THEORIZING MEMES (original) (raw)
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Meme culture in malayalam cyberspace : Evolution and Impacts
2019
this paper discusses with the meme culture in Malayalam cyber space .it starts with the concept of memes , goes through the evolution of Indian and ma;Malayalam memes and specifically the socio political changes that such memes brought to the social media usage of an average malayali person .
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/
Methodological and epistemological challenges in meme research and meme studies
Internet Histories, 2024
This article examines some methodological and epistemological challenges facing meme studies and meme research. It delves into the shifts in Anglophone meme culture post-Trump and challenges the assumption that memes are generally anonymous and antagonistic by highlighting the coexistence of collegiality and pseudonymity across diverse meme communities. Moreover, it suggests that such meme cultures can transcend from online to offline realms, requiring methodological adaptations to capture this dual dimension of creativity and sociality. The paper also addresses epistemological challenges in meme studies, starting from memetics' contentious history and critiquing the dominance of cultural evolutionary theory in contemporary meme research. It brings attention to the academic tendency to follow a "Dawkins to Shifman pipeline" citation trope in meme research and advocates for a more critical approach informed by platform studies. It argues that the future of meme studies lies at the intersection of platform ideology and content economies, urging scholars to engage with historical and political transformations in digital culture for a comprehensive understanding of memes and their societal impact.
Internet Memes as Digital Carnival: Analysing Memes on the Movie Kasaba
B akhtin (1965) observes carnival as a counter culture as it does not have any structures and rules to follow. Carnival connects people who are normally separated in different levels. As it leads to a free and familiar interaction, a carnival site embodies the idea of being universal and belonging to everyone. It is not an event performed by an actor, and viewed by a group of spectators, but an event where there is no demarcations between the performer and spectator, where everyone lives in. Foregrounded on Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of Carnivalesque, this paper seeks to understand the underlying carnival culture of the internet memes. Choosing memes created out of the first look poster of Kasaba, 2016 released Malayalam movie, the paper tries to explore the unorganised free play of images in internet memes and also looks at the intertextual nature of memes to explore their growing extant of multiple signification processes.
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.
2019
The word 'meme' was coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book ``The Selfish Gene,' as an attempt to explain the way cultural information spreads. A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols or practices that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena within a mimic theme. Memes started on the Internet in 1996 with the first-ever viral sensation of a baby dancing on 'cha-cha-cha' (3D dancing baby). With its growing popularity, it has become a means of influencing the mindset of people who view, follow and share these memes. Memes have a potential to focus on real-world issues which when consumed by a user influences them to share it further thus leading to its large consumption. Memes can be denoted as; 'Amplification by Simplification' which basically means they have a potential to condense a complex political fact into a powerful, brief and an effective way which engages a large audience. Hence, it is becoming a powerful tool for communication. In the following paper, we attempt to understand how Internet memes are used to communicate political issues in India. For this, the method of content analysis will be used to observe the practice of memes and its role will be scrutinised to reflect whether it is creating a new paradigm shift in the political discourse. The amount of viewership and type of comments posted will also be a way to gauge the response of the audience. Also, by understanding the relationship between political memes and the Indian audience, we will be able to study whether these memes help in changing the perception of the audience if at all. Moreover, if they do, what are the factors which help the meme becomes an easy tool to affect the audience's political perceptions.
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...
Contagious memes, viral videos and subversive parody: The grammar of contention on the Indian web
International Communication Gazette, 2015
This essay presents the viral culture of videos, memes, and websites deploying the tropes of parody and satire as a newly emerging discourse of social and cultural critique on the Indian web. It situates this cultural phenomenon at the intersection of a prior tradition of heterodoxy in India as well as the globally proliferating memetic culture. The essay argues that the speech is distinguished by a logic of repetition with difference both in its parodic/satiric text as well as through its medium that allows the text to repeat at new sites creating new meanings.
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.