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

First, we should think of the viral and the memetic as two ends of a dynamic spectrum rather than as a binary dichotomy. In fact, purely viral content probably does not exist—once a photo, or a video, reaches a certain degree of popularity on the Web, you can bet that someone, somewhere, will alter it.

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.

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The main difference between Internet memes and virals thus relates to variability: whereas the viral comprises a single cultural unit (such as a video, photo, or joke) that propagates in many copies, an Internet meme is always a collection of texts. You can identify a single video and say “This is a viral video” without referring to any other text,

Treating memes as cultural building blocks,

According to this logic, a video structured for easy replication has a chance to succeed in YouTube’s attention economy.

There are two types of preferred users for seeding: “hubs”—people with a high number of connections to others; and “bridges”—people who connect between otherwise unconnected parts of the network.

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

According to Dawkins’s analysis in The Selfish Gene, memes that spread successfully incorporate three basic properties—longevity, fecundity, and copy fidelity. All three are enhanced by the Internet. Online meme transmission has higher copy fidelity (that is, accuracy) than communication through other media, since digitization allows lossless infor