Media Memes and Prosumerist Ethics: Notes Toward a Theoretical Examination of Memetic Audience Behavior (original) (raw)
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.