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The MIT Press Essential Knowledge
Memes in Digital Culture
Taking “Gangnam Style” seriously: what Internet memes can tell us about digital culture.
In December 2012, the exuberant video “Gangnam Style” became the first YouTube clip to be viewed more than one billion times. Thousands of its viewers responded by creating and posting their own variations of the video—“Mitt Romney Style,” “NASA Johnson Style,” “Egyptian Style,” and many others. “Gangnam Style” (and its attendant parodies, imitations, and derivations) is one of the most famous examples of an Internet meme: a piece of digital content that spreads quickly around the web in various iterations and becomes a shared cultural experience. In this book, Limor Shifman investigates Internet memes and what they tell us about digital culture.
Shifman discusses a series of well-known Internet memes—including “Leave Britney Alone,” the pepper-spraying cop, LOLCats, Scumbag Steve, and Occupy Wall Street's “We Are the 99 Percent.” She offers a novel definition of Internet memes: digital content units with common characteristics, created with awareness of each other, and circulated, imitated, and transformed via the Internet by many users. She differentiates memes from virals; analyzes what makes memes and virals successful; describes popular meme genres; discusses memes as new modes of political participation in democratic and nondemocratic regimes; and examines memes as agents of globalization.
Memes, Shifman argues, encapsulate some of the most fundamental aspects of the Internet in general and of the participatory Web 2.0 culture in particular. Internet memes may be entertaining, but in this book Limor Shifman makes a compelling argument for taking them seriously.
In December 2012, the exuberant video “Gangnam Style” became the first YouTube clip to be viewed more than one billion times. Thousands of its viewers responded by creating and posting their own variations of the video—“Mitt Romney Style,” “NASA Johnson Style,” “Egyptian Style,” and many others. “Gangnam Style” (and its attendant parodies, imitations, and derivations) is one of the most famous examples of an Internet meme: a piece of digital content that spreads quickly around the web in various iterations and becomes a shared cultural experience. In this book, Limor Shifman investigates Internet memes and what they tell us about digital culture.
Shifman discusses a series of well-known Internet memes—including “Leave Britney Alone,” the pepper-spraying cop, LOLCats, Scumbag Steve, and Occupy Wall Street's “We Are the 99 Percent.” She offers a novel definition of Internet memes: digital content units with common characteristics, created with awareness of each other, and circulated, imitated, and transformed via the Internet by many users. She differentiates memes from virals; analyzes what makes memes and virals successful; describes popular meme genres; discusses memes as new modes of political participation in democratic and nondemocratic regimes; and examines memes as agents of globalization.
Memes, Shifman argues, encapsulate some of the most fundamental aspects of the Internet in general and of the participatory Web 2.0 culture in particular. Internet memes may be entertaining, but in this book Limor Shifman makes a compelling argument for taking them seriously.
212 pages, Paperback
First published October 4, 2013
63 people are currently reading
976 people want to read
About the author
Limor Shifman
3 books11 followersLimor Shifman is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Communication and Journalism at Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 58 reviews
June 25, 2018
I really dragged my feet over this book. Perhaps because I normally associate memes as non-analytic, fun fare, when I began the book and was confronted with a relatively dense theoretical discussion of the subject my enthusiasm dimmed somewhat. However when I forced myself to finish what I'd started, I was rewarded with a curious book. Shifman writes in a way that's half academic and half internet educated, in a way that will be unsatisfying to a reader only versed in one of those forms of writing, and disorientating to a reader (like this reviewer) who is versed in both. In terms of practical content, Shifman has some interesting ideas on the definition of an internet meme, and effectively places the study of internet memes in the broader literature of memes. Most interesting is the discussion of what makes a particular meme go viral in chapter 6, and also a discussion of the globalising effect of the internet in chapter 9 (including the delicious new word to me of glocalisation). But perhaps the most curious thing about the book is a complete lack of discussion or consideration of the temporal aspect of memes and meme culture. Individual memes are discussed in a multi-dimensional phase space of qualities such as simplicity and flawed masculinity, but the lifecycle of a meme is never discussed, which at least to me is an incredibly important aspect of modern internet culture.
Perhaps this is a consequence of the book being published in 2014, but it feels like a rather thorough and considered analysis of a proto-modern internet. Has the internet of memes really changed that much in that time? Perhaps a physical book is always doomed to be a late, naive representation of a rapidly evolving system? I'm sure that these are factors, but to me this discussion needed more pages, more time, and more detailed thought into the evolution of internet memes.
Perhaps this is a consequence of the book being published in 2014, but it feels like a rather thorough and considered analysis of a proto-modern internet. Has the internet of memes really changed that much in that time? Perhaps a physical book is always doomed to be a late, naive representation of a rapidly evolving system? I'm sure that these are factors, but to me this discussion needed more pages, more time, and more detailed thought into the evolution of internet memes.
January 16, 2021
Good book on memes, best one of few that I came across on the subject.
Read
September 2, 2017This is not loop quantum gravity, but it is still worth a read. It's a quick, incisive primer (But I'm not sure you'd want much more, unless you're an academic trying to butter your bread). Instead this book lays out some patterns and observations and says, go, look at the phenomena. It is provisional and aware of itself as such.
Personal note: I'm interested in memes because of the attention-hold they have over my students. I am always looking for ways to tap such naturally occurring well-springs. This book provides an analytical approach to memetic patterns which can provide a broad range of applications, such as helping older or less digitally immersed individuals to use memes more effectively during presentations or providing engaging activities for learners (from the more conventional - create a literary meme which conveys an understanding of the original text- to the more radical - analyzing memetic content as deeply encoded language, through a qualitative close-reading of content, form and stance).
Richard Dawkins coined the term 'meme' in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, defining it as "small cultural units of transmission, analogous to genes, that spread from person to person by copying or imitation." This is a massively broad definition, and as such is limited as analytical tool. However, this idea has evolved quite a bit since that time. Limor Shifman's brief synthesis of various internet studies makes the meme's application to digital culture quite promising.
Personal note: I'm interested in memes because of the attention-hold they have over my students. I am always looking for ways to tap such naturally occurring well-springs. This book provides an analytical approach to memetic patterns which can provide a broad range of applications, such as helping older or less digitally immersed individuals to use memes more effectively during presentations or providing engaging activities for learners (from the more conventional - create a literary meme which conveys an understanding of the original text- to the more radical - analyzing memetic content as deeply encoded language, through a qualitative close-reading of content, form and stance).
Richard Dawkins coined the term 'meme' in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, defining it as "small cultural units of transmission, analogous to genes, that spread from person to person by copying or imitation." This is a massively broad definition, and as such is limited as analytical tool. However, this idea has evolved quite a bit since that time. Limor Shifman's brief synthesis of various internet studies makes the meme's application to digital culture quite promising.
September 7, 2018
The MIT Essential Knowledge Series is the perfect venue for a book on something like this, and in keeping with its subject there's a lot packed into a small space. Memes and viral content are ubiquitous, and even if individually each shared image is trivial, in the aggregate they present a fascinating window into a fundamental aspect of human communication that the internet has vastly amplified. Richard Dawkins was the first person to fix the idea of the meme in the public consciousness, proving his own point by giving the amorphous concept of an informational analogue to the gene a compact, shareable name and definition. However, Shifman mentions two main conceptual difficulties with a neat meme-gene analogy: firstly that people commonly refer to a "meme" as both an individual unit of selection (a gene) and as a unit of transmission (a virus), which are different things; and secondly that people are not helpless vectors for meme reproduction but are actors and meme creators themselves. This is not simple nitpicking, since borrowing terminology from evolutionary biology and epidemiology without care can only lead to confusion and obscure actual insights, and though the book's 2014 vintage makes it practically antediluvian in its examples, its careful analysis of both human and memetic behavior is perfectly undiminished by time.
In one sense, the internet is merely the latest transmission vector for memes, not truly a qualitatively different medium from the books, TV, audio recordings, etc that people used to use to share ideas in the before-time. But even in addition to offering, for the very first time ever, the tantalizing prospect of quantified empirical data on idea transmission, the internet has vastly transformed three key aspects of memes: longevity, fecundity, and copy fidelity. Pity our ancestors: one imagines a poor farming family in the depths of Nebraska in the 1800s, waiting anxiously on the porch of their sod-roofed homestead for a quarterly meme update from the big cities back East tucked neatly next to the Sears Roebuck catalog... no longer! Thanks to what Shifman terms the "hypermimetic logic" of the internet, in practical terms there are more memes than it is possible to humanly experience, with memes mutating and spawning new clades and taxa so rapidly that much of the attention-based economy of the modern internet is based on either exploiting something that's already viral or trying to manufacture something viral out of nothing.
But again, a meme is not a piece of viral content, although the two are often used synonymously (side note: "piece of viral content" is a clunky phrase and "virus" sounds bad; would something like "vireme" work better?). Exact definitions are tricky to make, and nearly impossible to sustain, but the basic idea is that a piece of viral content is a single thing that spreads to many people, while a meme is a "group of content units", each of which could be modified while the whole thing is recognizably descended from a single image, which could then also spread virally. Thus, to use one of her examples, the infamous "Leave Britney alone!" video is a piece of viral content, which then became a meme once people latched onto various aspects (the hair, the eyeliner, the bedsheet, the "Leave X aloooone!" plaint) to make their own parodies/imitations/tributes. Some viral items are rich enough in imagery and hooks to inspire vast families of memetic descendants, "Gangnam Style" being the current best example, but even relatively absurd and meaningless viral content like planking or "Kilroy was here" can be memeified, as the latter was referenced with hilariously nerdy panache as a Kilroy-shaped band-pass filter by Thomas Pynchon in his novel V. It's very rare for something to go viral without also getting memed, but there's still a useful distinction between a dendritic "founder-based meme" such as "Leave Britney alone!" that has a clear original viral basis, and a rhizomatic "egalitarian meme" like LOLcats, where theoretically there must have been a single original Ur-funny cat image but currently consists of an endless sea of comedically equal variations.
Of course, truly proving why one thing goes viral and spawns a million memes while something seemingly identical doesn't is a vast and almost certainly impossible goal. Christian Bauckhage had a 2011 paper titled "Insight Into Internet Memes", lamentably uncited here, which fit the popularity (using Google search results) of various memes into a few distributions, but refrained from entering the "why" debate, as it seems beyond the power of data science alone to explain "why" one meme's popularity fits a log-normal distribution and another's doesn't. Surely it must be some mix of inherent latent virality and the random luck of being in the right place at the right time shared by the right people, if we could ever break down the exact factors. Duncan Watts' superb book Everything Is Obvious (Once You Know the Answer) raised many of these same questions in the context of influence in social networks and how some people get to be so influential while most of the rest of us won't ever be, or how some songs become popular while others don't.
Shifman has a more sociological theory of virality, however, and as she says, successful viral content checks off as many of the 6 Ps as possible: positivity, provocation of high-intensity emotions, packaging, prestige, positioning in social context, and participation, maybe the most important factor. This makes intuitive sense - boring irrelevant crap made by nobodies that no one ever sees is unlikely to go viral almost by definition - yet for all the countless YouTube videos out there that master some combination of relatable protagonists, flawed masculinity, humor, simplicity, repetitiveness, and whimsical content that Shifman identifies as crucial to viral success (see Mark O'Connell's excellent short book Epic Fail for a more poignant meditation on the appeal of watching people fail at something), there are even countless more videos out there that no one besides their creators will ever see. The numberless descendants of "Gangnam Style" might make it the Genghis Khan of memes, yet it too exists in a meme ecosystem where the overwhelming majority of similar K-pop music videos make barely a ripple on the international stage.
And it is on that international stage where the potential existence of a formula for virality and memetic success can be most clearly investigated. The somewhat ugly term "glocalization" refers to the ability of viral content to originate in one culture or context, spread to another, and then acquire memetic aspects specific to its new home. Shifman uses the example of "I upgraded Girlfriend 7.0 to Wife 1.0!" and its gender-reversed counterpart as examples of an incredibly hackneyed joke that is nevertheless extremely popular worldwide because it plays on such familiar stereotypes (although with some significant modifications for some cultures, such as Arabic or Japanese, which don't always have exactly the same cultural signifiers). Same with the American meme Successful Black Man becoming Humanist Ultra Orthodox Man in Israel. Political memes often resist translation, since although some complaints with government are universal, others - the Pepper-Spraying Cop at UC Davis, the "grass mud horse" of Chinese battles against government censors, satires of Benjamin Netanyahu or Nicolas Sarkozy's attempts to take credit or be present for everything - require just a bit too much cultural specificity to go global. Political meme urges are universal, but as Tip O'Neill might have said, all political memes are local.
The final chapter is an admirably humble call for further research on a number of memetic avenues, all of which I second:
- The politics of meme participation. With rare exceptions, the demographics of successful meme creators, influencers, and users looks remarkably similar to the demographics of just about every successful anything: young, well-off, straight white males front and center. If the internet theoretically gives everyone an equal voice, what gives?
- Memes as a language. People use memes to pithily communicate an incredibly broad variety of mental and emotional states to others, yet not all of them translate well. What's the general distribution of memetic communication on the "universal" to "extremely niche micro-sub-culture" spectrum, and why do particular memes fall where they do?
- Memes and political change. Some political memes become popular, and some are then successful, but these paths are neither universal nor uniformly paced - how should we interpret the varying success of memes like "I am the 99%" vs "repeal the death tax"? What about "Carthago delenda est" vs "54-40 or fight"?
- Viral and memetic success. Here's where research like Duncan Watts' or Christian Bauckhage's is important: a better typology of memes can help with the etiology. Once we know the "what"s, then the "how"s and "why"s of memes become much easier to study.
And yes, the book does end with a meme.
In one sense, the internet is merely the latest transmission vector for memes, not truly a qualitatively different medium from the books, TV, audio recordings, etc that people used to use to share ideas in the before-time. But even in addition to offering, for the very first time ever, the tantalizing prospect of quantified empirical data on idea transmission, the internet has vastly transformed three key aspects of memes: longevity, fecundity, and copy fidelity. Pity our ancestors: one imagines a poor farming family in the depths of Nebraska in the 1800s, waiting anxiously on the porch of their sod-roofed homestead for a quarterly meme update from the big cities back East tucked neatly next to the Sears Roebuck catalog... no longer! Thanks to what Shifman terms the "hypermimetic logic" of the internet, in practical terms there are more memes than it is possible to humanly experience, with memes mutating and spawning new clades and taxa so rapidly that much of the attention-based economy of the modern internet is based on either exploiting something that's already viral or trying to manufacture something viral out of nothing.
But again, a meme is not a piece of viral content, although the two are often used synonymously (side note: "piece of viral content" is a clunky phrase and "virus" sounds bad; would something like "vireme" work better?). Exact definitions are tricky to make, and nearly impossible to sustain, but the basic idea is that a piece of viral content is a single thing that spreads to many people, while a meme is a "group of content units", each of which could be modified while the whole thing is recognizably descended from a single image, which could then also spread virally. Thus, to use one of her examples, the infamous "Leave Britney alone!" video is a piece of viral content, which then became a meme once people latched onto various aspects (the hair, the eyeliner, the bedsheet, the "Leave X aloooone!" plaint) to make their own parodies/imitations/tributes. Some viral items are rich enough in imagery and hooks to inspire vast families of memetic descendants, "Gangnam Style" being the current best example, but even relatively absurd and meaningless viral content like planking or "Kilroy was here" can be memeified, as the latter was referenced with hilariously nerdy panache as a Kilroy-shaped band-pass filter by Thomas Pynchon in his novel V. It's very rare for something to go viral without also getting memed, but there's still a useful distinction between a dendritic "founder-based meme" such as "Leave Britney alone!" that has a clear original viral basis, and a rhizomatic "egalitarian meme" like LOLcats, where theoretically there must have been a single original Ur-funny cat image but currently consists of an endless sea of comedically equal variations.
Of course, truly proving why one thing goes viral and spawns a million memes while something seemingly identical doesn't is a vast and almost certainly impossible goal. Christian Bauckhage had a 2011 paper titled "Insight Into Internet Memes", lamentably uncited here, which fit the popularity (using Google search results) of various memes into a few distributions, but refrained from entering the "why" debate, as it seems beyond the power of data science alone to explain "why" one meme's popularity fits a log-normal distribution and another's doesn't. Surely it must be some mix of inherent latent virality and the random luck of being in the right place at the right time shared by the right people, if we could ever break down the exact factors. Duncan Watts' superb book Everything Is Obvious (Once You Know the Answer) raised many of these same questions in the context of influence in social networks and how some people get to be so influential while most of the rest of us won't ever be, or how some songs become popular while others don't.
Shifman has a more sociological theory of virality, however, and as she says, successful viral content checks off as many of the 6 Ps as possible: positivity, provocation of high-intensity emotions, packaging, prestige, positioning in social context, and participation, maybe the most important factor. This makes intuitive sense - boring irrelevant crap made by nobodies that no one ever sees is unlikely to go viral almost by definition - yet for all the countless YouTube videos out there that master some combination of relatable protagonists, flawed masculinity, humor, simplicity, repetitiveness, and whimsical content that Shifman identifies as crucial to viral success (see Mark O'Connell's excellent short book Epic Fail for a more poignant meditation on the appeal of watching people fail at something), there are even countless more videos out there that no one besides their creators will ever see. The numberless descendants of "Gangnam Style" might make it the Genghis Khan of memes, yet it too exists in a meme ecosystem where the overwhelming majority of similar K-pop music videos make barely a ripple on the international stage.
And it is on that international stage where the potential existence of a formula for virality and memetic success can be most clearly investigated. The somewhat ugly term "glocalization" refers to the ability of viral content to originate in one culture or context, spread to another, and then acquire memetic aspects specific to its new home. Shifman uses the example of "I upgraded Girlfriend 7.0 to Wife 1.0!" and its gender-reversed counterpart as examples of an incredibly hackneyed joke that is nevertheless extremely popular worldwide because it plays on such familiar stereotypes (although with some significant modifications for some cultures, such as Arabic or Japanese, which don't always have exactly the same cultural signifiers). Same with the American meme Successful Black Man becoming Humanist Ultra Orthodox Man in Israel. Political memes often resist translation, since although some complaints with government are universal, others - the Pepper-Spraying Cop at UC Davis, the "grass mud horse" of Chinese battles against government censors, satires of Benjamin Netanyahu or Nicolas Sarkozy's attempts to take credit or be present for everything - require just a bit too much cultural specificity to go global. Political meme urges are universal, but as Tip O'Neill might have said, all political memes are local.
The final chapter is an admirably humble call for further research on a number of memetic avenues, all of which I second:
- The politics of meme participation. With rare exceptions, the demographics of successful meme creators, influencers, and users looks remarkably similar to the demographics of just about every successful anything: young, well-off, straight white males front and center. If the internet theoretically gives everyone an equal voice, what gives?
- Memes as a language. People use memes to pithily communicate an incredibly broad variety of mental and emotional states to others, yet not all of them translate well. What's the general distribution of memetic communication on the "universal" to "extremely niche micro-sub-culture" spectrum, and why do particular memes fall where they do?
- Memes and political change. Some political memes become popular, and some are then successful, but these paths are neither universal nor uniformly paced - how should we interpret the varying success of memes like "I am the 99%" vs "repeal the death tax"? What about "Carthago delenda est" vs "54-40 or fight"?
- Viral and memetic success. Here's where research like Duncan Watts' or Christian Bauckhage's is important: a better typology of memes can help with the etiology. Once we know the "what"s, then the "how"s and "why"s of memes become much easier to study.
And yes, the book does end with a meme.
June 14, 2021
A small intro.
March 29, 2019
fundamental standard work for the academic analysis of internet memes.
probaply nothing new for most readers but it's a good introduction to this topic from an academic view especially in view of how to write about memes using academic speech.
probaply nothing new for most readers but it's a good introduction to this topic from an academic view especially in view of how to write about memes using academic speech.
March 26, 2021
A quick read that introduces helpful concepts / points of inquiry for understanding memes in an academic sense.
May 2, 2017
nice meme 👌👌👌👌
July 20, 2020
Memes in Digital Culture, de Limor Siofman é um livro muito agradável de ser lido. Serve como uma introdução ao estudo dos memes, fazendo um belo apanhado da evolução que aconteceu com os memes a partir da era digital até o ano de 2013, época em que o livro foi escrito. Claro que de lá para cá muita coisa mudou nesse aspecto e os memes se tornaram ainda mais presentes no nosso cotidiano, principalmente a partis das limitações que a Pandemia do COVID-19 impôs a todos no planeta. As partes mais interessantes para mim neste livro foram as que Limor Shifman faz uma diferenciação entre o que é considerado meme e o que é considerado viral e que intersecções eles têm. Outra parte muito boa foi quando ele analisa as atuações e as consequências políticas do uso de memes, como isso deixou as pessoas mais participativas no âmbito político. O ponto fraco do livro são os capítulos em que Limor Shifman tenta categorizar os memes, criando algumas categorias que são de difícil usabilidade. Ele mesmo em suas análises não utiliza das próprias categorizações. De qualquer forma é um livro acessível e com um texto fluido e gostoso de ler. Recomendo.
October 11, 2019
In a time flooded with memes this piece brings an excelent insight on how memes are formed. Most of the young generation today have a good relationship with digital memes, but not many have a understanding of why and how they become memes. If you are interested in an indepth analysis on memes and their spread, I highly recommand reading this book.
February 17, 2023
This is an easy to read scholarly analysis of memetic content and culture. It’s so interesting how fast our social media landscape changes in so little time. The examples are rich with analytical potential and illustrate the key points well. Pepper spray cop & baby yoda got me though! The blurry lines of pop culture and political participation are a core takeaway here.
December 3, 2018
Maybe one of the few serious studies about memes and virality. It falls short as an analysis of meme types, public, creators and forums... but it is a good scientific introduction study.
June 26, 2022
A very weird book to overcome my reader's block. Not many things to learn, to be excited about. Net knowledge gain positive though
February 20, 2023
provides great language for talking about memes not as discrete units but as socially constructed public discourses that scale up over time. big takeaway: memes are not things but processes.
January 19, 2021
Una gran introducción a este fenómeno.
May 10, 2018
This one is a quick read. I would say this is a must read for those who want to understand memes beyond what they present themselves as. For those who have an eye for the socio cultural implications of the meme culture beyond what the usual writings on memetics could offer, this is the book to read. And would you want to read more once you finish the book? Definitely. And this one is a nicely written work, you can breeze through the chapters.
March 28, 2021
If you want to reproduce a funny frog, get two other funny frogs together in a pool of your choice. Dissecting it will only tell you where it got the funny gene from but it'll also kill it in the process
July 22, 2022
Did I think it was possible to have a serious, scholarly analysis of "meme culture"? Not really. Shifman manages to take a subject that seems frivolous on face value and handles it fastidiously without being pedantic.
Memes are how we communicate in this social media age. And a single meme can have many layers of meaning, understanding them requires more than just reading words pasted over an image. Memes are here to stay, and we'd do well to pay attention to them.
Memes are how we communicate in this social media age. And a single meme can have many layers of meaning, understanding them requires more than just reading words pasted over an image. Memes are here to stay, and we'd do well to pay attention to them.
December 18, 2018
What is a meme? A meme has subtle definition. Broadly speaking, it’s a phenomena that causes public frenzy on the internet. We are living in a digital era that everything connects with the net. By UN’s definition, connectivity to internet has become one of the basic human rights. Internet equals access to information these days. Most of us indulge in posting pictures, discussions, and everything interesting on social media nowadays. It can be said that internet has become the most important venue for human interactions, though a virtual one. Thus not surprisingly, a new kind of ‘societal norms’ is invented by ‘netizens’. It leads to a new culture: the digital culture. You must be digitally literate to understand some nuances on the web.
Similar to pop-culture, sometimes something interesting catches peoples’ attention. From time to time, a craze sweeps the internet. People start to imitate, parody, satire, and quickly spread that particular thing. This something (be a video, text, or pictures…) is called ‘meme’, which initial meaning comes from genetics, as genes replicate and gradually mutate, but still carrying the essentials.
The book is a scholarly research on this digital production. It’s well written and accessible. I enjoy learning interesting stuff by reading serious discussion about it. Meme is often overlooked in the academia, because many scholars don’t see anything valuable worthy delving into. However, the author Limor Shifman of this book believes quite the opposite. She believes memes reflect humans’ internal thinking perfectly. If we can understand this phenomena well, we will be able to explain or even predict human behavior more accurately.
In the book, Shifman discusses the origins and meaning of meme. She gives comprehensive examples of memes, such as ‘Charlie bit my finger’, ‘Gangnam Style’, and many others. She shows how netizens use memes to join discussion, exhibit individuality, and meanwhile prove our belonging to the community (ex: I belong to the internet generation). Memes can be quite versatile and are constantly evolving. Shifman tries to put an overarching framework to define memes. A meme consists of different contents, forms, and stances. For example, ‘Charlie bit my finger’ is about a pair of boys (content), it’s a video (form), and it’s very funny (stance).
Shifman also points out the attributes of a successful meme. Normally something with humorous, positive, and simple elements tends to spread faster. Sometimes incongruity or contrast also stimulate people to share. Notably, Shifman differentiates ‘viral’ and ‘meme’. Say, a video can go viral, but doesn’t become a meme. What’s the difference? Meme stands out due to its ability to arouse people’s desire to imitate. Meme brings about many derivatives, while something viral attracts much attention but doesn’t cause anything else.
Meme appears in every aspect. Besides pop culture, many people use memes to voice their political opinions. Shifman discusses memes’ role in public participation in politics. Interestingly, she talks about memes in non-democratic countries as well. In this case, she takes China as an example. Grass mud horse(草泥馬) and River crab(河蟹) are two creative ideas from the net users facing censorship.
Memes could have global influence. We already know some countries use internet to meddle the world order. People with malign intentions could weaponize internet to cause huge problems. In the post-truth era, we communicate even more frequently in the cyberspace. Understanding the communicative mechanism is more imperative than before. Memes offer a nice perspective on the whole picture. Reading this book is both entertaining and inspiring.
Similar to pop-culture, sometimes something interesting catches peoples’ attention. From time to time, a craze sweeps the internet. People start to imitate, parody, satire, and quickly spread that particular thing. This something (be a video, text, or pictures…) is called ‘meme’, which initial meaning comes from genetics, as genes replicate and gradually mutate, but still carrying the essentials.
The book is a scholarly research on this digital production. It’s well written and accessible. I enjoy learning interesting stuff by reading serious discussion about it. Meme is often overlooked in the academia, because many scholars don’t see anything valuable worthy delving into. However, the author Limor Shifman of this book believes quite the opposite. She believes memes reflect humans’ internal thinking perfectly. If we can understand this phenomena well, we will be able to explain or even predict human behavior more accurately.
In the book, Shifman discusses the origins and meaning of meme. She gives comprehensive examples of memes, such as ‘Charlie bit my finger’, ‘Gangnam Style’, and many others. She shows how netizens use memes to join discussion, exhibit individuality, and meanwhile prove our belonging to the community (ex: I belong to the internet generation). Memes can be quite versatile and are constantly evolving. Shifman tries to put an overarching framework to define memes. A meme consists of different contents, forms, and stances. For example, ‘Charlie bit my finger’ is about a pair of boys (content), it’s a video (form), and it’s very funny (stance).
Shifman also points out the attributes of a successful meme. Normally something with humorous, positive, and simple elements tends to spread faster. Sometimes incongruity or contrast also stimulate people to share. Notably, Shifman differentiates ‘viral’ and ‘meme’. Say, a video can go viral, but doesn’t become a meme. What’s the difference? Meme stands out due to its ability to arouse people’s desire to imitate. Meme brings about many derivatives, while something viral attracts much attention but doesn’t cause anything else.
Meme appears in every aspect. Besides pop culture, many people use memes to voice their political opinions. Shifman discusses memes’ role in public participation in politics. Interestingly, she talks about memes in non-democratic countries as well. In this case, she takes China as an example. Grass mud horse(草泥馬) and River crab(河蟹) are two creative ideas from the net users facing censorship.
Memes could have global influence. We already know some countries use internet to meddle the world order. People with malign intentions could weaponize internet to cause huge problems. In the post-truth era, we communicate even more frequently in the cyberspace. Understanding the communicative mechanism is more imperative than before. Memes offer a nice perspective on the whole picture. Reading this book is both entertaining and inspiring.
January 8, 2014
Shifman takes a more expansive definition of memes than the original Richard Dawkins idea, focused more on memes that are created and communicated primarily through the broad reach of the Internet.
Because this is a very young field, there isn't a large body of research, but Shifman brings current thinking (including his own research) on the topic, along with related work from people other fields together in this book. By giving the reader a multitude of perspectives on memes, and various ways of categorizing them, Shifman starts to give us the tools to think about the topic in a more formal way.
I found two sections particularly fascinating: the differences between memes and virals - I had always sort of lumped them together in my mind - and a list of the 9 strongest influencers on whether an idea goes viral. The book is a pretty quick read - only 175 pages in a rather small form factor, and Shifman's style is what I would call "readable academic" - a notch more formal than most popular science books but not nearly as dry as a research paper.
If you're like me and find yourself spending too much time on reddit, tumblr or 4chan, or even if you wonder why certain videos, pictures and stories keep showing up in your email box or Facebook feed, and you are interested in a more formal exploration of what you're experiencing, then I can recommend "Memes in Digital Culture."
Because this is a very young field, there isn't a large body of research, but Shifman brings current thinking (including his own research) on the topic, along with related work from people other fields together in this book. By giving the reader a multitude of perspectives on memes, and various ways of categorizing them, Shifman starts to give us the tools to think about the topic in a more formal way.
I found two sections particularly fascinating: the differences between memes and virals - I had always sort of lumped them together in my mind - and a list of the 9 strongest influencers on whether an idea goes viral. The book is a pretty quick read - only 175 pages in a rather small form factor, and Shifman's style is what I would call "readable academic" - a notch more formal than most popular science books but not nearly as dry as a research paper.
If you're like me and find yourself spending too much time on reddit, tumblr or 4chan, or even if you wonder why certain videos, pictures and stories keep showing up in your email box or Facebook feed, and you are interested in a more formal exploration of what you're experiencing, then I can recommend "Memes in Digital Culture."
January 1, 2021
2020.12.30–2020.12.31
Contents
Shifman L (2013) (03:47) Memes in Digital Culture
Series Foreword
Acknowledgments
01. Introduction
02. A Telegraphic Biography of a Conceptual Troublemaker
03. When Memes Go Digital
• Probing “Hypermemetic Logic”
04. Defining Internet Memes
• Leave Britney (and the Pepper-Spraying Cop?) Alone, It Doesn’t Get Better
05. Memes versus Virals
• Table 1. Virals, founder-based, and egalitarian memes.
06. Unpacking Viral and Memetic Success
• What Makes Content “Viral”?
• • (1) Positivity (and Humor)
• • (2) Provoking “High-Arousal” Emotions
• • (3) Packaging
• • (4) Prestige
• • (5) Positioning
• • (6) Participation
• What Makes Content Memetic?
• • Memetic Videos
• • • 1 Ordinary People
• • • 2 Flawed Masculinity
• • • 3 Humor
• • • 4 Simplicity
• • • 5 Repetitiveness
• • • 6 Whimsical Content
• • Memetic Photos
• • • Juxtaposition
• • • Frozen Motion
• Viral and Memetic Promoters: Commonalities and Differences
07. Meme Genres
• Reaction Photoshops
• Photo Fads
• Flash Mob
• Lipsynch
• Misheard Lyrics
• Recut Trailers
• LOLCats
• Stock Character Macros
• Rage Comics
08. May the Excessive Force Be with You: Memes as Political Participation
• Memes (and Virals) as Persuasion: The 2008 US Presidential Campaign
• Memes as Political Action and Discourse: Occupy Wall Street and Memetic Photos
• • Occupy Wall Street, 2011
• Political Memetic Photos
• Memes as Democratic Subversion: The Case of China
09. Internet Memes Go Global
10. Future Directions for Internet Meme Research
Glossary
Notes
Further Readings
Index
Contents
Shifman L (2013) (03:47) Memes in Digital Culture
Series Foreword
Acknowledgments
01. Introduction
02. A Telegraphic Biography of a Conceptual Troublemaker
03. When Memes Go Digital
• Probing “Hypermemetic Logic”
04. Defining Internet Memes
• Leave Britney (and the Pepper-Spraying Cop?) Alone, It Doesn’t Get Better
05. Memes versus Virals
• Table 1. Virals, founder-based, and egalitarian memes.
06. Unpacking Viral and Memetic Success
• What Makes Content “Viral”?
• • (1) Positivity (and Humor)
• • (2) Provoking “High-Arousal” Emotions
• • (3) Packaging
• • (4) Prestige
• • (5) Positioning
• • (6) Participation
• What Makes Content Memetic?
• • Memetic Videos
• • • 1 Ordinary People
• • • 2 Flawed Masculinity
• • • 3 Humor
• • • 4 Simplicity
• • • 5 Repetitiveness
• • • 6 Whimsical Content
• • Memetic Photos
• • • Juxtaposition
• • • Frozen Motion
• Viral and Memetic Promoters: Commonalities and Differences
07. Meme Genres
• Reaction Photoshops
• Photo Fads
• Flash Mob
• Lipsynch
• Misheard Lyrics
• Recut Trailers
• LOLCats
• Stock Character Macros
• Rage Comics
08. May the Excessive Force Be with You: Memes as Political Participation
• Memes (and Virals) as Persuasion: The 2008 US Presidential Campaign
• Memes as Political Action and Discourse: Occupy Wall Street and Memetic Photos
• • Occupy Wall Street, 2011
• Political Memetic Photos
• Memes as Democratic Subversion: The Case of China
09. Internet Memes Go Global
10. Future Directions for Internet Meme Research
Glossary
Notes
Further Readings
Index
December 6, 2023
The content is not bad, and I appreciate the attempt to define attributes of digital memes. "Curated chaos" is a term I am going to use. Claiming "the idea of mass protests became memetic" (122), though? That made me look at the book's definition differently. My supervisor suggested that Shifman's definition of a meme is so broad that it could even apply to a bank website, and I am so mad that he's right.
The referencing system was frustrating - superscript numbers that correspond to footnotes at the end of the book, which are also divided by chapter, so you need to remember which chapter you've just come from. I would find something like "the basic activity of spreading memes has become desired and highly valued, as it is associated with what Nicholas John has identified as the constitutive activity of Web 2.0: sharing" (19), with no corresponding footnote, and thought 'well I can't just take your word for it'. Fortunately I have a digital copy and could search for 'John' in the footnotes at the end. But this was simply Chapter 3's note '2', which was useless as a search term. This is why APA has us cite as "John (2012) identified...", then provide a full reference in a list at the end.
Sometimes names are mentioned, e.g., to paraphrase page 10, 'Douglas Hofstadter's contributions were important landmarks in 1990s memetics', but there is no mention of any texts to start looking at this person's work. Just frustrating for someone trying to start research in memetics.
The referencing system was frustrating - superscript numbers that correspond to footnotes at the end of the book, which are also divided by chapter, so you need to remember which chapter you've just come from. I would find something like "the basic activity of spreading memes has become desired and highly valued, as it is associated with what Nicholas John has identified as the constitutive activity of Web 2.0: sharing" (19), with no corresponding footnote, and thought 'well I can't just take your word for it'. Fortunately I have a digital copy and could search for 'John' in the footnotes at the end. But this was simply Chapter 3's note '2', which was useless as a search term. This is why APA has us cite as "John (2012) identified...", then provide a full reference in a list at the end.
Sometimes names are mentioned, e.g., to paraphrase page 10, 'Douglas Hofstadter's contributions were important landmarks in 1990s memetics', but there is no mention of any texts to start looking at this person's work. Just frustrating for someone trying to start research in memetics.
June 11, 2020
Very well written! You can tell that a lot of thought and research went into this.
The incongruity between the studies and the content made me laugh frequently. I also felt like I had a better understanding of the digital culture in which I'm daily immersed. There are some distinctions and definitions made throughout this book that I had never really considered before.
Some of my favorite pull-quotes are:
"Whereas a single meme may rise and fall as quick as a flash, revealing the common ideas and forms shared by many Internet memes might tell us something about digital culture. For instance, while the single lipdub "Numa Numa" features one guy from New Jersey, its analysis in chapter 7 as part of a stream of thousands of similar videos that constitute the lipdub genre will reveal a larger story about the eroding boundaries between top-down pop culture and bottom-up folk culture in contemporary society."
"Re-creating popular videos and images can thus be seen as the cultural embodiment of "networked individualism:" it allows people to be "themselves," together."
"The veteran term "meme" is highly relevant and applicable for understanding a wide range of contemporary behaviors, ranging from worldwide political protests to bizarre Korean dance movements."
The incongruity between the studies and the content made me laugh frequently. I also felt like I had a better understanding of the digital culture in which I'm daily immersed. There are some distinctions and definitions made throughout this book that I had never really considered before.
Some of my favorite pull-quotes are:
"Whereas a single meme may rise and fall as quick as a flash, revealing the common ideas and forms shared by many Internet memes might tell us something about digital culture. For instance, while the single lipdub "Numa Numa" features one guy from New Jersey, its analysis in chapter 7 as part of a stream of thousands of similar videos that constitute the lipdub genre will reveal a larger story about the eroding boundaries between top-down pop culture and bottom-up folk culture in contemporary society."
"Re-creating popular videos and images can thus be seen as the cultural embodiment of "networked individualism:" it allows people to be "themselves," together."
"The veteran term "meme" is highly relevant and applicable for understanding a wide range of contemporary behaviors, ranging from worldwide political protests to bizarre Korean dance movements."
September 27, 2018
Memes have a large presence in our digital culture. Limor Shifman explores this presence and how it affects us in her book "Memes in Digital Culture." In each chapter, Shifman has put footnotes on references to research or on things she hasn't elaborated on, but may require more understanding. When talking about "Mars and Venus" humor, the author leaves a footnote, leading to a researcher that further expounds on the idea. Of course, there are example images to illustrate the memes that the author is describing. These range from the image that started the meme of the officer pepper spraying things to the actual memes that circulate the internet. Limor Shifman uses first person throughout her book. She uses this in explaining his own research, such as the research she did on the popularity of Gangnam Style. All around, Shifman presents a good analysis of memes and provides the reader with good thought provoking questions, making "Memes in Digital Culture" a great read for critical thinkers.
July 5, 2021
It is one interesting book, I stumbled upon. It opens a facet to understand memes as a socio-cultural bloc in every netizen's life. It helps us to categorize and differentiate between viral and memes.
Although it has as started an inquiry, it is still to see what the effects of memes are. I like to believe that it can produce awareness by catharsis but to make a dent in a political structure is yet to be seen.
The book has become a little outdated because the flow of memes and virals has increased globally. The psychological effect and acceptability have also increased over time. Memes are humorous in nature and I think it can have the effect of cartoons which appears on the newspapers and hence its use would grow exponentially. As big companies have vacancies like social media executives and content creators, which will eventually help make meme a satirical voice and an art form.
The book is an essential basic guide for anyone to understand the anatomic dispersion of memes. I hope other updates of such books should come soon.
Although it has as started an inquiry, it is still to see what the effects of memes are. I like to believe that it can produce awareness by catharsis but to make a dent in a political structure is yet to be seen.
The book has become a little outdated because the flow of memes and virals has increased globally. The psychological effect and acceptability have also increased over time. Memes are humorous in nature and I think it can have the effect of cartoons which appears on the newspapers and hence its use would grow exponentially. As big companies have vacancies like social media executives and content creators, which will eventually help make meme a satirical voice and an art form.
The book is an essential basic guide for anyone to understand the anatomic dispersion of memes. I hope other updates of such books should come soon.
April 12, 2021
Hm, not sure about this one. The other MIT PEK series I read (Nihilism by Nolen Gertz) was really good and accessible, but this one left me a bit uninspired, mainly due to being either quite academic or almost trivial. I'm aware that sociological diffusion studies are not the most interesting to read and that it is very difficult to get a grip on information spread, but somehow it should've been presented in a different way. The dearth of literature on memes posed a challenge for Shifman because on the one hand she tried to be introductory (and explaining memes in a way that felt a bit strange for a digital native but could be of great help for people that don't know the memes intuitively) as well as catering to digital natives. Maybe it would've been better to just decide for one route, but it's genuinely difficult.
November 17, 2019
This book was published in 2012, when optimism about the Internet's emancipatory potential was still possible. (For context, the memes referenced include Gangnam Style, Charlie Bit My Finger, and Rebecca Black.) So while this book's clear-eyed definition of memes, classification of meme types, and breakdown of what enhances a meme's virality has held up nicely, it left me wanting more about the communicative breakdown that can occur when we rely on iterated bite-sized content to express our social, cultural, and political values.
August 26, 2018
Not a bad book overall. An introductory read, so a lot of time is dedicated to establishing definitions and listing examples. It's unfortunate that a lot of memes mentioned feel useless: they are just mentioned for the sake of being mentioned, they are described in academic terms, perhaps categorized and then not really analysed. I wanted to hear more fascinating bits like memes as political criticism in a censored Chinese context, the commercialization of orignally anti-consumerism, anti-capitalism memes, etc.
May 9, 2019
It's impressive that this book is still topically and thematically relevant six years after publication. In a space where the pace of trending ideological memes is not just evolving daily but where memetic mutations accelerate hourly, Shifman's scholarship is notable.
I had to request this publication through interlibrary-loan, but it should legit be on the NYU shelves. Dank AF and totally on fleek. #ImOldYall #GreyHairsKindaCare #GradSchoolYall
I had to request this publication through interlibrary-loan, but it should legit be on the NYU shelves. Dank AF and totally on fleek. #ImOldYall #GreyHairsKindaCare #GradSchoolYall
November 5, 2023
Memes are even cooler after reading this!
If texting with emojis are a latte, memes are like matcha. It just has this delicate flavor in it...
Nevertheless.. this helps understand why memes are so interesting and widespread. The contextual feelings memes provoke are just so powerful. It's funny that the author offers to take memes seriously, but if we take them seriously, are they still memes..?
If texting with emojis are a latte, memes are like matcha. It just has this delicate flavor in it...
Nevertheless.. this helps understand why memes are so interesting and widespread. The contextual feelings memes provoke are just so powerful. It's funny that the author offers to take memes seriously, but if we take them seriously, are they still memes..?
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