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Routledge Studies in New Media and Cyberculture
The Discursive Power of Memes in Digital Culture: Ideology, Semiotics, and Intertextuality
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.
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Published February 1, 2019
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
April 28, 2024
সূচী দেখে যতটা আগ্রহী হয়েছিলাম বইটা নিয়ে, পড়তে বসে সেই মজাটা পাওয়া গেলো না। সংশ্লিষ্ট সংজ্ঞা আর উদাহরণ টানাতেই মন ছিলো লেখকের। মিম বিষয়ক আলাপের গভীরে তিনি যান নি।
November 4, 2019
There is a very brief history of academic books on memetics, but this one seems like the first move towards a cohesive set of ideas that "memetics" is about as a topic of academic interest. This book offers a series of chapters on which memetics literature has been bouncing around for some time.
In short, there was a history of memes as cultural genetics starting from Richard Dawkins' _The Selfish Gene_ until Susan Blackmore's publication in the 1990s. After this, culture studies took a turn for more constructed notions of memetic movements which gives agency back to the active participation in meme creation and dissemination. This was marked by the publication of a series of books which tends to revolve around Limor Shifman's definition in _Memes in Digital Culture_ or something similar. This book is the first book (not academic publication) which considers memes as semiotic objects and then proceeds to delineate various areas of which memes are an object of interest. Yet it still holds that memes are semiotic, but that their social interpretation and dissemination is about ideological argumentation and political discourse. This organization seems much more clear and well-defined than prior organizations of what memes are and what memetics does.
The first chapter spends a good deal of time separating memes form other contexts in which it has been muddied with: virality, cultural commodities, culture and then spends a little time explaining meme economy. It then takes a careful look at Limor Shifman's definition and elaborates on what it means for image-based memes. In the next chapter it settles on something similar to Sara Cannizzaro's definition of semiotic systems, with the explanation that the movements of memes are more related to ideology through semiotic argument structures. It operationalizes power, digital culture, ideology, and intertextuality as important features related to memes. So in short, the first two chapters are throat clearing since memes have been muddied conceptual objects since their admittance into academic thought. Chapter 3,4 & 5 consider memes from several contexts: genre, politics, and marketing respectively. Although some of these seem fuzzy, it seems as though this is because their status relative to these considerations are unclear in research. What these chapters do is situate the academic audience's interests in what they should be looking for rather than what they are looking at because of the previous chapters' structuring of the memetic object. Finally, the book relates memes to more humanities-based studies of audience (i.e. discourse, rhetoric, and communication literature), Identity via Goffman as constructive epistemology of memes, art history orientation as ne0-data and surrealism and their relation to political and ideological use.
This might be the best book I've read so far on memetics. Certainly this work could not have existed without a lot of trials and sticky situations from past fields, but this is the first book I have read on memes that delineates memes in a way that is agreeable, and not an unverifiable object of study. if there was one thing I wished this book had but did not explore more fully it was "affective potentials" which have been hinted at in prominent memetic academic work. In some ways, this might be a "linguistic turn" ignoring the "affective turn" for cohesion, but I think it could have addressed it without dismantling anything.
In short, there was a history of memes as cultural genetics starting from Richard Dawkins' _The Selfish Gene_ until Susan Blackmore's publication in the 1990s. After this, culture studies took a turn for more constructed notions of memetic movements which gives agency back to the active participation in meme creation and dissemination. This was marked by the publication of a series of books which tends to revolve around Limor Shifman's definition in _Memes in Digital Culture_ or something similar. This book is the first book (not academic publication) which considers memes as semiotic objects and then proceeds to delineate various areas of which memes are an object of interest. Yet it still holds that memes are semiotic, but that their social interpretation and dissemination is about ideological argumentation and political discourse. This organization seems much more clear and well-defined than prior organizations of what memes are and what memetics does.
The first chapter spends a good deal of time separating memes form other contexts in which it has been muddied with: virality, cultural commodities, culture and then spends a little time explaining meme economy. It then takes a careful look at Limor Shifman's definition and elaborates on what it means for image-based memes. In the next chapter it settles on something similar to Sara Cannizzaro's definition of semiotic systems, with the explanation that the movements of memes are more related to ideology through semiotic argument structures. It operationalizes power, digital culture, ideology, and intertextuality as important features related to memes. So in short, the first two chapters are throat clearing since memes have been muddied conceptual objects since their admittance into academic thought. Chapter 3,4 & 5 consider memes from several contexts: genre, politics, and marketing respectively. Although some of these seem fuzzy, it seems as though this is because their status relative to these considerations are unclear in research. What these chapters do is situate the academic audience's interests in what they should be looking for rather than what they are looking at because of the previous chapters' structuring of the memetic object. Finally, the book relates memes to more humanities-based studies of audience (i.e. discourse, rhetoric, and communication literature), Identity via Goffman as constructive epistemology of memes, art history orientation as ne0-data and surrealism and their relation to political and ideological use.
This might be the best book I've read so far on memetics. Certainly this work could not have existed without a lot of trials and sticky situations from past fields, but this is the first book I have read on memes that delineates memes in a way that is agreeable, and not an unverifiable object of study. if there was one thing I wished this book had but did not explore more fully it was "affective potentials" which have been hinted at in prominent memetic academic work. In some ways, this might be a "linguistic turn" ignoring the "affective turn" for cohesion, but I think it could have addressed it without dismantling anything.
September 10, 2020
The Discursive Power of Memes in Digital Culture: Ideology, Semiotics, and Intertextuality, de Bradley E. Wiggins é um livro bastante interessante que investiga os memes através de uma análise semiótica para encontrar os requícios de ideologias que envolvem sua produção, difusão e recepção. O autor se utiliza de textos clássicos da análise de discurso, da semiótica e que explicam as formas de utilização da ideologia para fundar a teoria que utilizará, durante todo o livro, para analisar o fenômeno dos memes de internet. Para além da análise da utilização política dos memes, neste livro o que achei muito pertinente foi pensar como os memes infuenciam e são influenciados pela identidade dos seus utilizadores, como são moldados e como moldam essas identidades, um fator que me fez parar para pensar que faltam estudos nesta seara. Também uma outra boa questã levantada pelo autor foi a aproximação dos memes como formas de arte, usando o pretexto dos ready mades de Marcel Duchamp para justificar esse pensamento. Um livro muito bom para se inteirar sobre o processo que leva os memes a se tornarem um discuso pólítico e ideológico orientado por elementos semióticos.
January 25, 2020
Critical ADHD. While it's nice to draw on a broad range of sources, this can disrupt understanding of the phenomena at hand (internet memes) when they are used to make one-off comments from mutually exclusive traditions. On one page the author defines 'ideology' and 'sign' by way of Zizek, Althusser, De Saussure, Barthes, Derrida, Gibson and McLuhan. Lots of potential but please try applying one theorist thoroughly and consistently, linking back to earlier ideas through the breadth of that theorist's thought.
January 23, 2021
Una lectura muy provechosa sobre el poder de la cultura y la comunicación virtual en nuestra contemporaneidad y un gran complemento de la obra de Shifman.
January 31, 2022
Gah! So boring and tedious. Lots of good info, but such a slog.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews