Internet Memes Research Articles

Theorising the memescape: The spatial politics of Internet memes

AbstractDespite the increasing centrality of Internet memes for everyday political circulations and practices, their emergent implications as low-cultural artefacts of global politics have received little theoretical attention. In this article, I develop a critical theory of memes to provide a conceptual apparatus to understand the global political implications and possibilities of this pop-cultural phenomenon. I argue that, in order to attend to the emergent implications of memes and consider their differentiations from other pop-cultural phenomena, we need to unpack the spatial logic through which memes emerge and circulate. Analysing this spatial logic through the concept of the ‘memescape’ and deploying Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s notions of striated and smooth spaces, this article articulates the spatial logic of the memescape as comprising rhizomatic, decentralised circulations of digital content; nomadic, playful, and humorous disruptions of once-stable signs; and affective congregations of a multiplicity of subjects. Through two examples exploring how these smooth spatial tendencies produce divergent political potentials in the resistant memes of Indigenous digital communities and reactionary memes of the Alt-Right, I conclude that the global politics of the memescape is open-ended and undetermined which requires careful and nuanced political and ethical attention to actualise its futures for emancipatory horizons.

Smile! It's only Covid: Analyzing covid-19 internet memes

This article describes the special attributes of social media memes and their viral distribution during the Covid-19 pandemic and explores how they can challenge some of our conventional conceptions of creativity and humor. The internet memes turned to be very popular during the lockdown and this has raised questions about the possible relationship between a private creation its mass distribution and its possible assessment. A reasonable hypothesis is that the wide accessibility to the internet has strengthened the resilience and ability to cope with the pandemic and allowed nearly everyone to become a meme creator or receiver. The article lists some of the common themes and artistic devices that were used by meme creators and examines the power and limitations of traditional creativity and humor theories to explain this viral phenomenon.

Review: A Theory of Assembly: From Museums to Memes, by Kyle Parry

Review: <i>A Theory of Assembly: From Museums to Memes</i>, by Kyle Parry

The experience of iconological interpretation of Internet memes (based on the material of "quarantines" from the collection of social cartoons of the Center for Social and Political History of the State Public Historical Library)

The experience of iconological interpretation of Internet memes (based on the material of "quarantines" from the collection of social cartoons of the Center for Social and Political History of the State Public Historical Library)

Angry Friends, Happy Crowd: How the Emotionally Charged Content Influences Online Behavior

Social media are becoming new venues for more and more people to get information, express opinions, and connect with others. Various online communication behaviors carry and, meanwhile, are influenced by certain emotions. This study adopted a mixed method of survey and in-depth interviews to examine how the emotionally loaded content influenced people's online engagement. The targeted population focused on those active users on Chinese social media. The results revealed a unique phenomenon on social media in post-Covid China that both joy and anger attracted greater attention and more interaction. Also, the emotion of shock turned out to be unexpectedly influential on people's sharing behavior. It ranked ahead of anger and was second only to joy in getting people's attention. Furthermore, this study found that the content virality depended on the intended audience groupthat people tended to forward the angry messages to friends in private and retweet the joyful content publicly. These findings added nuances to previous literature concerning the role of emotions on social media. It reflected a relatively new reality of the post-Covid online phenomena in China.

Review of the Book “Peter I in Media Memory” by Denis S. Artamonov &amp; Sophia V. Tikhonova

The subject of the review is a monographic study by S. V. Tikhonova and D. S. Artamonov “Peter I in Media Memory”. The monograph consists of three chapters and fourteen paragraphs. Co-authors analyze in the first chapter (“Peter I in the Media Memory of the Digital Age”) the influence of traditional (radio, cinema, television) and new (digital, interactive, social) media on the collective memory. The second chapter (“Peter the Great in the Visual images of Media Memory”) contains a study of historical anecdotes, cartoons, Internet memes, animated films, computer games. The third chapter (“Constructing the image of Peter I in the media environment”) is devoted to the politics of memory and memorial wars around Peter I in comparison with the figures of media memory closest to him – Ivan the Terrible and I. V. Stalin.&#x0D; D. S. Artamonov and S. V. Tikhonova believe that in the 21st century, new media begins to play a major role in constructing the image of Peter the Great. The reviewed monograph is a truly innovative and searching study, which suggests methods and forms of analyzing the memory of Peter I in contemporary society that can be used in the study of other epochs, personalities, events of world and national history.

Ubiquitous Love or Not? Animal Welfare and Animal-Informed Consent in Giant Panda Tourism

Scholars argue that the ubiquity of the "virtual panda"-the panda people meet in zoos and consume as souvenirs, online memes, or videos-exists in a state of hybridity between wild and domesticated. The species has garnered a significant amount of attention because of their iconic status and because of how cute they are to an adoring crowd. However, given the degree of regard tourists have for the panda, there is a dearth of research on different types of visitors to captive panda venues. In filling this gap, we investigated (1) how deeply Chinese "fans" and "non-fans" consider the welfare of captive giant pandas, and (2) if these groups differ in their assessment of whether giant pandas consent to being used as tourist attractions. In both aims, we apply a recent model on animal welfare and animal consent to giant pandas of the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding.

The Research on the Popularity of Ding Zhen, a Young Chinese Ethnic Minority Man, and Reasons and Effects of His Negative Online Memes Fascination

In 2020, Ding Zhen, a Tibetan youth in China, became popular on the Internet for a short video, and after he became popular and received strong support from the official media, his popularity declined due to the exposure of his earlier smoking video, and there were even many memes made based on his shortcomings that contained flirtatious and ironic meanings. This paper adopts the method of questionnaire survey and study of past literature to come up with the reasons for the popularity of Ding Zhen and its memes appearing and being spread and the influence of these memes being spread. Reasons are: First, the rebellion against the mainstream narrative to create a perfect public image for Ding Zhen; Second, the role of the pan-entertainment deconstruction and the Internet carnival phenomenon. In terms of impact, the paper argues that these online obsessions can intensify gender antagonism in cyberspace, contribute to the trend of pan-entertainment on social platforms, and adversely affect the outreach of China's minority policies.

Digitizing the Epistolary: Dracula Daily and Embodied Contemporary Reading

Abstract This review discusses the online phenomenon of Dracula Daily, an internet substack that emails users sections of the epistolary novel Dracula in real-time, rearranged chronology. It examines the unique appeal of Dracula for virtual dissemination, examines how the epistolary format changes the context in virtual form, how readers read online, community reading, and whether or not the success of Dracula Daily can be replicated with other classic novels.

Meaning extensions of internet memes

AbstractThis paper explores the constructional properties of internet memes by conducting a case study ofIf 2020 was a(n) X(IYWX) memes within the framework of Viewpoint Spaces (Dancygier &amp; Vandelanotte, 2017). By looking into constructional properties and viewpoint interactions at multiple conceptual levels evoked by the juxtaposition of text and an image, this paper aims to shed light on cases where extended meanings emerge as the cognizer’s expectation on the conventionalized use of the meme is flouted. IYWX memes reveal the meme maker’s stance toward the year 2020, either evaluative or depictive, with the help of the conditional construction and the pictorial presentation of X. This study also accounts for a third type, in which the de-conventionalized construal relies on the meme viewer’s expectation of the meme’s structure. This specific type is intriguing because it indicates that the conventional use of internet memes can be extended just as verbal constructions can.

E-LEARNING IN THE UNIVERSITY ENVIRONMENT

The paper focuses on the issue of e-learning in the university environment. Developments in IT have led to the emergence of new ways of working and training for students. Thus, in recent years, in order to increase the recruitment of students, the academic environment has implemented in educational offers online teaching and learning methodologies, less expensive. Distance learning has gained a special rise in the university environment, through the prism of new technologies, being approached the notions of e-learning, virtual library or virtual university. In recent years, an educational boom has been launched through Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs), a concept that offers anyone the opportunity to study anywhere and anytime. MOOCs are essentially an online phenomenon, integrating the connectivity offered by social networking, with facilitating access to recognized experts in a field of study, as well as to collections of online resources with free access.

An online world of bias. The mediating role of cognitive biases on extremist attitudes

Abstract Extremists often aim to paint a biased picture of the world. Radical narratives, for instance, in forms of internet memes or posts, could thus potentially trigger cognitive biases in their users. These cognitive biases, in turn, might shape the users’ formation of extremist attitudes. To test this association, an online experiment (N=392) was conducted with three types of right-wing radical narratives (elite-critique, ingroup-outgroup, violence) in contrast to two control conditions (nonpolitical and neutral political control condition). We then measured the impact of these narratives on the activation of three cognitive biases of relevance in the formation of extremist attitudes: the ingroup-outgroup bias, the negativity bias, and the just-world hypothesis. The results indicate that violence narratives seem to be particularly harmful as they heighten participants’ negativity bias and increase just-world views. Just-world views in turn show a positive relationship to extremist attitudes, which highlights the need of regulating violence invocations on social media.

The cute and the fluffy

When serious official political statements are not enough to get people’s votes, politicians often turn to attention-grabbing and emotion-triggering self-presentation. They give the public access to their “normal, everyday” lives through personalisation and use other tools of “new” politics to create a favourable image of themselves. They can also show the unexpected, backstage aspects of their lives, such as their interactions with their pets. The paper analyses four case studies from different countries (Belarus, Estonia, Slovakia and Spain) in which politicians’ references to their pets became a prominent topic in internet communication and provoked numerous humorous reactions in the form of memes. By looking at various degrees of politicians’ personalisation strategies, we show that “new” and “old” politics should be regarded as the poles of a continuum rather than a binary opposition. We also discuss the content, form and stance of the humorous internet memes posted in reaction to the appearance of politicians’ pets in the news. Our research indicates that such memes function to provoke a discussion and, as a result, form a polyvocal commentary on events; the politicians, however, must take risks accompanying unconventional, revealing political communication and hope that “there's no such thing as bad publicity”.

Effects and perception of multimodal recontextualization in political Internet memes. Evidence from two online experiments in Austria

Internet memes are an integral part of social media communication and a popular genre for humorous engagement in online political discourses. A meme is a collective of multimodal signs that refer to each other through shared formal, content-related, and/or stance-related characteristics and can be recontextualized on different levels: (1) language, (2) mode of presentation, and (3) humor. In this paper, we examine the perceptions and effects of recontextualization in image macros—the most prominent meme subgenre. Two between-subjects online experiments from Austria offer a holistic approach to meaning-making through multimodal recontextualization in political image macros. The first experiment explored the perception of language variety and its effects on users' intentions to forward a humorous image macro. The second experiment further investigated the effects of a political message's language variety, mode of presentation, and humor on users' perceptions and behavioral intentions. The experiments' results indicate that perceptions and behavioral intentions are mainly affected by a political message's presentation as an image macro, while the recontextualization of language variety and humor plays a minor role. The study contributes to the growing body of knowledge on Internet memes as multimodal and recontextualizable political messages from the receivers' point of view.

"Even more than that, men love cars": "Car guy" memes and hegemonic masculinity.

The construction of gender identities occurs through a variety of social forces, including memes widely circulated on social media. Beyond the function of internet memes as entertainment, they also promote gender-based bonding through humor in ways that encourage performative gender roles central to self-image. Decoding memes as a form of contemporary data reveals desires and fears, both conscious and unconscious, that underlie dramaturgical performances supporting hegemonic masculinity. In the case of "car guys," car aficionados whose passion for cars is integral to their identity, memes reflect the group's aspirational presentation of self, including cars, as a symbolic physical embodiment of hegemonic masculinity. This semiotic study of 60 car guy memes shared on social media uncovered recurrent motifs centered around cars' ability to affirm men's position in the metaphorical driver's seat. Flashy cars were often portrayed as more desirable than women, a sentiment encapsulated by the meme, "Men love women, but even more than that, men love cars." This novel analysis of memes explores the ostensible male preference for fantasy cars over emotionally risky relationships. Two salient themes relevant to conceptions of masculinity emerged: (1) car guys' apprehensions about male-female interdependence and (2) frustration with women's discretion in meeting men's emotional and sexual needs. Memes as a cross-sectional, unfiltered data source provide insight into the need to reconcile car culture with gender equality.

The SUCHO Ukrainian War Memes Collection

ABSTRACT Since the onset of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, internet memes about the war have been widely disseminated through social media, both in Ukraine and abroad. The Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO) initiative uses crowdsourcing to collect Ukrainian war memes. Community submissions are curated and published on the interactive online SUCHO Meme Wall. The resulting archival collection is diverse in its content and format, preserving an important element of Russo-Ukrainian war discourse and offering unique material for research and teaching.

Фразеологізація інтернет-мемів

The article analyzes modern Internet memes, which, due to their precedent, are able to be phraseologized in mass communication. Memes are considered intertextual polycode units that arise as a verbalized reflection on the dynamic development of events and actively function in the virtual media space. It has been proven that the language of Internet memes is built on irony and sarcasm using stylistic puns and "word games", oxymorons and gradation techniques, as well as aphorisms, precedent quotes, established constructions. A special emphasis is placed on war memes, which are characterized, in our opinion, by a set of primary features: (a) a catchy word, expression, verbal / non-verbal sign must be precedents; (b) spontaneity in appearance; (c) flexibility to modifications in order to interpret different events and phenomena; (d) appeal to the background knowledge of recipients; (e) semantic unity in form and content; (e) reproduction of cultural memory and response to the digital challenges of modernity. All this enables Internet memes in language communication to phraseologize and be able to be widely replicated in the information space. It is emphasized that communicators can independently create Internet memes and distribute them on their own media resources, which emphasizes the ability of memes to be constantly modified. For illustrative material, we turned to the information of the "Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online" (SUCHO) portal, which has more than 10,000 memes as cultural markers of Ukraine. Having analyzed the memes of 2023, we can state that most Internet memes are precedent phenomena of the modern media space, and therefore have the ability to phraseologize. Therefore, Internet memes are a powerful source of new phraseology, have the ability to stylistically transform and help to strengthen the impression of a relevant informational message.

The internet-meme and the ethics: A review of scientific research for 2018–2022

The article accumulates, systematizes and qualifies the most significant modern and relevant scientific works in the field of digital ethics and memetics over the past five years by means of a semisystematic analysis. This method allows us to consider various areas of research for a specified period and provide an overview of scientific sources on issues of digital ethics and memetics. The studies reviewed by the author were selected on scientific and technical bases as eLibrary, CyberLeninka and CORE according to the following keywords: Internet meme, memetics, digital ethics, ethics of a journalist, social networks. The author’s focus is on identifying gaps in research on both internet memes and digital ethics. The author aims to identify different aspects of the relationship between the Internet meme and the ethics of its creation and distribution, as well as to outline the prospects for further research of the problems raised. The presented article specifies the range of existing semantic gaps in scientific concepts and identifies the main lines of development of the problem. As a result of the study the author notes that the study of creolized texts comes down to three problematic issues: how they influence the user’s picture of the world, how they become popular and who creates them. At the same time, the ethical side of the issue is not touched upon by the authors in their works. Most scholarly articles on digital ethics and journalism ethics boil down to three areas: analysis of codes of ethics, analysis of user behavior on social networks and analysis of the spread of fake information online. Thus, the author concludes that digital ethics scholars almost never consider Internet memes as a subject of study, and vice versa, researchers of Internet memes rarely address ethical issues in their works.

Internet memes as heritage in becoming and its problems: The methodology of heritization and the formation of cultural memory in cyberspace

After defining Internet memes and their place within broader popular culture, this paper examines the methodology and interpretation of a large-scale collection of Internet memes used by the KnowYourMeme database. By observing the changed context in which Internet memes are created, shared, or forgotten, questions are raised about the formation of meme cultural memory in cyberspace, leading to critical commentary on the ways in which they are collected. By analyzing the heritization of Internet memes, this paper addresses the following issues: the formation of the future meme heritage, scope of cultural memory in cyberspace, redefinition of remembering and forgetting within the panmnemonic tendencies of online heritage projects. Using the KnowYourMeme database as an example, the problems of cyberspace heritage are discussed, and the different online projects dealing with Internet memes as heritage are compared. By defining ?on-the-fly? memory, which indicates the simultaneity of the process of creating and preserving heritage, this paper offers a critical review of the existing cyber projects of ?saving everything?.

Интернет-мем в семиозисе комического в свете активных процессов в интернет-коммуникации

The work deals with semiotic and linguistic means of creating the comic in polycode Internet memes in modern Internet communication in Russian. The material of the study is polycode Internet memes discovered by the authors in the process of Internet monitoring of the Runet in the period from 2010 to 2023. The postulate of “two worlds exisnence”, “doubling of the reality” as the main principle of comic semiosis and its pragmatics is formulated. The paper also discusses models of interaction between verbal and non-verbal components in a comic Internet meme: non-verbal and verbal components are somehow correlated in semantic and/or emotional terms; the verbal component is logically opposed to the non-verbal one; the verbal and non-verbal components belong to logically incompatible conceptual areas. It is noted that the functioning of humorous Internet memes is based on a “language game”. As a means of creating a comic effect, such varieties of “language game” as word-formative game, semantic game, phonetic game and pragma-semantic game are analyzed. It is concluded that the Internet meme is a multi-level semiotic instrument for creating comic in the environment of modern Internet communication, actively exploiting its specific properties such as polycodeness, interactivity and intertextuality.