The Discursive Power of Memes in Digital Culture

Ideology, Semiotics, and Intertextuality

Bradley E. Wiggins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429960499
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Human-Computer Interaction
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Shared, posted, tweeted, commented upon, and discussed online as well as off-line, internet memes represent a new genre of online communication, and an understanding of their production, dissemination, and implications in the real world enables an improved ability to navigate digital culture. This book explores cases of cultural, economic, and political critique levied by the purposeful production and consumption of internet memes. Often images, animated GIFs, or videos are remixed in such a way to incorporate intertextual references, quite frequently to popular culture, alongside a joke or critique of some aspect of the human experience. Ideology, semiotics, and intertextuality coalesce in the book's argument that internet memes represent a new form of meaning-making, and the rapidity by which they are produced and spread underscores their importance.

1 Dawkins Revisited

A Brief History of the Term Meme and Its Function

A socio-historical account of the term “meme” reveals a concept that has mutated since its introduction. By “mutated,” I mean to emphasize the ways in which meme-as-a-concept has itself changed because of human interaction with the internet. Prior to exploring the similarities and important differences between Richard Dawkins’ meme and its digital counterpart, the internet meme, it is best to review the term meme in general and chart its development since its inception.

Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins introduced the meme in his book The Selfish Gene and intended the meme to be a response to the gene-centric focus of evolution. Dawkins’ motivation for the neologism was rooted in the sense that “[w]e need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation” (1989, p. 182, italics in original text). This was ostensibly due to the need to conceptualize and verbalize the posited relationship between cultural and genetic transmission in society. Curiously, Dawkins cites the Greek word mimeme in his effort to create a new word. It is perhaps worth noting that mimeme, or μίμημα (“mīmēma”) translates from Ancient Greek to mean “imitated thing”. Dawkins suggests that a shorter, monosyllabic word such as ‘meme’ better captures the linkage between culture and memory. In unambiguous terms, Dawkins (1989) writes that

[j]ust 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.

(p. 192)

However, it is this conceptual standpoint of imitation which is critical in understanding the difference between the Dawkinsian meme and the internet meme. Not mimeme but rather enthymeme better captures the essence of internet memes as a digital phenomenon marked not by imitation but by the capacity to propose or counter a discursive argument through visual and often also verbal interplay; the emphasis here is on those internet memes which inhere a critical component of society, politics, etc. Enthymeme conceptually designates the fundamental differences between meme and internet meme from an orthographic as well as an etymological standpoint. Huntington (2017, p. 80) suggests that the “enthymeme lays out key points of an argument while leaving the conclusion of the argument unstated”. Finnegan (2001, p. 143) argued that the enthymeme is

an argument that is drawn from premises that do not need to be stated, ‘since the hearer supplies it’…the enthymeme leaves space for the audience to insert its own knowledge and experience; it assumes an audience of judges capable of ‘filling in the blanks’ of an argument.

Similarly, Smith (2007, p. 122) concludes that enthymemes function in contemporary society not as the Aristotelian syllogism but rather as visual arguments that

contain premises and conclusions that are merely probable, thus recognizing the differences that are common in human interactions. They call for judgment, and thus appeal emotionally and ethically as well as logically. Finally, their effectiveness depends on agreement between messenger and audience, discovered in the common opinions shaped by the contexts and culture of the people addressed.

A later section expounds on the differences between the Dawkinsian meme and the internet meme, but it is more conceptually clear to view the etymological inception of meme, with reference to its digital counterpart, as emanating from enthymeme and not simply an imitation of something as with mimeme.

To return to the meme, as described by Dawkins, and its internet counterpart, he envisioned the meme as a cultural unit (or idea) that sought replication for the purpose of its own survival. Ideas (or memes per Dawkins) are inherently selfish and virulent, competing to infect individual minds to use them as vehicles for replication. Dawkins’ meme was generally conceived, including such examples as slogans, catch phrases, fashion, learned skills, and so on. The emphasis in all these examples of the Dawkinsian meme is clearly imitation, or an imitative force. According to Dawkins, catch phrases, popular songs, and fashion all persist through agential imitation and replication. Like genes, which are ubiquitous and essential to evolution, Dawkins saw the gene as a metaphor for the meme. By describing evolution as a cultural phenomenon – not a biological phenomenon – Burman (2012) suggests Dawkins’ purpose was to “[redefine] the fundamental unit of selection in evolutionary biology” (p. 77). For Dawkins, the meme served as a catalyst for cultural jumps in human evolution, much like a gene served to further biological evolution. Memes are the mediators of cultural evolution. Within the decade following Dawkins’ work in the 1970s, the gene ceased being simply a metaphor for meme. Gene and meme became synonymous. Hofstadter (1983, p. 18) took Dawkins’ metaphor and imagined it more literally:

Memes, like genes, are susceptible to variation or distortion – the analogue of mutation. Various mutations of a meme will have to compete with one another, as well as with other memes, for attention, that is, for brain resources in terms of both space and time devoted to that meme.

Moreover, Hofstadter notes further competition among memes because of aural and visual transmission, suggesting that memes unlike genes will compete “for radio and television time, billboard space, newspaper and magazine column-inches and library shelf-space”. It is worth noting here the close parallel to the infrastructure of the internet and human interaction. The draw on attention (“brain resources in terms of both space and time”) is relevant to our contemporary reliance on digital and online forms of communication regardless of internet memes per se.

By 1995, Burman (2012) writes, “the meme had become active and non-metaphorical” (p. 89). The understanding of meme was a given obvious item of knowledge thus shaping our assumptions of it and how it is to be understood at a time when the current internet meme was years away. In a sense, the Dawkinsian meme – the concept itself as a spreadable idea – became a prime example of its explicitly articulated definition, in the tradition of Dawkins, which is to infect language and thought, replicating itself within the minds and languages of individuals for the sole purpose of replication. Although the meme has a long history of usage tied to linguistics, psychology, and philosophy, the contemporary meaning of meme is much different. Its current meaning describes a genre of communication, not a unit of cultural transmission. Interestingly, scholarship on memes has historically relied on an “epidemiological model” (Weng, Flammini, Vespignani, & Menczer, 2012, p. 6). As such it is a metaphorical model that confines the meme conceptually within biology and evolution. Specifically, from an epidemiological stance, the meme spreads much like a disease. This, of course, echoes Dawkins’ own initial treatment of meme as well as the way in which the field of memetics responded to Dawkins’ neologism. For example, Blackmore’s (2000) book The Meme Machine argued for an actual science of memetics, all in response to Dawkins’ simple but necessary decision to offer a cultural corollary to the biological gene. Similarly, and following Dawkins, Aunger (2002, p. 2) extends the Dawkinsian perspective of the biological connection by stating that memes represent “an idea that becomes commonly shared through social transmission”. Kien (2013, p. 554) refers to Aunger (2002) in his excoriation of media researchers who, in his view, have “abused [the] term in its reduction by media studies to mere internet phenomena”. While Aunger deliberately emphasized the biological in his work, researchers such as Kien (2013) and Milner (2012) needlessly extend the reliance on Dawkins and the biological metaphor, a process which fails to grasp the ideational argumentation afforded by internet memes. The epidemiological approach serves as a false analogy for the digital understanding and usage of memes by placing the power of their spread in the memes and ignoring agency.

Similarly, Jenkins (2009, para. 18) states that “the idea of the meme and the media virus, of self-replicating ideas hidden in attractive, catchy content we are helpless to resist – is a problematic way to understand cultural practices”. Jenkins proceeds with an explanation of the role of agency as critical to understanding cultural change, but the argument suffers from an implicit presumption that meme necessarily means what Dawkins originally suggested. While Jenkins is correct to assert that memes do not replicate themselves, the argument suffers in stating that individuals are not susceptible to viral media, memes, or otherwise. This view emerges from an epidemiological assumption that memes, like a media virus, infect people, making them susceptible to influence. This perhaps accidental reliance on Dawkins’ biological metaphor prevents the opportunity to reveal that the Dawkinsian definition does not apply to internet memes given their capacity to function as visual arguments and not simply “attractive, catchy content”. It is important to explore the distinction between viral media and internet memes in greater detail if only to provide clarity to my insistence on viewing memes as visual arguments.

Memes and Viral Media

When comparing internet memes to viral media (or the capacity for media content, such as texts, images, hashtags, etc. to spread massively in online spaces often for relatively short periods of time), the tendency is to posit that due to the agency involved in the production and dissemination of internet memes, they are viewed as qualitatively different from viral media.

Typically, the distinction is explained with an emphasis on the manner by which change, imitation, remix, modification, etc. is perceived, and this is articulated as the origin of the distinction. For example, many researchers on this topic might cite Gangnam Style, a music video featuring South Korean musician Psy. The video has been viewed over 3 billion times since it was uploaded to YouTube on July 12, 2012. In this example, the argument goes that the views of a video do not count as a modification or remix but rather indicates virality.

Indeed, Shifman (2011) lightly distinguishes between viral and what she terms memetic videos in her analysis of a series of YouTube videos. She demarcates viral as “a clip that spreads to the masses via digital word-of-mouth mechanisms without significant change [italics in original]” (2011, p. 190). With memetic video, Shifman asserts that “a different structure of participation” incorporates “two main mechanisms in relating to the ‘original’ memetic video”, namely imitation and remix (2011, p. 190). Shifman takes viral and memetic and equates them with Jenkins’ term spreadable media but acknowledges that the term still necessitates some clarity. However, subsuming viral and memetic under spreadable media suggests an effort to refine the specific toward the general. Equating spreadable media with a derivative is counterproductive, since doing so assumes a conceptual alignment.

Further, and to borrow an important perspective from the field of sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, Varis and Blommaert (2015, pp. 35–36) understand Shifman’s (2011) argument as emphasizing “the absence of signification change to the sign itself to distinguish virality from ‘memicity’: memes, as opposed to viral signs, would involve changes to the sign itself”. Here, Varis and Blommaert understand internet memes as signs, which in semiotics is the quality of a thing to communicate meaning. As noted in the second chapter and following the definition of semiotician Umberto Eco, the sign is “produced with the intention of communication, that is, in order to transmit one’s representation or inner state to another being” (1984, p. 16). The core of Varis and Blommaert’s argument is that when considering activities associated with social semiotics (processes of meaning making across groups in society), the distinction between viral and memetic is less tenable than Jenkins or Shifman has considered. Rather this sociolinguistic argument is that to share information on Facebook, for example, is a form of “re-entextualization”, or “meaningful communicative operations that demand different levels of agency and creativity of the user” (2015, p. 41). Additionally, Varis and Blommaert (2015) assert that such an act involves “re-semiotization”, which suggests that every repetitive expression of a sign invariably “involves an entirely new set of contextualization conditions and thus results in an entirely ‘new’ semiotic process, allowing new semiotic modes and resources to be involved in the repetition process” (p. 36). Further, they argue that a Facebook post that generates tens of thousands of reactions does not mean that each person who reacted actually read the post. Similarly, a study conducted on Twitter revealed that approximately 59% of URLs shared were not actually clicked on at all (Gabielkov, Ramachandran, Chaintreau, & Legout, 2016, p. 8, in Wiggins, 2017). Thus, the main counterargument offered by Varis and Blommaert resides in the perspective that a piece of media content, such as a selfie, a looped video, or an image-macro, does not need to be altered in the way commonly expressed by researchers on memes because of the process of re-entextualization.

Bridging the Viral Divide

In an effort to bridge both perspectives, suppose a given selfie is uploaded to Instagram and attains a massive level of reactions. In this case, the selfie has led to some degree of virality; however, it is not an internet meme in the sense that it offers some form of visual argument. It is, nevertheless, an iteration of the Dawkinsian variant as a selfie exists as an idea that is executable and imitable. Additionally, it is also a sign given its communicative function, and as such exists as another genre of communication. Thus, following Eco’s (1984) definition of sign and Varis and Blommaert’s (2015) suggestion that internet memes are semiotic signs, all forms of mediated content – whether they ‘go viral’ or not – that represent or transmit meaning, can also be viewed as semiotic signs. However, signs which inhere a visual argument achieved through an expression of ideological practice and constructed semiotically and often intertextually are the category of internet memes examined in this work. Whether an individual wishes to view all such content as memes or viral media, or semiotic signs, etc. is a personal choice. It is my contention that understanding the capacity for certain digital messages to argue a perspective visually constitutes an acknowledgement of the thing as an internet meme. The importance of such an action leads to opportunities to understand the ideology expressed, audience(s) addressed, identities constructed or negotiated, the degree to which media narratives are incorporated into the message, etc. In other words, their construction, curation, consumption, etc. are what should concern us, not questions of their epidemiological but rather their discursive power.

Scholarship on internet memes tends to a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface/Foreword
• 1 Dawkins Revisited: A Brief History of the Term Meme and Its Function
• 2 The Discursive Power of Memes in Digital Culture
• 3 Memes as Genre
• 4 Political Memes
• 5 Commercially Motivated Strategic Messaging and Internet Memes
• 6 Audience
• 7 Identity
• 8 Internet Memes as a Form of…Art?
• Postface/Afterword
• Index