'"Look @ this fukken doge": Internet Memes and Remix Cultures'

Abstract

Internet memes are an important index of how people communicate ideas on social media. Each of these starts as an in-joke within an online community, which means that internet memes can often seem bewildering or trivial to those not in on the joke. But often these are not only adopted or shared, but are also adapted or remixed into new contexts, bringing new people into the joke as it’s moved across different networks, both online and offline. In this way, internet memes can also become implicated in political actions. And internet memes show how certain creative strategies that were once considered radical or avant-garde, from collage and Situationist detournement to digital sampling, have now become some of the basic cultural practices of everyday social media interactions.