In a time marked by a convergence of media platforms ( Jenkins, 2006), when content flows swiftly from one medium to another, memes have become more relevant than ever to communication scholarship.
But this is no longer the case in an era of blurring boundaries between interpersonal and mass, professional and amateur, bottom-up and top-down communications. As units that propagate gradually through interpersonal contact, they were considered unsuitable for exploring content that is transmitted simultaneously from a single institutional source to the masses. Until the twenty-first century, mass communication researchers felt comfortable overlooking memes.
For the most part, however, it was utterly ignored in the field of communication. Coined by a biologist, the term meme has been widely adapted (and disputed) in many disciplines, to include psychology, philosophy, anthropology, folklore, and linguistics. The second premise is that we should look at memes from a communication-oriented perspective. In this endeavor I follow the footsteps of researchers such as Johnson ( 2007), Knobel and Lankshear ( 2007), Jones and Schieffelin ( 2009), Benett (2003), and Burgess ( 2008), who used the meme as a prism for understanding certain aspects of contemporary culture without embracing the whole set of implications and meanings ascribed to it over the years. While enthusiastic advocators argue that the meme explains everything and their opponents assert it explains and changes absolutely nothing, it might be worth asking whether the meme concept may be useful for something. In what follows, I explore the utility of memes for understanding digital culture, positing throughout the following two premises: First, that the intense emotions and dramatic statements characterizing both sides of the memes debate need to be toned down. Memes, since at least as early as the 1990s, have been said to “replicate at rates that make even fruit flies and yeast cells look glacial in comparison” ( Dennett, 1993, p. While memes were conceptualized long before the digital era, the unique features of the Internet turned their diffusion into a ubiquitous and highly visible routine. The uptick in vibrant popular discourse about memes in an era increasingly defined by Internet communication is not coincidental. According to this popular notion, an Internet meme may spread in its original form, but it often also spawns user-created derivatives. In the vernacular discourse of netizens, the phrase “Internet meme” is commonly applied to describe the propagation of content items such as jokes, rumors, videos, or websites from one person to others via the Internet.
Recently, however, the concept once kicked out the door by many academics is coming back through the Windows (and other operating systems) of Internet users.
Ever since Richard Dawkins coined the term in 1976 to describe gene-like infectious units of culture that spread from person to person, memes have been the subject of constant academic debate, derision, and even outright dismissal. Or so at least a glance into the world of academic literature would suggest. Memes in a Digital World: Reconciling With a Conceptual Troublemaker