All posts tagged: meme culture

Call for Papers: Issue 34, InVisible Memes for Cultural Teens

For our 34th issue, Invisible Culture seeks scholarly articles and creative works that approach internet memes as aesthetic, cultural, and political objects of study. Memes have been discussed largely in their communicative and participatory capacities, particularly in the fields of communications, political science, and other social sciences. There are fewer examples of humanistic work approaching memes and memetics as world-building practices and as cultural objects that foreground meaningful sense-making. The last major journal issue devoted to the topic was a 2014 special issue of The Journal of Visual Culture.1 Memes have since moved from diversion to discourse, from formally simplistic to kaleidoscopically complex, from niche to mainstream. Memes draw endlessly from the ever-growing dustbin of popular visual culture, returning modified images that are, in turn, instantly modifiable. Memes are as much, if not more, a part of most people’s daily cultural exposure as television, film, or radio. Savvy creators of “legacy” media anticipate memification (one need only think of Lil Nas X sliding down the stripper pole to Hell) and marketing professionals “in on the …