Online memes, Affinities and cultural production (original) (raw)

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 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...

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

DISCOURSE PECULIARITIES OF INTERNET MEMES

ISSN 2409-1154 Науковий вісник Міжнародного гуманітарного університету. Сер.: Філологія. 2021 № 52 том 1, 2021

The article is devoted to the discourse analysis of the internet memes. It highlights the peculiarities of the internet memes and figures out the features which implement political discourse based on the classification proposed by the Netherland scholar T. van Dijk in his book "Discourse and Power". The proposed theoretical material has been reworked stressing out the prior directions of contemporary linguistics. Practical material was purposefully selected from official pages of news agencies in social network Instagram among which there are: BBC News, Telegraph, the Independent, and the Times. All the mentioned resources are official representatives in social networks. The aim of this work is based on the process of figuring out discourse peculiarities of internet memes. To achieve the proposed aim there is a need to identify key information concerning internet memes themselves and the way they implement political discourse on the internet. The author proposes basic information concerning the research on discourse, political discourse and internet memes. Moreover, the article points out key classifications on discourse and internet memes. Being based on the classification by T. van Dijk the work analyses pragmatical, lexical, and semantical features which are appropriate for political internet memes. The article figures out separate phrases and word-combinations which express the highest level of emotional marking and implement core intentions posed by news agencies in Instagram. The priority was granted to internet memes which depict political situation in two countries-the United States of America and the United Kingdom. In conclusion the author proposes the results of the comparative analyses which presents distinctive as well as common features of political discourse verbalization of internet memes.

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...

Internet Memes – A New Literacy?

2014

This paper examines the recently emerged multimodal artefacts commonly known as Internet memes in the light of the new literacies that are rapidly emerging in the digital age. Attention is paid particularly to the most popular type of Internet meme – image macros – with Joseph Ducreux as a model meme, analyzing and demonstrating their features as well as their correlation with the theoretical framework of new literacies. The paper includes a brief introduction to the theory of new literacies in relation to Internet memes followed by a description of memetic selectivity, distribution, classification and the linguistic and non-linguistic peculiarities of this phenomenon that expand the traditional notion of literacy.