meme

I’m tentatively including memes under the modes and genres of creative appropriation because I adopt Limor Shifman’s definition of a meme in her very lucid and penetrating book, Memes in Digital Culture (2013).

The word “meme” was originally coined by Richard Dawkins in the final chapter of his book on sociobiology, The Selfish Gene (1976). This was long before the Internet became a thing ordinary people were aware of or started to use. Dawkins used the word to describe a theoretical “unit of selection” in the evolution of ideas, similar to the “gene” in the evolution of organisms.

Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.

Today, most people use the term loosely to refer to things that are propagated through social media on the Internet. So among the many uses of the term, the following are fairly common:

1. A theoretical unit of selection among human ideas, comparable to the gene in biology. (Original sense)
2. Any piece of media shared through social media.
3. An image or concept that is well known and has become a convention for communication & creation via social media.
4. 4. An image with text added to it. (this is more technically referred to as an IMAGE MACRO)
5. An amateur video that is shared for its entertainment value or surreal impact (“dank meme”).
6. A viral motif that propagates across the Internet, building or playing off on the same image or text template [broad but also the strict sense in this class]

Virals vs memes vs image macros

Shifman proposes that we use the term viral for “a single cultural unit (such as a video, photo, or joke) that propagates in many copies” – for example, the original music video of “Gangnam Style” (2012). It doesn’t change, it just gets re-posted, re-tweeted, etc.

Memes, on the other hand, are derivatives of virals that propagate across the Internet, building or playing off on the same motif – for instance, the parodies, variations, and take-offs on “Gangnam Style.” Thus, “Gangnam Style” as a meme is not the original video, but the motif or “trope” of “Gangnam Style” in its mutated life in other contexts The Gangnam Style meme is “Gangnam Style” appropriated and remixed. in other words.

As Shifman conceives of them, virals are often glossy professional creations that ordinary web citizens would find it difficult to create or remix themselves (“Taylor Swift’s latest video went viral 10 minutes after it went live” – i.e. the video was shared and mentioned by people).

Memes, on the other hand, tend to have certain features that make them easier to appropriate for people with limited technical skills or resources. They are often simple, repetitive, and easy for amateurs to remake. for instance image macros (see below).

One way of thinking about the distinction between virals and memes that Shifman suggests is that virals are items that people are motivated to share (without modification), whereas memes are items that people are motivated to engage with creatively.

One responds to virals passively, by propagating them without altering them. Memes are variant versions of a single motif, idea, image etc that various people have messed with.

People often use the word meme to denote the sort of combination of image with text that we see in this variant on “Scumbag Steve”:

There is a more technical term for referring to this particular kind of meme (a single image with a caption or text overlay of some kind): an image macro.

For the purposes of precise communication, I am encouraging you to refer to what we see above (an image with text overlay) as an image macro (that is the kind of work it is, or its genre). It is also one example – and an appropriate one given the subject of this website – of the Scumbag Steve meme. The original video of “Gangnam Style” meanwhile is not a meme, but a viral.

If we accept Shifman’s definitions, all memes are by nature a form of appropriation art or remix, but people sometimes refer to the process of adopting and detourning an existing meme, as meme hacking. Such people are taking the concept of meme in its broadest sense, and including anything in our culture as a meme. Shifman, on the other hand, is focusing on a meme as precisely an element of culture that has been detourned or remixed.

A company logo, for instance, could be viewed as a meme; but it might be more useful to consider it a viral, or – given that it is not merely being freely shared by members of the online community but is propagated through corporate and capitalist “propaganda” techniques (which can now include social media campaigns) – a parasite or “forced viral.”