Memes, Internet Memes, Internet culture

Es gibt verschiedene Methoden, mit Ausnahmezuständen, Katastrophen und Tragödien umzugehen. Eine davon ist Humor. Seit dem frühen 20. Jahrhundert beschäftigen sich Volkskundler*innen mit den entstehenden Witzezyklen nach Tragödien. Seit der Entstehung der Massenmedien können sogenannte Disaster Jokes (im Folgenden werden aufgrund der englischen Literatur einie englische Begriffe benutzt, um keine Sinnverfälschung vorzunehmen) ganz neue Dimensionen annehmen und verbreiten sich unter neuen Bedingungen. Medial vermittelte Tragödien können eine große Anzahl nicht unmittelbar betroffener Rezipienten erreichen. Was sind die Funktionen solcher Witze? Handelt es sich bei ihnen um einen bloßen Ausdruck des Wunsches nach Comic Relief und der Traumabewältigung oder gibt es weitere Ambivalenzen, die dieser 'kranke Humor' in der medialisierten Welt adressiert?
Die Anschläge vom 11. September stellen nicht nur eine historische Zäsur dar, sie fanden auch zu einer mediengeschichtlichen Umbruchszeit statt. Sie markieren das erste globale Mediendesaster. Die Bilder des Terrors gingen in Echtzeit um die ganze Welt. Dass sie dabei zwischen Werbe- und Entertainmentaspekten platziert wurden, allgemein an einen Hollywood-Blockbuster erinnerten und so montiert wurden, dass bestimmte Emotionen der Trauer hervorgerufen werden sollten, sorgte für ein Ambivalenzgefühl bei den Rezipienten. Welche Rolle spielt diese Ambivalenz beim humoristischen Umgang mit 9/11?
9/11 markiert außerdem die erste globale Katastrophe im Internetzeitalter. Die Anschläge kennzeichnen die erste Tragödie, bei der der offiziellen Berichterstattung in den Massenmedien eine Gegenöffentlichkeit entgegengesetzt werden konnte, die keiner Montage und keiner Zensur ausgesetzt war: Die Internet-Community. Zum ersten Mal in der Geschichte gab es die Möglichkeit einer Echtzeitreaktion auf eine Tragödie in einem virtuellen, global vernetzten Raum. Heute sind Reaktionen auf öffentliche Katastrophen im Internet ganz normal – 9/11 jedoch war die Premiere. Gelten für den virtuellen Raum dieselben Regeln der Reaktion auf Tragödien wie für den realen? Welche Rolle spielt die Anonymität im Netz?
Die virtuelle Gegenöffentlichkeit ermöglichte neue Kommunikationsformen und damit auch neue Witze-Genres. Mit Internet-Memes –  humoristischen Inhalten in Text-, Bild- oder Videoform – entstand ein neues Genre, dessen Relevanz bis zum heutigen Tag weiter zunimmt.  Was ist ein Meme und wie funktioniert es? Was macht ein erfolgreiches Meme aus?
Der Einzug von Disaster Jokes in die virtuelle Sphäre war eine logische Folge der neuen Umstände. Der analoge, verbal vermittelte Disaster Joke durchlief beim Einzug in den virtuellen Raum eine Transformation: Er wurde zum Disaster Meme und damit vor allem visuell. Nach 9/11 bildete sich im Internet ein ganzer Witzekomplex rund um die Anschläge, der in verschiedenen Wellen auftrat und Rückschlüsse auf die Art und Weise zulässt, wie Desaster-Humor im Internet funktioniert. Kann man den digitalen Witzezyklus rund um 9/11 als humoristische Zäsur in der Mediengeschichte verstehen? War er der Beginn einer seither üblichen, humoristischen Umgangsweise mit Tragödien im virtuellen Raum, die ein durch die Massenmedien entstehendes emotionales Vakuum adressieren kann? Und wie entwickelte sich das Genre Disaster Meme seither weiter?

Originally published in:
The International Journal of Arts in Society, Volume 6, No. 2, pp. 111-20, available online at: http://ija.cgpublisher.com/product/pub.85/prod.757

The phenomenon of large-scale public art projects has gone viral. From intentional crop circles to illusionistic sidewalk paintings in many of the world’s urban tourist sites to choreographed flocks of sheep and rice paddies planted in imitation and emulation of classical paintings, these projects often reveal a sophisticated degree of communal organization and the expenditure of sometimes vast amounts of human energy and resources. The widespread distribution of videos about these often memetic and mimetic projects on YouTube and other digital media networks means that these projects are familiar to millions around the world and engender others. To what end?

In this article, Dr. Hipólito Rafael Chacón, Professor of Art History and Criticism at The University of Montana (USA), illustrates the rich gamut of projects that are currently documented online. He analyzes how these works resonate with traditions of land-based art known to art history and archeology, specifically how they relate to the land art, pop, and mass culture movements of the last quarter of the 20th century. Most importantly, he shows how their diffusion via electronic media is a revelatory commentary on a new and increasingly global culture.

The evolution of information and communication technologies has brought about changes in the way in which individuals interact and express themselves converted into connected users through different digital entertainment platforms in their daily lives. Facebook, being the most used social network, becomes a space where interests and experiences can be shared and an own digital identity can be built. The Internet meme is very important within the digital formats for the dissemination of social issues or concerns, reason why it is the object of study in this research. The objectives of the paper are: to use the meme as an indicator of transmission of messages in social networks, and to identify the concerns of graphic design students through them. The methodology is characterized by developing from a qualitative approach which, through observation, filing and extraction of categories, allows identifying the main problems that students find in relation to their academic training. The results show seven main categories: (1) personal aspects; (2) professional aspects; (3) materials; (4) thesis; (5) concepts of graphic design; (6) university; and (7) popular culture. These are broken down into specific categories and subcategories, among which the one that refers to the "stress" generated in their academic journey stands out in a higher level, as well as the "professional loss of prestige" suffered in the labor market. As conclusions, it is also possible to emphasize that Internet memes can throw information of the personality and the concerns of the users which change as the student progresses to higher levels of his career.

A través del artículo se explora la hipótesis de que los memes de internet constituyen un nuevo espacio para el pluralismo informativo en Chile, ya que tendrían la capacidad para romper el cerco informativo impuesto por los medios de comunicación masivos. A partir de la Ecología de Medios se analizan los memes y la viralización, para descubrir el rol que cumplen en la conformación de la agenda temática. Este artículo forma parte de la etapa inicial de una investigación más amplia que pretende dar luces sobre el rol que las redes sociales cumplen en la conformación de la agenda temática y cómo han afectado el ecosistema de medios de comunicación.

When musical parodies as ‘authentic imitations’ of existing artistic compositions or cultural memes are transmitted through social media, the general public may be provoked and confronted with mixed reactions on decency and other moral issues.  This has the potential conflating to a catastrophic state especially when the audiovisual data have instantly been enabled for public access.

The ‘listen, listen, listen’ phenomenon started when a video, which depicts a moderator named Sharifah Zohra Jabeen dismissing a student from asking questions at a forum held in a local university, went viral on social media on 14 January 2013, while her abusive ‘listen’ catch-line and other humiliating remarks catapulted the public uproar overnight. Immediately following the incident, there came a few parody videos, which appear both satirical and entertaining, to underscore a typical paradox that apparently parallels the many underlying problems of the education and politics in Malaysia, and thus ‘listen, listen, listen’ significantly emerges as a contemporary Internet meme.

This paper deals with a hermeneutic study on the ‘listen, listen, listen’ phenomenon based on online comments YouTube members have posted (3,583 as of 10 October) for a musical parody produced and published by Yuri Wong on 14 January. As commentary from other available Internet platforms is analysed, the use of audiovisual data is also technically observed and interpreted. When net citizens drastically involved themselves through actions of liking, disliking, sharing or commenting on the social media, are they more voluble and honest on the Internet platform? Through this musical parody, what idea did they gather to reflect the reality in Malaysia? Are they ready to appreciate musical parodies?

The discussion continues on possible reactions of the censors in the event when musical parodies allegedly ‘collide’ with the ‘national security concerns’.

The present study argues against the deterministic view that professional gaming should be constructed as a sport (Taylor, 2012; Voorhees, 2015). The stereotypical male gamer is examined against the user representations created for esports; i.e. athletic masculinity and geek technology user. How does this sit with individuals’ performance of gender, work and sport? Using a framework of game studies and science and technology studies, 10 females and males involved in esports were interviewed. Irrespective of gender, competition was a high motivation to develop skills in professional gaming. Individuals in esports view gaming as fun, first and foremost. They usually refer to their ‘day jobs’ and potential future careers derived from university studies. It was found that in general, those who have a past of practicing organised sports more readily accept the label of athlete. Discussions about the toxic environment in esports were explicit with female gamers but only implicit with male ones. Women in the lower ranks affirmed it is ubiquitous and two strategies to deal with it were mentioned; ignore and mute voice chat to silence toxic players, or confront and retaliate. Men implicitly spoke about hostility between competitors and the need to rapidly obtain skills to surpass them.

There is a lot of people that viewed memes and found them funny and entertaining, but not all people find it funny, the view it as negative, inappropriate, offensive, insulting, annoying, etc. The focus of this study is to gain new knowledge whether the attitudes of students on memes that contain sensitive content is disturbing for them or not because there has been issues about the memes posted on social media that may contain sensitive content for others. In other words, the goal of this study is to know the attitude or behavior and the reactions of the senior high school students towards memes and how they view it. Three questions are set to guide the researchers and ought to answer later on. First, what is the level of awareness of Silliman University Grade 12 STEAM Senior High School students on memes with sensitive content. Second, what would be the possible effects on a person after viewing memes with sensitive content. Lastly, if there is a significant difference of awareness of students towards memes in terms of sex. The data was gathered through an online survey. Based on the data gathered, the researches have safely assumed that the students had an average knowledge of awareness from the harmful content that memes contained. There was no significant difference of awareness in based on sex of an individual. Students have considered memes as somewhat positive and negative at the same time. Nevertheless, citizens of the net should be responsible in utilizing social media.

With the emergence of the internet and various digital technologies, the consumption of the media has been transformed drastically. The viral and notorious Internet memes have become the fundamental unit of cultural transmission on the internet, especially on social media networks. Born into this Digital Age are the Digital Natives who have 24 hours access and are the “native speakers” of the digital language of the internet. While much is known about internet memes' effectiveness and role in the online sphere, there is a gap in knowledge in addressing its significance in the offline world through a concrete reception research. This qualitative study explores whether internet memes affect the offline lifestyle choices of the Indian digital natives and to what extent by conducting online structured interviews through questionnaire. The results show that digital natives understand memes in terms of their ability to produce humour and relatability, and as a digital vernacular. The findings illustrate and confirm the role of internet memes in influencing the offline lifestyle choices and the formation of cultural capital among the Indian digital natives.

There is a lot of people that viewed memes and found them funny and entertaining, but not all people find it funny, the view it as negative, inappropriate, offensive, insulting, annoying, etc. The focus of this study is to gain new knowledge whether the attitudes of students on memes that contain sensitive content is disturbing for them or not because there has been issues about the memes posted on social media that may contain sensitive content for others. In other words, the goal of this study is to know the attitude or behavior and the reactions of the senior high school students towards memes and how they view it. Three questions are set to guide the researchers and ought to answer later on. First, what is the level of awareness of Silliman University Grade 12 STEAM Senior High School students on memes with sensitive content. Second, what would be the possible effects on a person after viewing memes with sensitive content. Lastly, if there is a significant difference of awareness of students towards memes in terms of sex. The data was gathered through an online survey. Based on the data gathered, the researches have safely assumed that the students had an average knowledge of awareness from the harmful content that memes contained. There was no significant difference of awareness in based on sex of an individual. Students have considered memes as somewhat positive and negative at the same time. Nevertheless, citizens of the net should be responsible in utilizing social media.

This paper aims to discuss the growing and dominant online phenomenon – internet meme by doing a bibliographic review of related theoretical and empirical research. This paper presents the review of recent literature (2005-2017) from various journals, magazine articles, and book sections. It also argues for meme literacy to be included in the limited traditional digital literacy definition and considered as an essential locus for cultural, civic and political participation for children and youth.

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 meme is an idea, element of culture or behavior passed down from one person to another through imitation. A more specific form of meme is the internet meme, which involves images, videos, text, or other content rapidly spread, and often modified, over the internet, and sometimes transcending the mere digital into the material world. Internet memes are often global and therefore help establish commonality between people across cultures, oceans, and national boundaries. They also can help further knit together particular communities already bonded through digital interaction. Yet, despite the cultural impact and pervasiveness of these virtual memes and artifacts in the late-20th and early-21st century, the heritage field has only just begun to recognize the importance and impact of online sub-cultures and viral phenomenon, and the future heritage value that these sub-cultures and phenomenon will hold. Meme historians are few and meme museums even more scarce. Because internet memes and cultures evolve so rapidly, and website links often move or expire, many, probably most, of these virtual objects and intangible heritages, are in danger of being forgotten and lost over the long term. Compounding this difficulty is the sheer volume of memes and artifacts to curate and sift through for selective preservation. This thesis explores the research question of how to select internet memes for preservation as virtual tangible and intangible heritage, and postulates that participatory, community-based efforts could prove invaluable to developing and implementing selection strategies.

En los últimos 7 años,  las personas que poseen  acceso a internet y a las distintas tecnologías de la información, han visto el surgimiento o masificación de las imágenes (algunas con y otras sin texto) llamadas memes. Las cuales no solamente abordan temas humorísticos, sino que también políticos.
Según lo que establece la web principal del noticiero Tele 13, en Chile el primer concepto de meme registrado es el caso de la campaña de la Radio Carolina titulada como Pitéate un flaite. Llegando a tal punto, que se volvió viral en las redes sociales de ese entonces  (por ejemplo, Fotolog). Generando cientos de mutaciones del meme original, como lo fueron: pitéate un pokémon y pitéate una pelo lais (Tele 13, 2015).
Con el patrón anterior se empieza a hacer presente la relación y posterior fusión  entre consumidor y productor (Sánchez y Contreras, 2012). Y este punto es el que gatilla el tema de investigación de este proyecto: el uso de los memes como lenguaje y/o forma de comunicación usada por jóvenes que se encuentren cursando la enseñanza media en Santiago.

Mémoire de musicologie (Master I recherche), présenté par Gabriel ROUET au sein de l'Université de Bourgogne.

Ce travail est basé sur l'étude d'un milieu social et musical sur internet, la vaporwave. Mon but a été de décrypter et de comprendre comment ces espaces de vie s'organisent, et ce que leurs spécificités engendrent sur la musique et les comportements autour de celle-ci. En effet, au début du XXIème siècle, grâce à l'ordinateur et internet, la musique est devenu malléable et hyper-accessible. Ces objets ont redéfini nos rapports avec la musique, et la vaporwave, en tant que premier style musical à naître et perdurer sur internet, a incarné cela. Ces nouveaux moyens de communication ont révolutionné les manières de s'organiser, de créer et de vivre ensemble. Les places virtuelles publiques sont nombreuses et les conversations privées sont mondialisées. Cette redéfinition des objets, et donc des espaces, laisse place à de nouvelles pratiques musicales et sociales, et met en avant les relations de pseudonymat ou d'anonymat. Ma méthode a consisté essentiellement en une étude de terrain virtuel basée sur l'observation des espaces du web et des entretiens individuels, par webchat, auprès d'artistes, médiateurs et auditeurs du monde entier. L'outil sociologique s'est révélé très pertinent pour analyser ce mouvement musical. Etant le premier style s'organisant fondamentalement en ligne, la vaporwave est un bon exemple pour explorer les interactions entre chaque monde, les sites, comme éléments d'un seul univers, le web.

Contact : gabriel.rouet@gmail.com
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The following work is based on the study of a musical and social environment on the internet, known as the vaporwave. My focus was to decrypt and understand how these living spaces are organized, and how their specificities generated singular music and behaviours. Indeed, at the beginning of the XXIth century, thanks to the computer and the internet, music became adaptable and hyper-available. Those devices defined our relations with music, and vaporwave, as one of the first musical genre that was born and prospered on the internet, embodies this idea. Those new means of communication revolutionized our way of organizing, building and living together. The public virtual plazas are numerous and the private conversations are international. This redefining of the objects, and thus the space, give way to new musical and social practices, and highlights the anonymity and pseudonymity of relationships. My methodology was to do a virtual field study based on the observations of the internet spaces and to interview, via web chat, artists, mediators and audiences all over the world. The sociological tool proved to be relevant to analyse this musical movement. As one of the first genre of music organized online, vaporwave provided a suitable example for exploration of the interactions between each world, the websites, as part of one universe, the web.

Contact : gabriel.rouet@gmail.com

This article investigates the use of Internet memes in Italy, to establish in what measure and how the Anglo-American model influences their creation and fruition. Using a qualitative approach, the article examines the cultural references and the verbal and visual elements of a corpus of image macros. The results suggest some relevant tendencies, including the connection between the features of different kinds of memes and their target audiences, and the presence of hybrid memes that combine global and local elements, such as dialects.

Questo articolo analizza l’uso dei meme di internet nel contesto italiano, al fine di determinare il loro rapporto con il modello angloamericano globalmente dominante. In particolare, vengono presi in considerazione i riferimenti culturali e gli elementi linguistici e visivi presenti in un corpus di meme costituiti da testi e immagini. Dall’analisi qualitativa di questi contenuti emergono alcune tendenze rilevanti, tra cui il legame tra le loro caratteristiche e la tipologia di utenti a cui si rivolgono e la presenza di meme ibridi, creati a partire dalla combinazione di elementi globali e altri marcatamente locali, come i dialetti.

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.

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.

Este trabalho se situa na fronteira das áreas de Comunicação, memética e estudos do imaginário. Temos como pressuposto a existência de um imaginário comunicacional, em que o homem contemporâneo é pautado por suas habilidades nas redes sociais, pela exigência da publicização do privado, a obsessividade da partilha da intimidade e a da exorbitante quantidade de imagens. Considerando os memes como um fenômeno significativo desse imaginário comunicacional, buscamos compreender a dinâmica e o trajeto dos memes em meio à essa pletora de imagens. A partir do conceito de iconofagia, tratamos da multiplicação exacerbada das imagens e do trajeto dos memes partindo de um ambiente marginalizado até se encontrar integrado aos papéis sociais e a um nível racional de pensamento. A partir do conceito de mito e sua função como ingrediente vital da civilização humana, discutimos a figura do troll em relação à noção do titanismo, fazendo as conexões entre os traços dessas figuras mitológicas e o homem contemporâneo. A partir das teorias sobre o humor, e do viés do imaginário, veremos a importância da função lúdica e seu papel ao assegurar uma catarse nas transições entre o mundo interior e exterior Além da pesquisa bibliográfica, nos utilizamos de casos exemplares e da mitodologia para buscar as imagens simbólicas recorrentes e os regimes do imaginário que guiam a produção e compartilhamento dos memes e suas constelações de imagens. A partir das formas de criar e compartilhas memes e de casos exemplares, descobrimos que essa miríade de imagens é guiada pelos simbolismos teriomórficos e que é através do Regime Diurno do imaginário que o homem pega em armas, e enfrenta as tenebrosas faces do tempo pela hipérbole e pelo exagero.

In our current technological age, digital reproductions of artworks are readily available with a mere Internet search. Additionally, the Internet allows for users to acquire copies of any image editing software, which in turn enables the altering and amalgamating of virtually anything, by anyone.  The results of this infinite availability that I wish to explore are the combinations of fine art pieces with elements of present-day popular culture into memes with art historical backgrounds and pop culture references. In a large way resembling the Dadaist tradition, these digital works physically and philosophically resemble Dadaist photomontage. As I place these works in a Postmodern setting, they reject the traditional medium and technique of painting and perhaps even adopt societal critique and parody, while the physical principles bear resemblance to pastiche.

This unpublished manuscript is the written version of a presentation given at a conference of the Colloquium on Violence and Religion (COV&R)  at Purdue University in 2002. It is in many ways an immature and outdated paper, and does not reflect my current views. It is certainly not ready for publication, but I often get inquiries about it, so I put it up on Academia. Rather than give an abstract in this space I want to offer a few evaluative comments:

The strongest element of this paper is probably the mimetic analysis of media obsession and the interpretation of Eminem's song. The overview of memes and memetics is outdated and not always accurate: I would do it much differently today. In the meantime, Dawkins' position on memes has since become less speculative, and more confident--he has written of memetics as if it were now solidly established science, which I think is not credible. Another development is that memes themselves, as media phenomena and quite apart from their technical description in memetics, have (subsequent to this study) become a huge cultural development, and (to me) a great deal more interesting in many ways than memetics.

This paper also reflects the flag-waving of a new adherent to Girard's mimetic theory so many years ago. I find it much more combative than it needs to be, as it pits mimetic theory against memetics as if there were some zero-sum contest involved.  Girard has also since commented positively on memes (in The One through Whom Scandal Comes). A calmer conversation comparing memetics and mimetic theory would have been much more worthwhile. In such a spirit, I did a follow-up presentation on memes at the Generative Anthropology conference at UCLA in 2013 (via Skype): "Memes, Mimes, and Scenes: A Place for 'Memetics' in Generative Anthropology?" (That presentation has not been put into written form.) For comments: <taylor [at] kinjo-u.ac.jp>.

The rapid emergence of the participatory internet culture produced new, rarely seen before ways of commenting on political and social issues. While the role of the internet memes is, of course, not strictly limited to that of social commentary, and, in fact, is rarely thought to be so, modern political internet memes at times enter even the mainstream political discussion. User-generated internet memes also often appear in mainstream media. The United States presidential elections were even branded ‘the meme election’ by some political commentators, underlying the importance of the internet memes as a means of political commentary during these elections. At the same time the research on political internet memes remains limited.
The internet memes are a product of a modern internet culture. Because of that it is important to discuss the concept of internet culture, its position as a part of culture in general, its key characteristics and its evolution from the supposedly less participatory culture of the early days of the World Wide Web to a more participatory period of Web 2.0. This latter era is characterized by the presence of certain technologies which are also discussed in chapter 1. These technologies allowed more participation and content creation by users, thus effectively being crucial to both creation and dissemination of internet memes.
At the same time the visual structure of internet memes is not new. ‘Image macros’ - the most popular type of internet memes represents an image which usually repeats from meme to meme with superimposed text. As such, in order to grasp the meaning of political internet memes, it might be useful to turn to semiotics. I discuss Roland Barthes’ collection of essays Image-Music-Text due to it being particular useful to discussion of images with text. Later I have also analyzed the case study of Rushka Kvadratnyi Vatnik using semiotics to test my hypothesis of political internet memes serving as examples of political caricature and means of reaction to propaganda.
Discussion of political internet memes is impossible without the general introduction to the concept of internet memes. In chapter 2 I discuss briefly the history of the concept, the reasons why people choose to produce internet memes, the role of affinity spaces in meme production, and what makes internet meme successful with a particular attention to the role of humor in political internet memes. In that chapter I also discuss the previous research on political internet memes which remains very limited. I also make a particular distinction between internet memes originally created as a form of social or political commentary and internet memes which were originally created for other purposes but may be used as a form of social or political commentary.
As a case study I have chosen the case of the internet meme Rushka Kvadratnyi Vatnik which became very popular in the Russian-speaking segment of the internet as form of criticism of Russian jingoist patriotism. I also discuss how certain manifestations of this internet meme are used as a form of a political caricature and as a means of reaction to the official Russian propaganda using semiotic analysis.
The source materials I have used throughout the paper are mainly academic research papers on the subject of the Internet, internet culture, and internet memes. I have also used Roland Barthes’ and Umberto Eco’s writings in the sphere of semiotics. Writings on the interrelation of humor, propaganda and politics were also important. Finally, I have used news from reliable mass media to illustrate my points – such sources were mostly used as a means of illustrating the coverage of certain events in the mainstream media.

Esta investigación fue relevante en el área de las comunicaciones porque los memes son una forma de interpretación de la realidad en la cual “el meme puede aludir a un referente más o menos concreto, y cuando es reconocido por los participantes en el acto comunicativo, efectivamente posibilita la puesta en común” (Pérez, Aguilar y Archilla, 2014, p.83). El problema de investigación partió a raíz de la masificación de los memes, y su proyección en los jóvenes, donde se investigó cómo “los usuarios se apropian de ellos y ‘remezclan’ para adaptarlos a su entorno y necesidades de comunicación” (Gómez, 2014, p.4). Según Vélez “no se necesita ser un profesional del área de las comunicaciones o lingüística para entenderlos [memes]” (Vélez, 2015, p.130).
Ahora bien, ¿Por qué fue relevante estudiar o investigar este tema? ¿Qué aporta al área de las comunicaciones? Para responder lo anterior fue necesario observar a los memes como una forma de interpretación de la realidad. Ya que “el meme puede aludir a un referente más o menos concreto, y cuando es reconocido por los participantes en el acto comunicativo, efectivamente posibilita la puesta en común” (Pérez, Gabriel; Aguilar, Andrea; Archilla, María Ernestina.2014.p.83). También es importante señalar que cuando un meme es compartido “los usuarios se apropian de ellos y ‘remezclan’ para adaptarlos a su entorno y necesidades de comunicación” (Gómez, Ignacio.2014.p.4). Por lo tanto, he aquí la relevancia de esta investigación.

Uno de los puntos novedosos de este trabajo, fue que se investigó un tema que es de principal interés para los jóvenes. Así mismo, se presentó la influencia que poseen los memes en las relaciones sociales del grupo de estudio y el uso que les otorgan. Ya sea como un rol identificativo y/o de pertenencia dentro de su círculo más cercano. Dilucidando si es que ocupan los memes como un método para interactuar con su grupo social pero sin poseer la necesidad de entrar en contacto directo con ellos.

Otro punto importante a señalar, es que también se investigó si es que la influencia de los memes se mantuvo solo dentro del margen de internet o ya es un complemento de interacción en el día a día.

Finalmente, esta investigación fue pertinente porque permitió comprender cómo el grupo de estudio usa los memes, a través de qué medios los crea y difunde y cuáles son sus motivaciones para realizar lo anteriormente escrito. Incluso, este trabajo otorga la posibilidad de aclarar el origen y futuro de los memes, a través de los distintos testimonios recogidos.

This paper aims to discuss preliminary results of a comprehensive research on the uses and appropriations of political-electoral memes. Our main goal at this stage is to develop, following former propositions from other scholars, a taxonomical matrix able to assist researchers interested in dealing with online political memes with greater objectivity. Therefore, we tried to perform a content analysis of memes that circulated on Twitter during Brazilian 2014 presidential elections.

This article shows that the origins of the confusion surrounding the theoretical status of internet memes today can be found in Richard Dawkin’s theory of culture as proposed in the Selfish Gene (1976) and later developed in memetics, the science of memes. Memetics’ concern with memes as ‘units’ that are transmitted via ‘copying’ between individuals appears to be problematic from the perspective of the longer-established framework for the study of culture which is semiotics. This article presents an alternative to the atomic and transmissible view of cultural information: that is, a take on memes that draws on biosemiotics and cybersemiotics, Tartu-Moscow semiotics and Peircean semiotics. Following this change of perspective on memes it is argued that contemporary internet memes in digital culture should be theorised as signs-systems with the habit to take new habits or translations, which in turn, are characterised by ‘asymmetry’ and ‘invariancy’. The semiotic analysis of the Rebecca Black’s Friday internet meme (YouTube 2011) shows that the adoption of this framework enables one to identify and analyse key moments in the development of a specific internet meme, a move that may constitute a further step for the semiotic investigation of digital culture as a whole.

Popular culture matters for international relations and global politics. It is able to define what is the "normal" and commonsensical in IR. While much research has been done on the influence of media such as movies and television, IR scholarship should extend its focus also towards the emergent phenomenon of digital popular culture, whereof internet memes constitute a big part. Particularly interesting for critical IR scholars should be the critical potential that memes possess, by their bottom-up nature, easy and rapid distribution, and the ability to disturb common assumptions with the power of humor. This thesis explores the recent cultural phenomenon of memes and shows their critical potential, both on the theoretical level and on the practical level, by examining the Kendall Jenner Pepsi Meme. Furthermore it argues that memes, like other forms of visual media, constitute an important form of discourse that should be analyzed from the perspective of IR.

Internet memes are phenomena that rapidly gain popularity on the Internet which construct intercultural discourse. Using visual rhetoric, the Internet memes convey a set of symbols and ideals that express socio-political structure represented on the Internet. The story of memes is crucial in understanding the digital culture along with revealing the identity of an Internet subculture, as well as in analyzing the impacts of this cultural artifact. This study analyzes the nature and functions of internet memes and its contribution to formulate a new cultural discourse. The findings have been instrumented to illustrate how memes operate as rhetoric to explore the intercultural communication and identity construction prevalent in representative cyber-culture. It has specially been targeted to inquire the inter-textual nature of memes which are created and disseminated by the Bangladeshi Facebook prosumers. In addition, the study makes a comparison of theoretical approaches to the study of memes, including visual rhetoric approach which combines elements of the semiotic and discursive approaches to study the persuasive constituents of visual texts. These methods help deconstruct a sign or a text and decode possible hidden meanings through discourse analysis in terms of written texts and through semiotic analysis in terms of images. The presence of both an image (sign) and a caption (text) in an internet meme requires such a combined approach for reflective output.

Memes are currently playing a formative role in the externalising of cultural memory, acting as replicators of social, scientific and other knowledge and as core elements of Web 2.0 culture with its focus on creating and sharing user-generated content in a collaborative, globalizing context. More than other network phenomena memes may help us explain how the internet is structured, showing the extent to which its surface chaos is in reality a highly organized system of practices of dispersion and diffusion. Recent work has made clear that it is possible to employ the meme as a prism for understanding certain tendencies within social networking without embracing the whole set of implications ascribed to this new 'genre' over the years. On the whole, however, critics and scholars have rather neglected the semiotic dimension of meme communication, focussing on complexities of aesthetic form only where necessary and largely ignoring the instabilities of meaning-production in the process of remixing visual and written meme 'messages'. Categories such as "form", "content" or "stance" (L. Shifman) fail to convincingly explain how memes work as formulas of media contents, importing as they do a single authorial intelligence responsible for having processed all content individually and thus over-emphasizing the power of human agency. This project argues that it needs a solid understanding of semiotics to understand memes and the series of patterns they help shape and diffuse. As they are mostly dependent on embarrassing moments of visual capture, they cannot insist on having a primarily informational or even symbolical meaning. In fact, they are predicated on a signifying accident (or "third meaning", as Roland Barthes would have argued) any reader may take up and develop into a new and justifiable meaning. Evolving from a situationally bounded generating process, memes are also exemplars of a level of meaning-production Julia Kristeva has adequately termed "signifiance". Their innovation in terms of aesthetic form lies in their productive violence and their underscoring of the limits of socially useful discourse, pointing as they do to the semiotic and unconscious processes that exceed the subject and its rationalising processes.

Resumen:
La progresiva generalización del acceso a Internet en los países industrializados ha tenido
como resultado la expansión y el desarrollo de formas vernaculares de comunicación, etiqueta y
folclore dentro de la red, entre las cuales se encuentran los objetos textuales en formato visual o
audiovisual designados comunmente como “memes”. Este ensayo busca explorar y analizar los
orígenes subculturales de los memes de Internet, las identidades ligadas a los mismos, su evolución
y cómo se insertan dentro del marco sociocultural que ha dado origen a los mismos. Para ello, voy a
prestar especial atención a las tendencias ironistas y los espacios subculturales del ecosistema
memero ya que, si bien estos espacios son menos conocidos por el público general, tienen una gran
importancia histórica y práctica en el desarrollo artístico y cultural que acompaña a los memes.
Palabras Clave: Historia de Internet, subculturas online, comunidades de fans, memes,
ironía, humor.

Abstract:
The progressive generalization of Internet access inside the industrialized countries brought
with it the development and expansion of vernacular comunication, etiquette normes and folklore
inside the Web. The textual objects in visual or audio-visual format popularly known as “memes”
are a huge part of today's Internet communication. This essay tries to explore and analyse the
subcultural origins of Internet memes, the identities associated, their evolution and how they're
wired to the socio-cultural frame that gave them birth. To do so, I'll focus on the ironist tendencies
and subcultural spaces of the Web mostly unknown for the general public but with a huge historical
importance in the artistical and cultural development of internet memes.
Keywords: History of the Internet, subcultures, fandoms, memes, irony, humour.

This paper explores the cohesive capacity of internet memes within the communal and multimodal environment of Facebook. Attention is paid specifically to Countryball memes gathered and analyzed in the context of the POLANDBALL community. The paper proposes that the cohesiveness of the community rests on its inclination to linguistic as well as social homogeneity, based on disparagement humor revolving around cultural and national stereotypes. Grounded in the Social Identity Approach, stereotyping is analyzed as a cohesive device with respect to the multimodal dimensions of memetic communication and its recurring linguistic properties.

Humor has been used as a tool against oppression since ages. With the advent of digital technologies, internet memes have gained prominence. Memes are mediums that communicate information through humor and satire. Today, internet memes have become a part of the political campaigning. This research paper thus analysis how internet memes have been used to communicate political satire. The study deals with the impact of internet memes on digital natives and digital migrants in India. Parameters like political engagement, influence on political views and voting behaviour are used to analyse the impact of memes. Using questionnaire as a tool for data collection, the research concludes that internet memes are used as a tool of political discourse but does not have a major impact on audience although it improves political engagement of the digital natives.Elaboration likelihood model and Agenda setting theory is used as a theoretical base for the study.