Conclusion: The World Made Meme

Once in class—with the Photoshopped picture of Kanye West interrupting Martin Luther King, Jr. (figure 1.1) on the screen behind me—I asked my students to define internet meme. There was the usual desk staring and head scratching, until a student in the back spoke up. “It’s like … a nationwide inside joke,” she said. Her unconventional definition inspired chuckles. But as the hours wore on, I realized its poignancy. Like inside jokes between friends, internet memes—the multimodal texts created, circulated, and transformed by countless cultural participants—balance the familiar and the foreign. And like inside jokes, internet memes are at once universal and particular; they allow creative play based on established phrasal, image, video, and performative tropes. The difference, of course, is the scale of these inside jokes. Assessing that scale, this book has charted the vibrancy that emerges when expressive strands become interactional threads, which in turn weave vast cultural tapestries. In the end, ...

Voice: Pop and Populism in Public Commentary

This chapter argues that memetic media carry the potential for polyvocal public voice, even given their everyday antagonisms. Focusing on mediated conversations surrounding the Occupy Wall Street movement, it addresses tensions between populism and pastiche when popular culture is part of public commentary. Vernacular creativity can be utilized for collective civic talk, as participants create, circulate, and transform memetic media in the name of critique, discussion, and argument. Memetic logics, grammar, and vernacular underscore a system of assertion and response, of point and counter-point as public participants contribute their expressive strands to vast public debates. Even if individual contributions are ambivalent and factionist, memetic media can indeed facilitate vibrant polyvocal participation, and our public conversations are stronger when they do.

Antagonism: Race, Gender, and Counterpublic Contestation

This chapter focuses on the everyday antagonisms that are perpetuated through memetic participation, specifically regarding race and gender identities. However, it also argues that memetic participation can be employed for the counterpublic contestation of those same antagonisms. The memetic logics, grammar, and vernacular introduced in the first half of the book are tools employed for both silencing marginalization and vocal pushback of that marginalization. The nature of this counterpublic engagement is ambivalent though, given that memetic media are often fraught with ambiguous irony and ambivalent humor. Genuine antagonisms and marginalizations can thrive under the “just joking” frame. But—even in the midst of this ambivalent system—there is value to the agonistic counterpublic engagement occurring through memetic media. Voice exists, even in the midst of the tensions evident throughout this discussion.

Vernacular: Everyday Expression in the Memetic Lingua Franca

This chapter focuses on the social dimensions of memetic practices, arguing that the memetic lingua franca is a vernacular premised on the creative transformation of expressions that have come before. In this way, memetic participation depends on the interrelations of fixed premise and novel expression. Just as spoken conversations are “prepatterned” by norms, tropes, and colloquialisms, memetic conversations are prepatterned by the expressions others have produced before. The chapter then outlines the vernacular creativity required in memetic conversation, emphasizing the collective standards guiding that creativity. Memetic expression is simultaneously influenced by and influences collective conversations. Because of this reciprocity, vernacular creativity is susceptible to the jargons, marginalizations, and antagonisms inherent to all collective conversations. Ultimately, memetic conversations are vibrant, if imperfect.

Logics: The Fundamentals of Memetic Participation

This chapter introduces the fundamentals of memetic media. It traces the (imperfect) connections between conceptualizations of memes as cultural replicators and the mediated texts that have come to bear the name in pop cultural parlance. It then outlines five fundamental logics central to memetic participation. Memetic media are unique for their multimodality (their expression in multiple modes of communication), reappropriation (their “poaching” of existing texts), resonance (their connections to individual participants), collectivism (their social creation and transformation), and spread (their circulation through mass networks). These logics persist beyond individual texts, and are lynchpins for public conversations occurring across mediated contexts.

Introduction: The Rise of Memetic Media

This book is about emerging patterns in public conversations, and about the social participation essential to those conversations. It focuses on internet memes—the linguistic, image, audio, and video texts created, circulated, and transformed by countless cultural participants across vast networks and collectives. Internet memes take the form of pictures captioned on Reddit, puns hashtagged on Twitter, and videos mashed up on YouTube. They can be widely shared catchphrases, Auto-Tuned songs, manipulated stock photos, or recordings of physical performances. They’re used to make jokes, argue points, and connect friends. The concept has risen in prominence over the last twenty years, emerging from the esoteric forums and message boards where participants first linked Richard Dawkins’s (...

Conversation: Cultural Participation and the Culture Industries

This chapter argues that memetic participation complicates the culture industries that remain at the heart of public life. It assesses the ambivalent relationship between collective participation and individual expression, especially when age-old gatekeepers intertwine with new means of sharing information. It focuses on the complex relationship between collectivism, publicity, and fame in memetic media, as well as on concerns about commercialism and authenticity in a seemingly open media ecology. The tapestry of conversation afforded by memetic media is part new precedent and part established infrastructure. Memetic media intertwine with established culture industries; ambivalent network gatekeeping enables both restrictive commercial control of mediated participation and conversations open enough to cast doubts on the credibility of information. In this way, memetic media exhibit new potentials and old tensions.

Grammar: Structures for Making Statements and Making Do

This chapter focuses on the complex multimodal reappropriation at the heart of memetic media, outlining the socially-situated grammar that connects participants as they employ memetic media in their conversations. This grammar is premised on bricolage and poaching, on participants “making do” by transforming media texts they didn’t narrowly create and don’t narrowly own. It addresses the tensions between imitation and transformation in this process, arguing that the bricolage and poaching at the heart of memetic media are creative, expressive acts. As it outlines the formal and social dimensions underscoring memetic media, it builds a case for the persistent power of memetic logics as a lingua franca for public conversation.