memes
Author(s): alice marwick
Source: Contexts , FALL 2013, Vol. 12, No. 4 (FALL 2013), pp. 12-13
Published by: Sage Publications, Inc. on behalf of the American Sociological Association
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jargon
jargon
key concepts
in social
research
7
memes
by alice marwick
The Internet is a bastion of folk
culture.
mainly
concerned
thetrendy
propa
Insider slang, chain emails,with
and
videos fill inboxes and news
feeds,
cir
gation
of genetic
material,
Dawkins
culating from user to user.
If someone
turned
his
uploads a photo of her cat, briefly
another
adds
attention
theto
a poorly-spelled caption and
poststoit
propagation
of
a message board, and months
(or years)
mate
later, someone else changes cultural
the caption,
rial.words
He observed
this string of reappropriated
and
and
images is called a "meme,"that
infashion
Internet
customs
evolve
parlance. The term is vague
enough
to
resembling
encompass such varied digitalrapidly,
artifacts
as
the ways
genes
Beyonce's "Single Ladies" music
video,
evolve. Curious
as
collections of funny yearbook
quotes,
to how such ham
influ
and animated GIFs of a dancing
ster. Memes reveal much about what
ential norms could
Source Unknown
change so quickly,
communications scholar Henry Jenkins
Memes
Mernes
such such
as "Paula
asDeen's
"Paula
Riding
Deen's
Things,"Riding
a comment
Things,"
on
a comment
the
the
celebrity
celebrity
chefs food
chefs
festival
food
antics,
festival
draw upon
antics,
pop culture
draw upon pop cu
cultural products
imagery,
imagery,
slicing
slicing
and dicing
and
them
dicing
for Internet
them
consumption.
for Internet consumption
the Internet, which is constantly in flux.
Dawkins broke
refers to as the participatory culture of
down into units
According to Patrick Davison, "an
said, will be more successful than others
called memes, including "tunes, ideas,
Internet meme is a piece of culture,
because they fulfill a cultural need or are
catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways
typically a joke, which gains influence
uniquely suited to a specific circumstance.
of making pots or of building arches."
through online transmission." Limor
Schifman defines them as "cultural infor
Just as genes propagate themselves by
mation that passes along from person leaping
to
from body to body, he wrote,
moving to memetics
so "memes propagate themselves in the
person, yet gradually scales into a shared
Dawkin's theory laid dormant until
pool by leaping from brain to brain
social phenomenon." The availability meme
of
it was popularized in the late 1990s with
the advent of memetics. Memes were
via a process which, in the broad sense,
social media means that any piece of
a fitting metaphor for Internet culture,
affording exact copies of digital artifacts,
Memes propagate themselves by leaping from
rapid person-to-person spread, and enor
brain to brain.
mous storage capacity—a perfect storm
of copy-fidelity, fecundity, and longevity.
Internet content has the potential for an
enormous audience. Websites like Know
can be called imitation."
Dawkins identified three key ele
Marketers, theorists, and pundits seized
upon the term as a description for Inter
Your Meme chronicle popular Internet ments of a successful genetic variant: net trends that made an average person
trends almost as quickly as they emerge. copy-fidelity, fecundity, and longevity. like the "Tron Guy" or "Numa Numa
The term "meme" was coined by In relation to memes, copy-fidelity is the Kid" an overnight sensation.
evolutionary biologist (and famed atheist) ability to replicate accurately; fecundity
Richard Dawkins in his 1976 bestseller
Memetics is a contested field.
is its speed of replication; and longevity Many anthropologists and sociologists
The Selfish Gene. Though the book is its stability overtime. Certain memes, he
12 contexts.org
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see memetics as limited in its capacity
Source Unknown
Source Unknown
Memes,
Mernes,
likelike
the omnipresent
the omnipresent
"Grumpy"Grumpy
Cat," encourage
Cat,"
imitation
encourage
and satire,
imitation
and spawn
and
thousands
satire,ofand
variants.
spawn thousands of variants.
to understand how cultural artifacts are
the Internet) and "memetic videos,"
Memes harness the participatory poten
rooted in complex sociohistorical con
which spur "extensive creative user
tial of the Internet and typify modern
texts. They charge that memetics sees
engagement in the form of parody,
popular culture.
"culture" as a series of discrete individual
pastiche, mash-ups or other derivative
Studying Internet chain letters, dance
units, and that it blurs the lines between
work." Davison calls the former "big
crazes, catchphrases, and slideshows of
metaphor and biology. Dawkins wrote in
like McDonald's" (something enjoyed
cute dogs may seem trivial, much as
studying television or pop music did a gen
1976, "When you plant a fertile meme in
by many, but not co-created) vs. "big
my mind you literally parasitize my brain,
like Emoji" the popular pictographic lan
eration ago. But media scholars believe
turning it into a vehicle for the meme's
guage built into iPhones and used in new
memes typify the shift from a culture of
propagation in just the way that a virus
may parasitize the genetic mechanism of
a host cell." While he emphasized that
memes were only a metaphor, the idea
that cultural diffusion has a biological
When you plant a fertile meme in my mind, you
literally parasitize my brain.
basis was popularized with the rise of the
terms "computer virus" and "viral market
and creative ways by text-aficionados. In
consumption to one of production. While
ing." Seth Godin's 2001 book Unleashing
other words, while some memes are just
teenagers might once have spent their
the Ideavirus argued that marketers and
trendy pictures or videos that get passed
free time watching television, a young
corporations could use the power of
around verbatim, others encourage a
person today may get creative, using their
the Internet to create "ideaviruses" that
type of iteration, imitation, parody, and
laptop and Wi-Fi to overlay witty text on
spread from person-to-person without any satire that can spawn literally thousands
a photo of a cat. Though it's not exactly
push from the creator—"word of mouth of variants. Memes, then, can become
intense intellectual labor, media scholar
raw material for creativity. Think of the
Clay Shirky is clear: even lolcats consti
original notion, memetics became a way myriad "image macros" that let anyone
tute creative work. Memes are the closest
for business people to describe new forms slap a funny caption on the same image,
thing to a native cultural form the Internet
of marketing, particularly those tied to or people uploading YouTube videos of
has, and, as such, they demonstrate the
the Internet.
sprawling variety of the medium.
marketing." Thus, going beyond Dawkins'
themselves enacting the latest dance
craze (the Harlem Shake, twerking, or
memes today
even elaborate, choreographed wedding
Contemporary memes can be
roughly divided into two groups. A
dances).
Memes harness what are really
study of YouTube memes by Shifman the "key logics," as Shifman puts it, of
distinguishes between "viral videos"
online culture: sociability, replicability, and
(for instance, the video for Korean pop
participation. They spread, according to
Alice Marwick is in the communication and media
studies department at Fordham University. She is the
author of Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity and Brand
ing in the Social Media Age.
star Psy's "Gangnam Style," which was Claudia Leigh, via a social, affective bond,
a huge hit in his home country and
and circulate through everyday communi
became a world-wide phenomenon on
cation channels like Facebook or Gchat.
Contexts, Vol. 12, No. 4, pp. 12-13. ISSN 1536-5042, electronic ISSN 1537-6052. © 2013 American
Sociological Association, http://contexts.sagepub.com. DOI 10.1177/1536504213511210
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FALL 2013 contexts 13