Memes

Visual content is a critical component of everyday social media, on platforms explicitly framed around the visual (Instagram, Vine), on those offering a mix of text and images in myriad forms (Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr), and in apps and profiles where visual presentation and provision of information are important considerations. However, despite being so prominent in forms such as selfies, looping media, infographics, memes, online videos, and more, sociocultural research into the visual as a central component of online communication has lagged behind the analysis of popular, predominantly text-driven social media.

This paper underlines the increasing importance of visual elements to digital, social, and mobile media within everyday life, addressing the significant research gap in methods for tracking, analysing, and understanding visual social media as both image-based and intertextual content. In this paper, we build on our previous methodological considerations of Instagram in isolation (Highfield & Leaver, 2015) to examine further questions, challenges, and benefits of studying visual social media more broadly, including methodological and ethical considerations. Our discussion is intended as a rallying cry and provocation for further research into visual (and textual, and mixed) social media content, practices, and cultures, mindful of both the specificities of each form, but also, and importantly, the ongoing dialogues and interrelations between them as communication forms.

In this article, we develop a new way to capture knowledge diffusion and assimilation in innovation networks by means of an agent-based simulation model. The model incorporates three essential characteristics of knowledge that have not been covered entirely by previous diffusion models: the network character of knowledge, compatibility of new knowledge with already existing knowledge, and the fact that transmission of knowledge requires some form of attention. We employ a network-of-networks approach, where agents are located within an innovation network and each agent itself contains another network composed of knowledge units (KUs). Since social learning is a path-dependent process, in our model, KUs are exchanged among agents and integrated into their respective knowledge networks depending on the received KUs' compatibility with the currently focused ones. Thereby, we are also able to endogenize attributes such as absorptive capacity that have been treated as an exogenous parameter in some of the previous diffusion models. We use our model to simulate and analyze various scenarios, including cases for different degrees of knowledge diversity and cognitive distance among agents as well as knowledge exploitation vs. exploration strategies. Here, the model is able to distinguish between M.P. Schlaile et al. two levels of knowledge diversity: heterogeneity within and between agents. Additionally , our simulation results give fresh impetus to debates about the interplay of innovation network structure and knowledge diffusion. In summary, our article proposes a novel way of modeling knowledge diffusion, thereby contributing to an advancement of the economics of innovation and knowledge.

This paper aims to unlock the potential for the politicization of art in the age of the meme. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s ideas, we suggest that technologies of viral reproduction create the tools and conditions for blasting the present moment out of the oppressive vice of classical historiography. While fascism retrenches on “art for art’s sake” in defense of principles of origin, authenticity, and mastery, we envision a politicization of the art of the meme not simply through content but through practice. This paper attempts to engage in this practice through creative invention. We work across two cases, one “real” (Richard Spencer gets punched) and one of our own creation: the viral life and death of Quodlibet, an anachronistic DJ. Our wager is that the blast of now-time that the meme
unleashes can be used to lay bare the myth of mastery and open a space for new subjects, forms, and practices. At the same time, we show how the meme is prone to boomerang effects and reterritorializations that can reverse back into fascist aestheticism, the catastrophic status quo, and the
dominance of the market. Playfully and without self-seriousness, our goal in this paper is to open the image sphere: to slip into the Internet’s dream house and rummage its drawers for a revolutionary politics.

Recently leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS/Mormon) faith have called upon members to “sweep the earth” with positive religious messages through social media. This digital moment in Mormonism exemplifies the interrelation and concomitant tension between everyday lived religion, technology, and religious institutions. While studies on digital religion have emphasized the push of participatory culture into everyday lived religion, this research on religious memes contributes to an emergent vein of digital religion scholarship focused on institutional authority. In our analysis of the “doubt your doubts” meme and antimemes we theorize religious memetics as a space for the reconnection of the everydayness of religious practice, which boils down meaningful moments of faith into facile, nonthreatening avenues for sharing religion. While this is beneficial for institutions, the reflexive and metonymic function of religious memes ruptures routine, offering participants momentary pauses from the demands of orthodox religious life.

In March 2014, a viral campaign spread across social media using the tag #nomakeupselfie. This campaign involved women posting selfies without wearing makeup and (in later iterations of the trend) donating money to cancer charities. It was credited with raising £8 million for the charity Cancer Research UK (CRUK) and received a wealth of coverage in mainstream news media as well as across a range of blogs and news sites. The starting point for the #nomakeupselfie has been attributed by its lead campaigner to a single picture Laura Lippman posted on Twitter after Kim Novak’s appearance at the Oscars on 2nd March 2014 (Ciambriello, 2014; London, 2014).1 Novak’s appearance was marred by criticism about her look. Some people on Twitter commented on how her face was not beautiful and that it was disfigured from plastic surgery. Lippman’s tweet of “No makeup, kind lighting. #itsokkimnovak” (Figure 1) was noted as the starting point to the prosocial focus of this hashtag.

The meme initially saw female users of multiple social media sites post selfies sans makeup with comments along the lines of “here’s my makeup-free selfie for breast cancer.” Before long, the posts mutated to being about cancer more generally, and they acquired messages with more specific actions, such as “Text BEAT to 70099 to donate £3.” More people started to share these photos, sometimes accompanied by a screenshot of their mobile phone to prove they had donated. And people began to nominate others to be the next one to dare to bare. It was around this time that the trend reached enough critical mass for it to be picked up on by other media outlets, and over the following week it mutated several times more, developing spin-off male-oriented memes, including #manupandmakeup (men wearing makeup) and #cockinasock (men naked except for socks covering their penises), as well as gaining traction internationally—generating thousands of words of commentary across news media and blog sites.

This article explores how the selfie became used as a charitable meme in this campaign and how the meme mutated from a (possibly naïve) notion of raising awareness to becoming a multimillion-pound fund-raiser. We consider the way the campaign was discussed and problematized within other media and how this contrasted with the coverage of cancer patient Stephen Sutton’s social media fund-raising events during the same time period and the campaign for Britons to post selfies using the #thumbsupforstephen hashtag following his death. Finally, we consider how these cases reflect wider discourses within British culture about charity, performativity, and national identity as well as how and why wider media responses to these two campaigns differed.

This article analyzes the creation, evolution, and monetization of the Harlem Shake meme on YouTube to explore contemporary implementation of copyright and understanding of authorship in regard to monetization of works with distributed authorship. This article has three main findings: first, we highlight the collection of digital labor that comprises the “Harlem Shake” meme, its rise in popularity, and the subsequent rise in popularity of Baauer, the composer of the song which forms the backbone of the meme; second, we examine how YouTube’s “new bargain” of Content ID, as a departure from the site’s origins creates coercive control mechanisms, shedding new light on the concept of and debate over “digital sharecropping.” Finally, we argue for a “Fair(er) use” system by exploring how memes might be understood outside of the contemporary copyright system, rethinking the rights of users engaged in collective production. The article is significant in that it challenges the current distribution of Content ID payments solely to copyright holders in an attempt to rethink a system that acknowledges the creative labor of memetic phenomena and collective authorship.