Although they spread on a micro basis, their impact is on the macro level: memes shape the mindsets, forms of behavior, and actions of social groups.

This leads to a somewhat surprising conclusion: “bad” texts make “good” memes in contemporary participatory culture. Since the logic of contemporary participatory culture is based on the active involvement of users, incompleteness serves as a textual hook for further dialogue, and for the successful spread of the meme. Thus, the ostensibly

A fundamental feature of many memetic photos is a striking incongruity between two or more elements in the frame.

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

Treating memes as cultural building blocks,

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

As I will elaborate in the next section, this attribute aligns with a common social logic: in an era marked by “network individualism,” people use memes to simultaneously express both their uniqueness and their connectivity.

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.

The term “meme” was introduced by the biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. As part of his larger effort to apply evolutionary theory to cultural change, Dawkins defined memes as small cultural units of transmission, analogous to genes, that spread from person to person by copying or imitation. Examples of memes in his