What are Internet Memes and How They are Used for Different Purposes (PDF) (original) (raw)

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.

Funny and Speculative Memes: An Emotional Outlet of Taboo Expression and Criticism

2019

Nowadays, the Millennials are closely connected with social media which offer a platform for them to share and express their emotions and opinions and have become an important part of their daily lives. Under this situation, a visual form of expression, known as internet memes, has emerged. What's more, cultural memes develop in an extremely fascinating form, gradually becoming the mainstream of social media. Memes have a significant impact on young audiences and the new emerging visual culture may change their perceptions of visual representation on the digital media. This study explores the reasons why the development of memes can achieve great “success” under the current online circumstances. So it is essential to understand the culture behind constitutive memes as well as to observe the emotions and explore the community behind the memetic visual representation in the current social context.

Memes and Affinity Spaces: some implications for policy and digital divides in education

E-Learning, 2006

This article focuses on the social practices of propagating and circulating 6 memes within Internet environments as a significant dimension of cultural production and 7 transmission. Memes (pronounced 'meems') are contagious patterns of cultural information 8 that are passed from mind to mind and which directly shape and transmit key actions and 9 mindsets of a social group. Memes include popular tunes, catchphrases, clothing fashions, 10 architectural styles, ways of doing things, and so on. The chief purpose of this article is to 11 contribute to the empirical study of online memes as new literacy practices by examining the 12 key elements of successful memes. The article begins by developing a succinct definition of 13 'meme' and identifies key characteristics of successful memes in general. This set of 14 characteristics is illustrated by way of two examples of successful Internet-mediated memes.

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.

Defining and characterizing the concept of Internet Meme

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 meme-virus. 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.

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.