Memes in Digital Culture, edited by Limor Shifman. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014. x + 200 pp. $15.95 paper. ISBN 9780262525435 (paper) (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/

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.

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 meme as meaningful discourse: Towards a theory of multiparticipant popular online content

Departing from the cultural studies semiotic approach, this chapter seeks to analytically review shift s in roles of media users given increasingly participation-oriented media tools. Drawing upon the re-interpretation of Stuart Hall's seminal encoding/decoding model of communication , the author proposes a theoretical concept of internet meme perceived as multipartici-pant popular online content combining modalities of traditional (vertical and culture industry-originated) and new (horizontal and peer-reproduced) modalities of media production and consumption. Th e author problematizes this concept by recontextualizing several aspects of Hall's theory: 1) theoretical appropriation of four stages of Hall's " chain of discourse " (messages' production , circulation, use, reproduction) to a new — highly converged — media environment; 2) ambiguous status of internet meme's authorship; 3) new contexts for analyzing internet memes, including: online pop-culture modalities, diff erent strategies of " old " and " new " culture industries, Intellectual Property Rights policies.