The success of an original meme depends on how it performs identity.
By: Mae Cosgrove
Course: Language and Digital Media (Ling 3800)
Advisor: Prof. Kira Hall
LURA 2020
Today, original memes are not only easy to create, but also shared among people within their various communities of practice as a means of identity performance. I was interested to see how this was executed and the factors that were involved in successful memes. I examined a collection of memes created by CU Boulder Rowers and shared within a GroupMe chat. Through this study, I found that by associating oneself with an in-group through unspoken indexicality, a meme is more likely to be successful and create group social bonding, thus perpetuating the participatory culture of memes.听
According to Gretchen McCulloch (2019), author of Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language, internet culture yields memes as participatory media, meaning that they have become an integral part of our means of digital communication. The sharing and recontextualization of original memes is a compulsory practice for those involved in the chat, set forth by unspoken social rules and media ideologies of the group chat. As these memes are shared, they become a part of the viewers鈥� communicative repertoires, meaning that the meme becomes something like a lexical item, a vocabulary word that can then be recontextualized, remediated, and used or understood in different situations. This contributes to the act of 鈥渞emixing,鈥� which is a crucial practice of successful memes according to Knobel and Lankshear (2007).听
Additionally, Crispin Thurlow and Adam Jaworski (2011) discuss the idea of stancetaking, which 鈥渆ntails the various ways people position themselves with respect to the things other people say or do.鈥� We often see this in the exchange of memes as a form of communication. The meme will communicate the position held by the sender and therefore place them into whatever social category is deemed appropriate by that person鈥檚 social affiliates. This may be explicit (overt) or implicit (covert). Thurlow and Jaworski view stancetaking as an evaluation of whether something may be desirable or undesirable. In other words, we use stancetaking as a way to index 鈥済ood鈥� or 鈥渂ad鈥� qualities about ourselves and others. Elitist stancetaking, in particular, is when a claim of distinction and superiority is made. So now, it is not only a vague position that is being posited, but also an assertion that someone or something possesses qualities that are inherently better or best. Stancetaking occurs within all social interactions, and elitist stancetaking over digital discourse is an inevitable byproduct, as memes become a more prominent means of communication.
In my study, I found that identity performance relies more on how something is memed rather than what is memed, which is to say that those features which are indexed (implied) carry more weight than those that are overtly stated. It was found that the action of overtly presenting oneself through a meme is indexical of an attention seeker, reminiscent of giving themselves a pat on the back (as see in Figure 1). However, if done covertly and cleverly enough, meme-ing oneself as a demonstration of team unity and social bonding can yield positive responses (as seen in Figure 2). This can be seen through the disparity of 鈥渓ikes鈥� between Figures 1 and 2.
Figure 1听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 Figure 2
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The element of remediation is an important aspect of layering humor within meme culture, along with the overt/covertness of the presentation of self within the memes. Those which were remediated from well-known pop culture references proved to be more successful than mere random images. The references that are remediated into successful memes must have multiple usages and be able to be reapplied to new contexts, as seen in Figure 2. Knobel and Lankshear (2007) associate rich intertextuality with the success of popular internet memes, stating that the 鈥渓ayering of cross-references appears to help the fecundity of a meme by encouraging subsequent photoshoppers to make their own engaging cross-cultural references that add layers of meaning for 鈥榯hose in the know鈥� to an already humorous contribution.鈥�
Mae Cosgrove
Mae Cosgrove is majoring in Linguistics with minors in Spanish and Sociology at the 乐播传媒 Boulder. She is pursuing her Bachelor鈥檚 and Master鈥檚 degrees as a part of the Linguistics Bachelor鈥檚 - Accelerated Master鈥檚 program. Mae also loves traveling and collecting old records.