Abstract
This comprehensive work probes various facets of Internet meme from different perspectives. It analyzes the origin of the term “meme”; its function, power, and ideology embodied in Internet meme; its commercial and political types; its audience and identity; and its artistic implications. Drawing upon a host of theories and concepts in the fields of semiotics, cultural studies, discourse studies, and politics and communication studies, the author offers a kaleidoscopic study of Internet memes in relation to digital culture. It also involves an interesting array of critical empirical studies of the latest and most popular Internet memes in various social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.
The book is sorted into eight Chapters. Chapters 1 and 2 serve as the introduction of the basic theories and concepts as the start point of the whole work. In the beginning chapter, the author reviews Dawkins’ (1989) conception of meme that “conveys the idea of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation” (p. 182; italics in original). The Internet meme is similar to Dawkins’ original concept of meme in that it grabs people’s attention and is propagated and transmitted via resemblance or reproduction. However, the author argues that Internet meme is more oriented toward the concept of enthymeme, as it in essence embeds and embodies visual argumentation. In addition, meme is usually transmitted through remixing (for instance, parodying, amending, and referencing other sources), rather than merely imitating. Subsequently, the author refers to Shifman’s (2013) model regarding the tripartite typology of meme, based on which he further develops an elaborated model of Internet meme: the content (deliberate communication without human speech embedded with ideological practices), the form (category of utility such as video, GIF, and image macro), and the stance (socially charged meaning constructed through multimodal semiosis and intertextuality). Chapter 2 discusses the inherent relationship between discourse, ideology, power, and Internet meme with its multi-semiotic and intertextual nature. Based on the ideas of Foucault, Barthes, Althusser, and others’ classical ideas on discourse, the author argues that power is maintained through discourse, and ideologies penetrate and get operationalized through Internet meme. Besides, Internet meme involves various semiotic modes and embeds other texts in constructing ideology. Chapter 3 argues that meme as a type of genre undergoes generic development from its original form. Based on structuration theory, it holds that social structure is maintained and constructed through agency and predominantly contains agency. Internet meme, just as social institution does, endures three processes: maintenance, elaboration, and modification. Its initial form is a type of spreadable media adhering to social structure; subsequently, the spreadable media are altered by individual into emergent meme, which in turn is further remixed and imitated as Internet meme.
Chapters 4 and 5 deal with political memes and commercially motivated Internet memes. The author offers a detailed empirical study of various popular political and commercial memes propagated in various social media on the Internet. In Chapter 4, the author analyzes the Jokerized memes of Obama and Trump (the Internet memes that tampered with their photos into the appearance of the Joker, the antagonist in the movie “Batman”), the Internet meme of the Distracted Boyfriend (used to symbolize the triangular relationship between the European Union, Spain, and Catalonia), and various Internet memes satirizing Putin who was regarded as permanently ruling Russia. Through the analyses, the author demonstrates how political memes embody the ideological construction and the participatory culture of the netizens. On the one hand, Internet meme boosts participation, and on the other hand, they are merely provisions for people to shun the “politics of eternity” (Snyder, 2018) which lampoons the fascist(-like) ruling style that still penetrates the modern politics in various countries in differing forms. Chapter 5 offers empirical analyses of various cases of commercially used Internet memes in promotion and advertising campaigns, including Wendy’s “Where’s the Beef” commercial, Geico Insurance’s use of the “Numa Numa Guy” video, Virgin Media’s use of the “Success Kid” meme, and Delta Aline’s use of Psy’s “Gangnam Style” meme. Through the analyses, the author demonstrates how these commercial use of Internet meme embodies the semiotics of cool to appeal to potential customers, that is, to “provide individuals with something unusual, not mainstream (and therefore ideally cool) in order to resonate with (possibly millennial) audiences” (p. 95). However, the utilization risks not least violating copyright which depends on the legal entities to decide, but more important is that the commercialized Internet meme may come to be understood and altered in a different way departing from the businesses’ initial expectations or objectives.
Chapters 6 and 7 center on audience and identity with regard to Internet meme. In Chapter 6, the audience of Internet meme is viewed from various perspectives, including the following: (1) the economy and gratification model which posits that audiences select media needing the least effort and affording highest gratification; (2) the dominant–negotiated–oppositional decoding of message production (a. the author’s preferred reading of readers who hold a similar view; b. the incorporation of the readers’ own particular personal experience in the decoding; and c. the decoding against the dominant reading, respectively) postulated by Hall (2012); (3) a “meme-centric understanding of audience” (p. 105) which posits that Internet memes do not necessarily target specified audiences, but they constitute the microactivisms which refer to micro-discursive activities including posts, comments, and reactions that can help achieve political purposes despite being without mass mobilizations; and (4) Internet meme inherits the postmodern critical vis-à-vis lucid purposes without targeting a real (specified) audience. In Chapter 7, exemplified by the interesting analyses of the Internet memes of Babadook (a monster in children’s story book which was later used to represent lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and others [LGBTQ+] groups) and Emma Gonzalez (a survivor of the Parkland school shooting on 14 February 2018), the author shows how Internet meme serves to polarize and divide people; it incurs people to identify the similar-minded groups by amending the original images in favor of the imaged audiences.
The last and eighth chapter takes a step further to heighten Internet meme as a form of art that can be seen in terms of Dadaism and surrealism. Internet memes share similarities with Dadaist art and Dadaist literary theory in the following aspects: First, they “mash-up content for discursive purposes” (p. 137) regardless of the joke and sarcasms embedded in; this is just like Dadaist art’s major significance which lies in subverting the conventional understanding of the boundary between art and non-art regardless of its sarcastic content. Second, it is subject to the binary interpretation from the perspective of Neue Sachlichkeit, a literary theory postulated by Benjamin (1969 [1935]). Internet memes in this sense possess the internal (referring to the original events or spectacle Internet memes derive from) and external (“the larger situation which the semiotic function of the meme finally signifies,” p. 138) aspects of semiotic functions. Grounded on these observations, the author introduces the Neo-Dadaist semiotics, which is presented by analyzing the Internet meme changed from Trump’s “America First” to be a video of “America First, Netherland Second,” in addition to a systematic analysis of the popular memes from 2016 to 2017.
In general, this is a very insightful work that probes Internet meme from a myriad of perspectives and points of view. The author innovatively grounds his start point on the concept of enthymeme rather than Dawkins’ conception of meme. This highlights the argumentative dimensions of Internet meme and hence orients the whole discussion toward social critique and memetic politics of the digital culture. Main types of Internet memes including the political and the commercially motivated are sufficiently covered and probed with in-depth theoretical concerns and intriguing empirical analyses of up-to-date memes. To elevate meme as an art form is also a quite novel idea, and the author argues for this convincingly through a host of case studies, in addition to systematic theoretical engagements with mainstream artistic and literary critical theories and practices. This book hence can be seen as a must-read for researchers keen on the studies of digital culture and in particular Internet memes. It will also interest students in communication studies, sociology, discourse studies, cultural studies, and among other relevant areas in humanities at large.
