Internet Meme: A Virtual Visual Artefact of Digital Visual Culture (original) (raw)
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Memes as the Phenomenon of Modern Digital Culture
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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.
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
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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
MEMES AS A WAY OF MANІPULATION IN THE PROCESS OF DIGITAL INTERACTION
International Multidisciplinary Conference SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY OF THE PRESENT TIME: PRIORITY DEVELOPMENT DIRECTIONS OF UKRAINE AND POLAND, 2018
The article is devoted to the manipulative possibility of memes due to level of memes spreading on Internet social networks especially memes on political issues with both positive and negative background and informative load. The modern world of developing Internet communication spreads out using new technics, thus it is necessary for our research to highlight trendy means of interaction such as meme. Being cultural inheritance it serves to promote different intentions or simply to substitute words which are turned to show emotional state of an interlocutor to make the process of communication easier and to make the process of sharing emotions more picturesque. Communication does not stop developing and those changes depend on the numerous aspects which include lexicology, semantics, pragmatics, grammar, and what is more – psycholinguistics. The article highlights the latest studies of the scientists turned to the memes as a way to manipulate users’ thoughts and ideas. Moreover, the article provides the information which serves to highlight the basic ways and methods of pushing thoughts into the Internet users’ mind in the process of digital interaction. Summing up it is important to stress out that after working out the most popular social networks; there has arisen a need in carrying out an experiment to calculate the statistics of the level of manipulation which is caused by memes.
A PROPOSAL FOR A METHODOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF THE DIGITAL MEME GENRE (Atena Editora)
A PROPOSAL FOR A METHODOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF THE DIGITAL MEME GENRE (Atena Editora), 2023
The general objective of this work is to carry out a methodological analysis of the digital meme genre, through the application of genre analysis categories elaborated by Motta-Roth (2011) and others, articulated to theoretical aspects formulated by Bakhtin (2011). In this sense, the analysis undertaken here starts from the production conditions of the genre, to then contemplate its compositional structure, its thematic content and its style. As a research problem, the following question was proposed: how is the digital meme genre characterized, in view of its specific characteristics, such as production conditions, compositional structure, thematic content and style? To find possible answers to this question, initially, a bibliographical survey was carried out regarding genres, genres and multimodality and digital genres, with the consultation of authors such as Bakhtin (2011), Motta-Roth (2011), Marcuschi (2005) and Rojo and Barbosa (2015), among others. Then, several websites and social networks were consulted for the selection of memes and subsequent composition of the corpus; finally, the theoretical categories were applied to analyze the selected corpus. Thus, in methodological terms, the research can be defined as qualitative, applied in nature, with bibliographic procedures and the objective of describing and analyzing the corpus composed of digital memes, with thematic content focused on female empowerment.
2018
The ever increasing use of new technologies and digitalization led to significantchanges in people’s everyday lives. The new media content produced as a result of it led to change ofpatterns of behavior, understanding of social, cultural and political developments both globally andlocally. One such media product, the meme, plays significant role in creating concepts andunderstanding. This process is metaphorical and can tackle different issues by drawing people’sattention and engaging their thinking . Furthermore, it can significantly impact people’s biases