Idil Galip

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.

There exists a specific genre of grotesque meme art on Instagram. Created, curated and appropriated by an Anglophone community of multi-media artists (i.e. @djinn_kazama, @males_are_cancelled2, @thebottomtext, @patiasfantasyworld, @aquarium.drinker), these memes seek to alienate Instagram’s mainstream, viral-meme consuming audience through grotesque aesthetics and transgressive subject matters. This essay will explore the aesthetic and semantic composition of these memes and their position in the digital marketplace through the lens of ‘the Grotesque and Carnivalesque’ (Bakhtin 1965, Milner 2016, Milner and Phillips 2017, Seta 2019) and ultimately suggest that the grotesque meme is the product of a ‘digital carnival’.
In the medieval carnival, social hierarchies are toppled and replaced by a mode of expression that favours marginalised and traditionally silenced voices (Bakhtin 1965, 15). These voices employ grotesque parody to debase ideas of bodily functions, cultural objects, norms, and figures, temporally subverting mainstream culture with the use of a vulgar form of speech. This mode of communication is inextricably tied to the concepts of ambivalent, all-encompassing “festive laughter” and the crude language of the marketplace, or “billingsgate”. Festive laughter echoes through the internet incessantly, instead of being limited to the temporal confines of the physical carnival. While the digital market, where virality, engagement and online visibility is both the currency and the object of transaction, generates a boundless and rhizomatic digital marketplace talk. Grotesque memes are borne of this digital billingsgate and never-ending festive laughter, as grotesque realism was out of the medieval marketplace and carnival.
The community of meme artists who create and disseminate grotesque memes are made up of mostly queer people of colour, often working creative yet precarious jobs. They offer services and products, beyond memes, on a multi-platform marketplace, and have to maintain a constant presence in this marketplace in order to make a living. Here, they wield significant influence, or “clout”, in contrast to their relative lack of social and economic power within dominant institutions in the creative industries. This digital marketplace tended to by precariously situated meme artists is open and active all hours of the day, everyday. It has its own vulgar and crude mode of communication which also feeds into and from the festive laughter of the continuous carnival, constantly bubbling away on the internet. Their memes exhibit a self-confessed and intentional garishness which stand in opposition to the aspirational aesthetics of mainstream social media influencers, yet coexist on the same platform and utilise a similar entrepreneurial logic. They laugh at this aspirational spirit widespread on social media platforms, but also laugh at themselves for contributing to it too, in true carnivalesque fashion. 
This essay, which is based on my doctoral research, will consider these similarities between the Bakhtinian conceptualisation of the carnival and this particular meme marketplace. It will trace festive laughter, billingsgate and grotesque realism from the medieval carnival into digital platforms with the use of a subgenre of Instagram memes.

The article brings to light the use of recommender systems as technologies of the self, complementing the observations in current literature regarding their employment as technologies of ‘soft’ power. User practices on the music recommendation website last.fm reveal that many users do not only utilize the website to receive guidance about music products but also to examine and transform an aspect of their self, i.e. their ‘music taste’. The capacity of assisting users in self-cultivation practices, however, is not unique to last.fm but stems from certain properties shared by all recommendation systems. Furthermore, unlike other oft-studied digital/web technologies of the self which facilitate ‘self-publishing’ vis-à-vis virtual companions in social media, recommender algorithms themselves can act as ‘intimate experts’, accompanying users in their self-care practices. Thus, recommendation systems can facilitate both algorithmic control and creative self-transformation, which calls for a theorization of this new cultural medium as a space of tension.