All posts tagged: memetics

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

Published by IVC Editorial Board

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 …

Erratic Copying: Consummate Memetics in the Year 2012

Published by Abby Glogower

Perhaps the greatest delight in teaching is watching students realize that debates are often not what they initially appear. I relished this transition in particular this fall, when my freshman working on an argumentative paper about the future of journalism began (mercifully) to drift from her original question—echoing the panicked buzz of so many alarmist headlines—“is print dead?” towards the infinitely more sophisticated “what does it mean to digest journalism digitally and how does this readership mode both continue and differ from others?” Inspired by the impending election, she asked her classmates during a draft review clinic whether she might discuss how election coverage played out online through social media—moving beyond the articles on news outlets themselves to address the ways topic circulated via Facebook walls and even enjoyed a second life as memes. The class seized enthusiastically on this question and began referencing images they had seen “reporting” the campaigns’ myriad gaffs and malapropisms. Everyone giggled when I pulled up one of my personal favorites from the recent presidential debate entitled One Meme to …