Makes a Meme Instead: A Concise History of Internet Memes (original) (raw)

Memes Da Internet: Perspectivas Para a Sala De Aula No Contexto Das Culturas Digitais

Educação & Formação, 2019

This paper aims at presenting some reflections upon adopting Internet memes as possibilities for teaching in the context of digital cultures. In Brazil, millions of people interact in social media, on a daily basis, by editing, sharing, reading and reacting to a great variety of graphic texts, videos, photos, and songs that reflect their everyday relationships, namely, they produce internet memes. This study is grounded on the multiliteracies perspective (COPE & KALANTZIS, 2000, 2008; LANKSHEAR & KNOBEL, 2007; LEMKE, 2009; MENEZES DE SOUZA, 2011), as well as on the studies on memes, made by Dawkins (1976), Shifman (2013, 2014), Shifman et al (2016), Chagas (2017, 2018) and Glaveanu (2018). The teaching suggestions are based on categories of memes analysis; remixing existing memes in order to explore discourses of dominant ideologies, issues of race, age, gender and social class; and reading and writing political memes, that operate as instruments of persuasion.

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.

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...

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/

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...

A PROPOSAL FOR A METHODOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF THE DIGITAL MEME GENRE (Atena Editora)

A PROPOSAL FOR A METHODOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF THE DIGITAL MEME GENRE (Atena Editora), 2023

The general objective of this work is to carry out a methodological analysis of the digital meme genre, through the application of genre analysis categories elaborated by Motta-Roth (2011) and others, articulated to theoretical aspects formulated by Bakhtin (2011). In this sense, the analysis undertaken here starts from the production conditions of the genre, to then contemplate its compositional structure, its thematic content and its style. As a research problem, the following question was proposed: how is the digital meme genre characterized, in view of its specific characteristics, such as production conditions, compositional structure, thematic content and style? To find possible answers to this question, initially, a bibliographical survey was carried out regarding genres, genres and multimodality and digital genres, with the consultation of authors such as Bakhtin (2011), Motta-Roth (2011), Marcuschi (2005) and Rojo and Barbosa (2015), among others. Then, several websites and social networks were consulted for the selection of memes and subsequent composition of the corpus; finally, the theoretical categories were applied to analyze the selected corpus. Thus, in methodological terms, the research can be defined as qualitative, applied in nature, with bibliographic procedures and the objective of describing and analyzing the corpus composed of digital memes, with thematic content focused on female empowerment.

MEMES AND THE WAY THEY INFLUENCE MASS CONSCIOUSNESS IN CYBERSPACE

International scientific and practical conference "Research of different directions of development of philological sciences in Ukraine and EU". North University Center of Baia Mare, 2019

The article is devoted to the analysis of the role of memes in the formation of mass consciousness in cyberspace. The article presents the main types of memes’ realization, key intentions of their creators and the possibility of these lexical and graphical units to influence the formation of mass consciousness of Internet users in social networks on political issues which nowadays occupy an essential and important place in the sphere of digital communication. The author has followed trendy tendencies and directions of analyzing the chosen topic that has proven the urgency of the proposed work in general and has served as the fundamental principle of the article’s aim formation. The article presents systematized aspects and features of the concepts such as “meme” and recently coined out “Mandela Effect”.