Memes, Internet Memes, Internet culture

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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>.

O presente trabalho propõe fomentar uma discussão acerca das potencialidades do gênero digital meme enquanto um elemento multifário capaz de auxiliar no desenvolvimento das competências linguístico-discursivas de educandos em aulas de língua portuguesa no ensino médio. Pode-se afirmar que, através da cibercultura, aspectos linguísticos, discursivos e sociais têm se materializado em diversas interações multimidiáticas que colocam em evidência o papel da tecnologia como meio de engendrar novas formas de se comunicar, significar e produzir cultura na pós-modernidade. Diante das demandas atuais que sinalizam para a importância da articulação entre tecnologia, linguagem e práticas sociais de uso da língua, em consonância com as propostas dos Parâmetros Curriculares Nacionais para o Ensino Médio e as Orientações Curriculares para o Ensino Médio, afirmo ser necessário pensar maneiras de implementação de propostas pedagógicas de produção de texto multimodal com o intuito de valorizar as novas formas de linguagem que se proliferam no mundo contemporâneo por meio das tecnologias digitais, agregando-as às aulas de língua portuguesa. Não podemos negligenciar o fato de que os nossos alunos, cada vez mais, têm feito uso de ferramentas de áudio, vídeo,  tratamento de  imagem, edição etc., atuando ativamente em práticas de produção e replicação na cibercultura, como coconstrutores de sentidos em ambientes  virtuais.  Nesse  sentido,  em  tempos  de  alunos  pertencentes  à Geração  Digital, práticas de ensino-aprendizagem de língua portuguesa devem se constituir, essencialmente, num espaço que privilegia as diversidades de linguagens, permitindo que nossos educandos se tornem protagonistas na construção de conhecimentos significativos, reconhecendo, assim, o papel que esses ocupam como produtores e consumidores de
bens culturais em novas mídias.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Growing access to digital technology in India has led to increased reliance on the interface be-tween religion and social media. The Internet provides traditional religious authorities with tools with which they can reinforce their official practices and beliefs. However, the Internet is also capable of generating multiple meanings from religious and nonreligious content. The multiplicity of meanings can establish a segregated, polarized, and nonhierarchical space. In this article, I seek to understand the use of faith memes on the churches’ Facebook pages. I focus on issues such as authority and the lack of participation that are involved in the use of faith memes as expressions of religious faith. I also analyze the online responses to the faith memes as projected through online tools such as “comment” and “like.” The analysis reflects a form of participatory social action on Facebook that may relate to the traditional hierarchical structure of Sacred Heart Cathedral Church (a Catholic church) and Abundant Life Church East Delhi (a Protestant church) as reflected in their Facebook pages. I employ visual rhetorical analysis of the two churches’ Facebook pages to comprehend social media’s interface with religion. I chose the sample of a Catholic church page and a Protestant church page in an attempt to provide a balanced analysis of the two largest Chris-tian communities in India.

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 research paper examines the way Netizens, web developers and web entrepreneurs relate to meme culture in the context of meme aggregator platforms, websites that serve as repositories and creation hubs for internet memes. The meme, the cultural equivalent of the biological gene and the trademark of internet popular culture, is showcased as the staple of an emergent economy, where memes are collected and disseminated at an incredible pace, the link becomes the substitute for a number of things (answers, examples, emotions) and the time spent in pursuing memes is being monetized. This papers sets off to determine the most popular meme aggregators of the moment, deconstruct them, identify the most common and popular features and create a taxonomy of said sites. In this context, we comprised a top 30 most popular meme aggregators within a complex scientific framework and applied a binary analysis grid constructed around technical features. Using formal concept analysis and subjective criteria we isolated four modules based on major actions (browsing, contributing, creating, uploading/submitting URLs) and several criteria clusters. We defined these clusters as units for understanding how certain technical features (or lack thereof) reflect on the way internet memes are consumed, aggregated, disseminated or created. This endeavor of constructing a taxonomy of meme aggregators based on architectural features is the first of its kind, offering a framework that can be adjusted and expanded in order keep up with web developers, web trends and meme culture.

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.

The soft-authoritarian and severe image of contemporary Singapore has often been associated with the
imposing and paternalistic presence of Lee Kuan Yew who has overseen the city-state as prime minister
and subsequently, senior statesman since 1959. Unlike the statues and street-names dedicated to other
founding leaders in newly decolonized countries, Lee has consciously discouraged any public portraitures
of himself in Singapore. However, as his presence fades with ailing health in the recent years, his
images are beginning to surface in figurines, coffee table books and even street art. Over in the social
and alternative media, there is an increasingly more irreverent use of the Hokkien/Minan term ‘limpeh’
or ‘your father’ as parodies of Lee’s unyielding paternalism. As a masculinistic self-assertion of one’s
authority, ‘limpeh’ is often crudely associated with the Hokkien/Minan-speaking ethnic Singaporean
Chinese working class. Singaporeans have also recognized the characteristics of ‘limpeh’ with the
authoritarian legacy of Lee who had displayed little mercy in crushing his political rivals and pushing
his social vision to society. In this respect, these popular communications can be seen as the cacophony
of emerging voices of the city-state in a late authoritarian phase.

The internet gives everyone an equal chance to demonstrate his or her sense of self, whether that is ambivalent, bizarre or completely banal. This has led new visuals to emerge online, as millennials use internet memes to express themselves on a daily basis. However, the essence of the techniques used to do so-including changing ready-made visuals, cheaply-made visuals, and parody-is not new to modern art history. They indicate rebellious attitudes, the challenging of authority and a sense of disillusionment with personal life. Social media offers people a platform to share and express their emotions and opinions and has become an important part of our daily lives. In particular, millennials have engaged with social media to an unprecedented degree, which has led a visual form of expression, known as memes, to emerge. The word "meme" existed long before the internet became mainstream. As Richard Dawkins points out in The Selfish Gene​ , a meme is a process by which culture is passed from one person to another without biological mediation. Dawkins believes that a meme is a self-replicating unit, which becomes established in one's thoughts and leads to mimicking forms of behaviour. Thus, a meme can be passed to another individual and evolve as the process is repeated (Dawkins, 1976). With reference to contemporary psychology, Susan Blackmore offers an additional perspective on Dawkins's theory. Blackmore argues that the human body is merely a machine that carries memes, and as a result, our self-identity is not necessarily self-generated; instead, it simply replicates that which already exists (Blackmore, 2000). As a result, patterns of memes are usually found within forms of social power or ideology, such as religion,

¿Por qué decir que el mundo es un meme? El término -comúnmente empleado para referirse a imágenes satíricas y humorísticas en Internet- es más antiguo que eso; dicha noción hace referencia a mutaciones a nivel cultural mediante agentes replicadores, teoría válida por autores neodarwinistas desde la década de los setenta.

En México encontramos un boom de la cultura participativa en la web y un surgimiento de memes satíricos durante el pasado proceso electoral de 2012. Los deslices del candidato Enrique Peña Nieto inspiraron a los usuarios de Internet para crear un alto
volumen de material memético -chistes, imágenes y videos.

El siguiente artículo pretende dar un panorama general e histórico acerca del estudio de memes, así como ofrecer ideas del autor y elementos conceptuales para su entendimiento; por esta razón, está dedicado a quienes desconocen la ideal del <<meme>> académicamente. También busca generar una reflexión y responder los siguientes cuestionamientos:

¿Qué hace la academia para estudiar e interpretar los emergentes fenómenos sociales (la memética digital)? ¿Es posible investigarla? ¿Qué podemos observar en los memes?

This is the first paper I have published and was produced in partial fulfilment of my B.A. Fine Art degree. This paper tackles the question, what is originality? Can an inspired Idea be truly original? Is it the idea, finish or technique that makes it original? It also asks if embracing reproduction could be a forward move in art. Using insights highlighted by Richard Dawkins on memes, and Walter Benjamin's take on originality and reproduction among others, I try to unravel the difference between plagiarism and reproduction.

Nowadays, the Millennials are closely connected with social media which offer a platform for them to share and express their emotions and opinions and have become an important part of their daily lives. Under this situation, a visual form of expression, known as internet memes, has emerged. What's more, cultural memes develop in an extremely fascinating form, gradually becoming the mainstream of social media. Memes have a significant impact on young audiences and the new emerging visual culture may change their perceptions of visual representation on the digital media.

This study explores the reasons why the development of memes can achieve great “success” under the current online circumstances. So it is essential to understand the culture behind constitutive memes as well as to observe the emotions and explore the community behind the memetic visual representation in the current social context.

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.

This paper examines the phenomenon of humorous Internet memes within the context of news and political culture, sometimes referred to as LOLitics. LOLitics are a category of digital texts created by ordinary individuals that, like most political humour, are usually responses to news events or gaffes committed by political figures. The analysis situates LOLitics as popular culture products that exist within the intersection between pleasure-driven ‘play’ and (arguably) genuine political discourse. LOLitics are prominent due to their spreadability and replicability, and the amount of texts being produced has visibly risen over the last election cycle. Internet memes have become one of the default ways to respond to particular situations online, and this certainly reflects the reaction towards news and political culture. The 2012 US Presidential election is applied as a case study in examining the significance of these Internet memes to everyday citizen discourse, and the relationships between ordinary citizens, the mainstream media, and politics. The results argue that humorous viral texts, both visual and verbal, reveal the potential power that ordinary people have in setting the agenda for newsmakers, and to communicate political criticism through popular culture.

This article explores the hero and new symbolism in 21 st century mainland China. In the wake of rapid transformations in Chinese society, there are still identifiable references in art and design made to symbols of the past that represent Mao (the collective) and party rhetoric. These symbols are often 'heroic' and are drawn upon in times of rapid social transformation to enable a smoother transition. Despite the documented proliferation of the appropriation of Maoist symbolism associated with propaganda, there is a noticeable shift in symbolism from the 'old' to the 'new' to represent Chinese visual culture in art and design in the 21 st century. The current climate of online social media culture is a testing ground for visual metaphors that represent changing tides during the rapid development in China in the digital age. The Grass Mud Horse symbol that emerged as a result of Internet censorship in 2009 may indicate a potential shift in Chinese visual culture, with the creation of symbols that represent dissent. This article argues that, as a result of shifting ideologies, a new hero has risen from online collective co-creation.

Rudyard Kipling's 1899 poem "The White Man's Burden" is frequently invoked in the online postings of white supremacists making various arguments about contemporary race relations. Many follow Senator Ben Tillman's early appropriation of the text as an argument for racial separatism and isolationism, while others advocate a new imperialism. This article examines how Kipling's poem takes on the special qualities of a meme, allowing a loosely affiliated community of authors and audiences to signal their identities through transmission of a shared text even as they stray in multiple directions from its original meaning. Newly examined primary sources draw from a range of so-called "alt-right" spokesmen and obscure Internet users to demonstrate how the concept of the "white man's burden" has adapted to survive in a cultural environment more than a century removed from its origin, and how Kipling himself has been adopted by a twenty-first century subculture.

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.

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.

Geçmişten günümüze insan elindeki en önemli eğlence ve muhalefet araçlarından biri olan mizah, zamana ve teknolojiye bağlı olarak gelişim göstermiştir. Tiyatro, sinema, karikatür gibi önemli mizahi silahlar bugün de mevcut olsa da sosyal medya kavramı ile yeni bir mizahi form ortaya çıkmıştır: internet meme. İnternet meme (bizim daha iyi bildiğimiz adıyla caps) formunda yaratılan dijital mizah, kullanıcı tabanlı medya ortamında yaratılırken geleneksel mizahi üretim sürecinden farklılık göstermiştir. Geçmişte mizahın sadece tüketicisi olanlar, sosyal medyanın kullanıcı tabanlı yapısı sayesinde hem üreten hem de tüketen durumuna gelmiştir. Bu çalışmada internet meme kavramı ve gelişim süreci anlatılmıştır. Daha sonra internet meme’leri/caps’lerin göstergebilimsel yöntemle analizi yapılmış ve dijital medyada mizahi anlamın ne şekilde inşa edildiği ortaya çıkarılmaya çalışılmıştır.

Understanding internet memes as digital culture artifacts, this research investigates the articulations of aesthetic and performance layers in videomemes that re-segnificate musical products through humor in platforms such as Facebook and YouTube. It concerns us to question, specifically, videomemes as experience mediators, consume and musical circulation, as well as the practices of fan activism and taste as protagonized performances. Based on this exchange between theory and case studies, we envision the hypothesis that from this phenomena a memetic musical culture emerges, wide and full of singularities, marked by a cultural repertoire of references and imagery that Brazilian social actors united in (sub)cultural fandoms perfomatize tastes and consumption, recognizing themselves, socializing and disputes.

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Ao compreender os memes de internet como artefatos da cultura digital, esta pesquisa investiga as articulações das camadas estéticas e performáticas dos videomemes que ressignificam produtos musicais por meio do humor em plataformas como o Facebook e Youtube. Interessa-nos questionar, especificamente, os videomemes enquanto mediadores da experiência, consumo e circulação musical, bem como as práticas de ativismo de fãs e performances de gosto protagonizadas. Com base nesse intercâmbio entre teoria e casos empíricos de tal viés, vislumbra-se a hipótese de que deste fenômeno emerge uma cultura memética musical, vasta e carregada de peculiaridades, marcada por um repertório cultural de referências e imaginários em torno do qual atores sociais brasileiros reunidos em fandoms (sub)culturais performatizam gostos e consumos, se reconhecem, socializam e disputam.

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.