Are Internet Memes Academic?

Concepts

Memes; viral videos; academia; communication; human behavior; digitalization.

Summary

Shifman explores the evolution of memes in the age of the Internet. He considers the proliferation of memes now that people have access to the Internet and questions what can be learned about culture and communication from these memes. He also talks about the issues that academics have with memes and why they hesitate to study this form of communication.

Quotations

“How, if at all, is the meme concept useful for understanding digital culture? What important obstacles stand in the way of its being accepted in research, and how can these barriers be overcome?” (Shifman 2).

“Among the criticisms raised against it, four positions are particularly relevant to our context. The first is the concept’s ambiguity: There is disagreement about what precisely a meme is, which leads to difficulties in quantifying and measuring it. Second, the analogy between nature and culture feeding the field has been criticized as reductive, materialistic, and ineffective in describing complex human behaviors. Third, the conscious selection and mutation of memes has generated heated debates over human agency and memetic control. Finally, some critics claim that memetics has no added value: It does not offer tools or insights beyond those employed in traditional disciples as such as cultural anthropology or linguistics” (3).

“Two biological analogies are especially prevalent in the discourse about memes viruses and genes. The meme-as-virus analogy sees the similarity between memes and disease agents. Taking epidemiology as its model, it considers memes the cultural equivalents of flu bacilli, transmitted through the communicational equivalents of sneezes (Alvarez, 2004)” (4).

“Copies become, in this sense, more important than the ‘original’: They are the raison d’etre of digital communication” (12).

Commentary

I’m not too big into memes, but I did find this article interesting for many reasons. One of the small aspects of this article that stuck out to me was the analogy of memes as both genes and viruses. Of course we have all heard the expression “viral” in relation to content on the web, but I never thought about this in a literal or negative sense. We always think of viral content as a good thing — you want your content to go viral, whether for your personal brand or for your business. But, as a biological analogy, viruses are a bad thing. It is interesting that the connotation for viral content online is positive, while actual viruses are viewed as a bad thing. When you consider memes as “the cultural equivalents of flu bacilli”, it doesn’t sound like a good thing (4).

Perhaps this is the issue that academics take with memes and studying memes seriously. There are many Internet trends that can indicate human behaviors, but that academics find lacking in substance or content. This aversion to popular things such as memes can make it difficult for them to be legitimized in the world of academia. Still, I think that Shifman’s various articles about memes proves that they can be analyzed in an academic context. There is important information about how people communicate and interact that can be found in memes, as Shifman explores in both of the articles that we read this week. Memes are much more than trivial pieces of content shared on the Internet — they can be looked at seriously in order to learn more about human behavior. Shifman’s critique of popular memes and his analysis for what they indicate about communication prove that they can be studied seriously. But just because something can be studied academically does not necessarily mean that it should be. Memes still have a long way to go before they are widely accepted in academia.

Questions

What do your favorite memes say about human interaction? Are memes worth studying?