Memes in Digital Culture (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series)

If indeed memes are evolving as “the language of the Internet,”

Asaf Nissenboim, who studied memetic practices in 4chan, found that appropriate meme use has become a form of cultural capital in this setting, differentiating between those who are “in the know” and are thus part of the community and those who are outsiders.

Yet whereas in the predigital era political memes were mostly part of the private lives of ordinary people who were ranting against those in power, in the digital era these expressions have become part of the public sphere: a performative display of opinions that is meant to be heard far and wide.

Thus, in order to produce and understand LOLCats, users need to master LOLspeak; to create a rage comic, the user requires familiarity with a broad range of new symbols. These genres are thus strongly associated with what Ryan Milner describes as the meme subculture, which flourishes on specific sites such as 4chan, Tumblr, and Reddit.

An initial observation stemming from this survey is that meme genres can be divided into three groups: (1) Genres that are based on the documentation of “real-life” moments (photo fads, flash mobs). These genres are always anchored in a concrete and nondigital space. (2) Genres that are based on explicit manipulation of visual or audiovisual mass-m

According to Ryan Milner’s illuminating analysis, these meme genres tend to focus on a small core of subjects associated with winners and losers in social life. He tags them as “Fail,” “What the fuck,” and “Win” memes.

image macros,

A simple explanation for the extensive memetic reactions that such photos generate is that they tend to capture people in a somewhat ludicrous posture—in particular, it is the ungainly positioning of their bodies that makes people look funny.

Users who capitalize on the incongruity embedded in the original memetic photo tend to do one of two things: to deepen the ridicule associated with the incongruity by presenting even stronger juxtapositions suggested by the original photo