Book Review: Memes in Digital Culture by Limor Schifman (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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.