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

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 unfinish

Simplicity is an important attribute contributing to the creation of user-generated versions of the meme. While any video can be edited or remixed, only a simple one can be imitated easily.

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.

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.

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.

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

image macros,

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

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.