Memes in Digital Culture

© 2014 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Shifman, Limor, 1974–.

Memes in Digital Culture/ Limor Shifman.

   p.  cm.—(MIT press essential knowledge)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-262-52543-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN978-0-262-31770-2 (retail e-book)

1. Social evolution. 2. Memes. 3. Culture diffusion. 4. Internet—Social aspects. 5. Memetics. I. Title.

HM626.S55 2014

302—dc23

2013012983

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

d_r1

Contents

Series Foreword

Acknowledgments

1    Introduction

2    A Telegraphic Biography of a Conceptual Troublemaker

3    When Memes Go Digital

4    Defining Internet Memes

5    Memes versus Virals

6    Unpacking Viral and Memetic Success

7    Meme Genres

8    May the Excessive Force Be with You: Memes as Political Participation

9    When Internet Memes Go Global

10    Future Directions for Internet Meme Research

Glossary

Notes

Further Readings

Index

Series Foreword

The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series offers accessible, concise, beautifully produced pocket-size books on topics of current interest. Written by leading thinkers, the books in this series deliver expert overviews of subjects that range from the cultural and the historical to the scientific and the technical.

In today’s era of instant information gratification, we have ready access to opinions, rationalizations, and superficial descriptions. Much harder to come by is the foundational knowledge that informs a principled understanding of the world. Essential Knowledge books fill that need. Synthesizing specialized subject matter for nonspecialists and engaging critical topics through fundamentals, each of these compact volumes offers readers a point of access to complex ideas.

Bruce Tidor

Professor of Biological Engineering and Computer Science

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Acknowledgments

This book could not have been written without the support of a number of patient colleagues who have put up with my meme obsession over the last few years. I am indebted to Elad Segev, Paul Frosh, Ben Peters, Nicholas John, and Leora Hadas for their valuable comments on parts of this manuscript. I am particularly grateful to Menahem Blondheim, the most generous friend and intellectual I have ever encountered.

I consider myself extremely fortunate to be part of the Department of Communication at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I have benefited greatly from the wisdom and kindness of my friends in this wonderful academic home. Besides those mentioned above, other colleagues and graduate students from the department—in particular Elihu Katz, Zohar Kampf, Keren Tenenboim-Weinblatt, Asaf Nissenboim, Noam Gal, and Lillian Boxman-Shabtai—offered many insightful observations and criticisms. The members of the Jerusalem Discourse Forum—Gonen Hacohen, Michal Hamo, Ayelet Kohn, Chaim Noy, and Motti Neiger—raised enlightening issues in two brainstorming sessions dedicated to memes.

I started my journey to the light heavyweight side of the Internet as a postdoctoral researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute, UK. My colleagues at the Institute, particularly Bill Dutton and Stephen Coleman, fully backed my plan to study the (then) eccentric topic of Internet humor. I am also extremely grateful to danah boyd and Nancy Baym from Microsoft Research. Their ongoing support means a lot to me.

Parts of the introduction and chapters 2, 3, 4, and 6 were originally published in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication (Memes in a Digital World: Reconciling with a Conceptual Troublemaker, 2013, 18[3]) and New Media & Society (An Anatomy of a YouTube Meme, 2012, 14[2]). I am thankful to the editors and publishers of those journals for their assistance and permission to reuse the papers.

My gratitude also goes to the editorial and production staff at MIT Press, particularly Margy Avery, who supported this project enthusiastically even before I knew that I wanted to write a book, and Judith Feldmann, who edited it with great sensitivity. Three anonymous reviewers offered thoughtful, constructive, and wise comments on the manuscript, and I’m greatly appreciative of that.

Finally, I wish to thank my parents, Nili and Tommy Schoenfeld, my husband, Sagiv, and my children, Neta and Yuval. My love and gratitude is beyond what any meme could express.

1

Introduction

On December 21, 2012, a somewhat peculiar video broke YouTube’s all-time viewing records. Performed by a South Korean singer named PSY, Gangnam Style was the first clip to surpass the one-billion-view mark. But the Gangnam phenomenon was not only a tale of sheer popularity. Besides watching the clip, people also responded to it creatively, in dazzling volume. Internet users from places as far-flung as Indonesia and Spain, Russia and Israel, the United States and Saudi Arabia imitated the horse-riding dance from the original video while replacing the reference to Gangnam—a luxurious neighborhood in Seoul—with local settings and protagonists, generating videos such as Mitt Romney Style, Singaporean Style, and Arab Style. At first glance, this whole process seems enigmatic. How did such a bizarre piece of culture become so successful? Why are so many people investing so much effort in imitating it? And why do some of these amateur imitations attract millions of viewers? In what follows, I suggest that the key to these questions lies in defining Gangnam Style—as well as many other similar Internet phenomena—as an Internet meme.

The term meme was coined by Richard Dawkins in 1976 to describe small units of culture that spread from person to person by copying or imitation. Since then, the meme concept has been the subject of constant academic debate, derision, and even outright dismissal. Recently, however, the term once kicked out the door by many academics is coming back through the Windows (and other operating systems) of Internet users. In the vernacular discourse of netizens, the tag Internet meme is commonly applied to describe the propagation of items such as jokes, rumors, videos, and websites from person to person via the Internet. As illustrated by the Gangnam Style case, a central attribute of Internet memes is their sparking of user-created derivatives articulated as parodies, remixes, or mashups. Leave Britney Alone, "Star Wars Kid, Hitler’s Downfall Parodies, Nyan Cat, and the Situation Room" Photoshops are particularly famous drops in a memetic ocean.

Another fundamental attribute of Internet memes is intertextuality: memes often relate to each other in complex, creative, and surprising ways. The example in figure 1 demonstrates such an amalgamate between Gangnam Style and Binders Full of Women—a meme created in response to an assertion made by Mitt Romney in a 2012 US presidential debate about the binders full of women that he asked for in order to locate female job applicants for senior positions. While an eccentric Korean rapper might seem as far as one may get from an affluent American presidential candidate, meme creators managed to link them. My Binders Full of Women Exploded is thus not only a striking example of intertextuality; it also demonstrates that this new arena of bottom-up expression can blend pop culture, politics, and participation in unexpected ways.

Figure 1

When Gangnam Style meets Binders Full of Women. Source: http://bindersfullofwomen.tumblr.com/.

This book is a first step in bridging the yawning gap between (skeptic) academic and (enthusiastic) popular discourse about memes. Internet users are on to something, and researchers should follow. Users seem to have sensed that the meme concept encapsulates some of the most fundamental aspects of contemporary digital culture. Like many Web 2.0 applications, memes diffuse from person to person, but shape and reflect general social mindsets. The term describes cultural reproduction as driven by various means of copying and imitation—practices that have become essential in contemporary digital culture. In this environment, user-driven imitation and remixing are not just prevalent practices: they have become highly valued pillars of a so-called participatory culture. In what follows, I will argue that we live in an era driven by a hypermemetic logic, in which almost every major public event sprouts a stream of memes. In this sense, Internet memes are like Forrest Gump. Ostensibly, they are trivial pieces of pop culture; yet, a deeper look reveals that they play an integral part in some of the defining events of the twenty-first century.

In what follows, I explore the utility of memes for understanding digital culture, positing two premises throughout. First, the intense emotions and dramatic statements characterizing both sides of the memes debate need to be toned down. While enthusiastic advocates argue that the meme concept explains everything and their opponents assert that it explains and changes absolutely nothing, it might be worth asking whether the term may be useful for something. Here I follow in the footsteps of researchers such as Michele Knobel, Colin Lankshear, Lance Bennett, Ryan Milner, and Jean Burgess, who have used the meme as a prism for understanding certain aspects of contemporary culture without embracing the whole set of implications and meanings ascribed to it over the years.

My second assertion is that we should look at memes from a communication-oriented perspective. Coined by a biologist, the term meme has been widely adopted (and disputed) in many disciplines, including psychology, philosophy, anthropology, folklore, and linguistics. For the most part, however, it has been utterly ignored in the field of communication. Until the twenty-first century, mass communication researchers felt comfortable overlooking memes. As units that propagate gradually through many interpersonal contacts, memes were considered irrelevant for understanding mass-mediated content, which is often transmitted simultaneously from a single institutional source to many people. But this is no longer the case in an era of blurring boundaries between interpersonal and mass, professional and amateur, bottom-up and top-down communications. In a time marked by a convergence of media platforms, when content flows swiftly from one medium to another, memes have become more relevant than ever to communication scholarship.

While memes and digital culture seem like a match made in heaven, several issues need to be resolved before the concept can be integrated meaningfully into academia and industry. First, there is a core problem about the exact meaning of the term—the jury is still out on what is meant by meme. Second, many competing terms—such as viral—tend to be used interchangeably with it. And finally, only a handful of studies have actually examined the practices and politics involved in the creation and diffusion of Internet memes.

And that is where this book comes in. In its first part, I survey the history of the term meme (chapter 2), tracing the controversies associated with the concept as well as its renaissance in the digital age (chapter 3). I then introduce a new definition for Internet memes (chapter 4). Instead of depicting the meme as a single cultural unit that has propagated successfully, I suggest defining an Internet meme as (a) a group of digital items sharing common characteristics of content, form, and/or stance; (b) that were created with awareness of each other; and (c) were circulated, imitated, and/or transformed via the Internet by many users. This definition is helpful for analyzing Internet memes as socially constructed public discourses in which different memetic variants represent diverse voices and perspectives. In chapter 5, I differentiate between Internet memes and virals. While these concepts are often used interchangeably, charting the differences between them enables us to better understand what’s going on in the