall meme is formed by the sum of its numerous meme instances. This structure is unique to the medium of Internet memes and is what enables subcultures to use them to easily transfer ideologies in order to challenge the hegemony of dominant cultures.
Meme language, its impact on digital culture and collective thinking
2021
Memes have become an increasingly common form of modern communication, which has recently attracted great research interest. In this article we analyze "language - memes", its influence on digital culture and collective thinking. The Internet, by expanding social content, contributes to the variability of cultural codes and consequently changes an individual’s cultural identity throughout life. The culture composed of cultural groups is defined as a kind of macro-code, consisting of numerous codes that are commonly used to interpret reality among members of the cyber community. Identity is also transmitted through the use of a specific language during interaction, which is a marker of discourse, in which Memes represent a distinctive business card. Linguists, as well as specialists in other disciplines (such as philosophy, anthropology) use each other’s work to study the interrelationships and mutual influences of language and culture. The study proposed a hypothesis about...
Here Come Dat Boi: Internet Memes, and their effect on modern discourse
A survey of Internet Memes to determine what makes them more likely to spread across the planet. Results were complicated due to a variety of factors, but pointed to Pop Culture memes as being eminently popular, with their context being learnable due to the ease of access to media from across the world almost immediately. Ease of internet access and type of device accessed from, as well as social pressures and censorship have a significant obfuscating effect, and a wider, more comprehensive study is warranted.
Internet memes as internet signs: a semiotic perspective on digital culture.
This article shows that the origins of the confusion surrounding the theoretical status of internet memes today can be found in Richard Dawkin’s theory of culture as proposed in the Selfish Gene (1976) and later developed in memetics, the science of memes. Memetics’ concern with memes as ‘units’ that are transmitted via ‘copying’ between individuals appears to be problematic from the perspective of the longer-established framework for the study of culture which is semiotics. This article presents an alternative to the atomic and transmissible view of cultural information: that is, a take on memes that draws on biosemiotics and cybersemiotics, Tartu-Moscow semiotics and Peircean semiotics. Following this change of perspective on memes it is argued that contemporary internet memes in digital culture should be theorised as signs-systems with the habit to take new habits or translations, which in turn, are characterised by ‘asymmetry’ and ‘invariancy’. The semiotic analysis of the Rebecca Black’s Friday internet meme (YouTube 2011) shows that the adoption of this framework enables one to identify and analyse key moments in the development of a specific internet meme, a move that may constitute a further step for the semiotic investigation of digital culture as a whole.
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/
Ryan M. Milner, The World Made Meme: Public Conversations and Participatory Media
International Journal of Communication, 2018
After Richard Dawkins (1976) first coined the term meme as a name for the cultural analog of the biological gene—the basic unit of cultural transmission—some imagined memetics as an entirely new approach to analyzing culture. In the early 2000s, the term meme was adopted in online subcultures, and ultimately in the wider English vernacular, to describe remixes and imitations of found media content. Noting that the basic informational properties of memes in Dawkins’ sense—their longevity, fecundity, and copy fidelity—were enhanced by digital media, Limor Shifman (2014) argued that Internet memes gave new theoretical viability to Dawkins’ original concept.
VIDEO MEMES, CULTURE OF THE INTERNET & VIRTUAL PUBLIC SPHERE
2018
Sometime in May 2018, a Twitter user responded to a fellow Twitter user by sharing a GIF of a cartoon cat slapping a table, which was edited into a short video, while putting in a picture of a bongo as well as adding Super Mario World soundtrack as its music (Caldwell, 2018). Afterwards, there had been various remixes, including one where the animated cat is tapping a yellow cartoon buttocks figure, along with Bruno Mars’ tune (9Gag, 2018). While the origin of this particular rendition might be more obscure, those who had seen it before somewhere, and wanting to share it with their colleague would go to various possible social media sites where they would have to try to search for it among other irrelevant animated cat visuals, or they could possibly go to a platform that caters towards similar humorous preferences, like 9Gag. While memes have been established as a complex and creative product that emerged in the era of media convergence (Shifman, 2014 p. 2-7), the popularity of it in video form could be seen as an unconventional kind of art movement of the virtual world. In an effort to see the relation of society and cultural product, this essay would be looking at the ubiquity of Meme Videos as a cultural product in the form of artistic movement created within a transnational virtual form of a public sphere.
2018
The ever increasing use of new technologies and digitalization led to significantchanges in people’s everyday lives. The new media content produced as a result of it led to change ofpatterns of behavior, understanding of social, cultural and political developments both globally andlocally. One such media product, the meme, plays significant role in creating concepts andunderstanding. This process is metaphorical and can tackle different issues by drawing people’sattention and engaging their thinking . Furthermore, it can significantly impact people’s biases
Educational Administration: Theory and Practice, 2024
This study investigates the sociological impact and linguistic characteristics of memes, focusing on their prevalence in online social media platforms. Utilizing content analysis, a diverse collection of memes was systematically analyzed to identify themes, linguistic elements, and cultural references embedded within them. In the age of information, memes are cultural units that are replicated and widely disseminated from one person to another through jokes, rumors, videos, animation, photographs Dube, et al (2018).). The data collection process involved gathering memes from various online sources, while the data analysis encompassed thematic exploration and linguistic examination of the memes. The findings reveal insights into how memes serve as mirrors of societal trends, generational disparities, and cultural dynamics. Memes emerged as potent vehicles for social connection, selfexpression, and cultural commentary within digital communities. This study underscores the multifaceted nature of memes and their significance in contemporary digital discourse, emphasizing the need for a nuanced understanding of their sociological and linguistic dimensions.