One Does Not Simply Preserve Internet Memes

2019

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.

Journal of Librarianship and Information Science, 2019

The internet archives kept by heritage libraries are analysed, focusing specifically on that new type of expression characteristic of web culture and digital folklore, the meme. Five paradigmatic examples of heritage institutions engaging in web archive initiatives are explored:

Media, Culture & Society, 2017

Iconic photographs possess broad social and symbolic significance, are widely replicated over time and circulated across media platforms, and fuel public discussion. In an era of digital memes, they have become generative resources for memetic performances that not only can draw on these images’ historic authority but can also undermine it. Based on the analysis of the ‘Accidental Napalm’ memes, our research leads to a fourfold taxonomy, from memes that expand or expound the meaning of the original picture to those that narrow and potentially destroy its significance. Assessing Hariman and Lucaites’ contention that appropriations of iconic images enhance civic engagement and public culture, we argue that some memes may actually dissolve the original significance of iconic photographs and potentially degrade, rather than enhance, public culture.

2017

Iconic photographs possess broad social and symbolic significance, are widely replicated over time and circulated across media platforms, and fuel public discussion. In an era of digital memes, they have become generative resources for memetic performances that not only can draw on these images' historic authority but can also undermine it. Based on the analysis of the 'Accidental Napalm' memes, our research leads to a fourfold taxonomy, from memes that expand or expound the meaning of the original picture to those that narrow and potentially destroy its significance. Assessing Hariman and Lucaites' contention that appropriations of iconic images enhance civic engagement and public culture, we argue that some memes may actually dissolve the original significance of iconic photographs and potentially degrade, rather than enhance, public culture.

The Information Society, 2016

Information, Communication & Society, 2022

Through the collection of digital media and engagement with underrepresented groups, memory institutions aspire to preserve and interpret a range of contemporary perspectives on culture and identity. These institutions simultaneously seek to provide experiences that foster civic identities and cultural citizenship. This article explores the potential of collecting internet memes, a specific form of digital media, to further these institutional aims. Through an empirical study of a youth engagement program at a Norwegian folklore archive, we conclude that collecting and contextualizing image macros in collaboration with young people is an institutionally viable and inclusionary approach to documenting new expressions of culture and everyday life. The project further created a context in which young people could exercise competencies related to the development of a civic identity. These findings are relevant for cultural heritage institutions which aim to diversify the forms of digital media, knowledge practices and perspectives represented in their collections, and for cultural heritage professionals who aim to engage youth or marginalized communities. Extending recent research on internet memes as resources for meaning-making the study also underscores the value of participatory research methodologies which deliberately invite individuals’ interpretations of digital culture and analytical approaches that account for the richness of internet memes and image macros as semiotic resources for narrating identity.

2021

This paper explores both how memes function as a means of communication, and how the creation and sharing of memes mimics communication trends in the history of print media, especially in terms of the effects on shaping a collective consciousness or collective identity through mass communication. Much of the similarities in the use and development of memes compared with the use and similarities of books and media lies in the way the use has both evolved and relied on familiar processes, or historically mirrors a shift from the “private” to the “public.” While it may be disputed that this movement is hazier than we previously considered (or exists minimally in the internet age), I think there are important implications in considering the publicization of media in brief, highly contextualized narratives, which might even resemble specific chapbooks or manuscripts earlier in history. Since memes usually rely on some sort of context to be understood in a narrative sense, they differ from traditional books in that they are not self-contained, but the information is “contained” within the meme. It is in this sense that I think they are worth exploring because while their existence may resemble or mirror in some ways the movement and treatment of communication earlier in the history of media; in many ways they are a unique expression or phenomenon. One other thing I would like to consider here is that memes (like books and other print media) evolve within their “bounds,” while at the same time representing part of a larger evolution in the history of communications. Ultimately, I will show that memes are an important (and familiar) part of the history of communications, and more broadly serve as a new way to promote and share narrative and shape identities.

2007

This chapter explores social practices of propagating online “memes”(pronounced “meems”) as a dimension of cultural production and transmission. Memes are contagious patterns of “cultural information” that get passed from mind to mind and directly generate and shape the mindsets and significant forms of behavior and actions of a social group. Memes include such things as popular tunes, catchphrases, clothing fashions, architectural styles, ways of doing things, icons, jingles, and the like.

International Journal of Communication, 2018

After Richard Dawkins (1976) first coined the term meme as a name for the cultural analog of the biological gene—the basic unit of cultural transmission—some imagined memetics as an entirely new approach to analyzing culture. In the early 2000s, the term meme was adopted in online subcultures, and ultimately in the wider English vernacular, to describe remixes and imitations of found media content. Noting that the basic informational properties of memes in Dawkins’ sense—their longevity, fecundity, and copy fidelity—were enhanced by digital media, Limor Shifman (2014) argued that Internet memes gave new theoretical viability to Dawkins’ original concept.