Abstract
Long after Dawkins (1976) first proposed the idea of memes as cultural units that can be transmitted through copying and imitation at a social level, the term ‘Internet meme’ is commonly applied today to describe various forms of digital texts created, circulated, modified, and shared by countless cultural participants over vast networks and collectives. They are multimodal objects that intertwine language, images, audio, video, hypertext, and more (Milner, 2016). While they may appear to be trivial and mundane artifacts, a growing number of digital culture scholars consider Internet memes to be ‘(post)modern folklore’ relevant to the analysis of contemporary culture born in the Web 2.0 era (Milner, 2016; Shifman, 2014). Multimodal representation, transformative reappropriation, and wide-ranging community-oriented dissemination via accessible applications and platforms are all parts of ‘memetic activities’ that play an essential role in the construction of collective norms and values in the contemporary digital culture landscape (Shifman, 2014). This study investigates the cultural-semiotic nature of the Internet meme as an ‘open work,’ in which the overall signification, as claimed by Eco (1962), may remain constant throughout the assembling and reassembling of both signifiers and signifieds among numerous sign users. As preliminary research, this study employs visual performativity as a core concept of Internet memes and constructs a conceptual diagram that includes appreciative, appropriative, resonant, and resistant memes. In particular, this study focuses on the emerging relationship between resistant memes and their DIY citizenship (Ratto and Boler, 2014).
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
New Media, Technology and the Arts
KEYWORDS
Internet Meme, Open Work, Cultural Semiotics, Visual Performativity, DIY Citizenship
