Cultural (Re)production: Memes in Digital Culture
via Reddit
Memes are an integral part of the Internet culture and Limor Shifman, in various chapters of Memes in Digital Cultures, explores the various characteristics of memes.
What is a meme? Shifman starts the second chapter of the book by saying that the term “meme” was introduced by the biologist Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene, in which he applies evolutionary theory to cultural change. Dawkins defined memes as small cultural units of transmission that spread from person to person by copying or imitation and, like genes, they undergo variation, competition, selection, and retention since this cultural (re)production favors the strongest. Only the strongest ideas survive. Memes can be compared also to viruses since they quickly spread by a viral automatic contagion.
Internet memes can be treated as (post)modern folklore, in which shared norms and values are constructed through cultural artifacts such as Photoshopped images or urban legends (15). Shifman defines memes as a group of digital items sharing common characteristics:
Content – the ideas that are conveyed
Form – the way in which the ideas are conveyed
Stance – the attitude. Tone and style of communication
Created with awareness
Circulated, imitated, and/or transformed via Internet by many users
An important controversy and debate in scholarship is “who’s the boss” that is the question of agency in the process of meme diffusion. Shifman contends that the undermining of human agency is inherent not to the meme concept itself, but only to one strain of its interpretation.
How memes spread? According to Dawkins, memes that spread successfully incorporate three characteristics: longevity (storage), fecundity (the number of copies made in a time unit) and copy fidelity (accuracy) which are all enhanced by the Internet.
Shifman, instead, conceives spreadability with three main attributes:
Gradual propagation from individual to society. It starts from a “micro” domain (a person) and propagate to a “macro” domain (society).
Reproduction via copying and imitation – digital repackaging of material
Diffusion through competition and selection – the meme’s degree of adaptability to the sociocultural environment in which it propagates.
Why so many people are driven to make memes? The answer can be found in:
The economy-driven logic relates to the notion that contemporary society is based on attention economy. The most valuable resource in the information era is the attention people pay.
The social logic of participation “networked individualism” – individuality and affiliation. The meme responds to the, especially Western, need to feel unique but also the need of being part of a community.
The cultural and aesthetic logic of participation – the ways in which practices of re-creating images/videos blur the lines between private and public, professional and amateur, market and non-market driven activities.
It is important to note the difference between two different forms and levels of engagement: viral and mimetic. Viral refers to the singular cultural unit whereas mimetic refers to a collection of texts based on intertextuality.
“Stonks” is an intentional misspelling of the word “stocks” which is often associated with a surreal meme featuring the Meme Man standing in front of the picture representing the stock market. Initially, it has been used as a reaction image online in jokes about making poor financial decisions and, afterwards, re-composed with other elements to create new ideas.
via Know Your Meme
Last year, I created a meme during the first lockdown, based on the meme “Stocks”. Since the industrial revolution, the planet has faced centuries of pollution; however, due to the lockdown halt to spread the coronavirus, most of industries were closed, road traffic incredibly declined, and the result was the reduction, at least for that period, of air pollution. Therefore, during these difficult times the planet is metaphorically taking a breath, which can be considered a goal for the eco system.
