Kaplan & Nova - Internet Meme Culture

FRÉDÉRIC KAPLAN
NICOLAS NOVA
The Internet
Meme
Culture
B I G
N O W
The Internet Meme Culture
The publisher and the authors
express their thanks to the Ecole
polytechnique fédérale de
Lausanne for their support towards
the publication of this book.
The Big Now collection is edited

by Frédéric Kaplan, Professor of Digital
Humanities at Ecole polytechnique
fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and Nicolas
Nova, Professor at Haute école d’art et de
design in Geneva (HEAD).
Translation of all texts except

both interviews and text from
Christian Bauckhage: Michael Mitchell
Design: Notter + Vigne
Printed in Switzerland
The EPFL Press is the English-language

imprint of the Foundation of the Presses
polytechniques et universitaires
romandes (PPUR). The PPUR publishes
mainly works of teaching and research
of the Ecole polytechnique fédérale de
Lausanne (EPFL), of universities and
other institutions of higher education.
www.epflpress.org
ISBN 978-2-940222-94-0
© EPFL Press, 2016
CH–1015 Lausanne
All rights reserved, including those

of translation into other languages.
No part of this book may be reproduced
in any form — by photoprint, microfilm,
or any other means — nor transmitted
or translated into a machine language
without written permission from
the publisher.
NICOLAS NOVA
The Internet
Meme Culture
B I G
N O W
CONTENTS

07

16
20
How to create an Internet meme 36

39
47
54

76
86
90
05
Introduction
06
Memes as replications
of the “même”
Richard Dawkins coined the term meme as an analogy to a

gene in biology. The term designates a cultural replication —
sometimes in a pure form, often with alterations — using
imitative sequences. It is also a reference to the French word
même, which means “the same.” A meme is what persists
when the “même” (same) is re-produced. However, defining
what persists and pinning down the unit of replication
is not a simple task. It might be the “content” of culture
(for Dawkins, the opening theme of Beethoven’s Symphony
No. 9 is an example of a meme) or a certain set of behaviors,
such as a dance move.
The relative ease of reproducing and modifying digital content

has made memes a central element of Internet culture.They
are also an excellent example of the complexity of the replica-
tion / modification phenomenon.Internet memes self-organize
in networks,where they are then reconfigured and reinforced.
Digital tools have made memes easily identifiable and trace-
able, and they also facilitate cataloguing.The result is an emer-
gencence of a complex culture that often appears absurd.
07
THE INTERNET MEME CULTURE
Viral logic and memetic logic
The process of memetic replication differs in com-

plexity from other, simpler logics of Internet propagation.
When a link is widely shared online, perhaps with a com-
mentary but without modification, we call this viral propa-
gation; the content remains identical to the original post,
unmodified for each new post or share. Memetic replica-
tion implies, on the contrary, a reinterpretation. The con-
tent is not simply circulated but is used as a matrix from
which new content is subsequently generated. The music
video “Gangnam Style” is the archetypal example of a com-
bination of these two logics. South Korean musician Psy
produced a video that was the first to ever reach 1 billion
views on YouTube, becoming the first global megahit. Yet
unlike most videos, “Gangnam Style” lent itself superbly to
reinterpretation because of its simple, efficient style, gen-
erating thousands of parodies adapted from the cultural
contexts of each new version. On its path to global stardom,
the video metamorphosed into thousands of new versions,
each self-tailored to specific cultures — the essence of the
logic of memetic propagation.
Memetic reproduction always implies a process of con-

tent division: first into a structuring, fixed content to be
duplicated — the matrix — and secondly, the content to
be modified during the reinterpretation. The same content
can be divided in various ways. The video for “Gangnam
Style” proposes, for example, an easy-to-assimilate choreo-
graphic language that is as accessible to world personalities
08
INTRODUCTION
(Ban Ki-moon, David Cameron) as it is to thousands of

school children around the world.These simple moves were
imitated, reinterpreted and parodied to such an extent as to
constitute a veritable global phenomenon of dance repro-
duction. Firemen, nurses and even NASA scientists pro-
duced their own versions of the video and put them on the
web — sometimes in the spirit of parody, sometimes with
politics in mind, often simply to produce and share some-
thing “cool.” In this case, the visual pattern of “Gangnam
Style” was the heart of the imitative reproduction. In this
way, the viral and memetic logics fed into each other and
reinforced the phenomenon. “Gangnam Style” is one of the
first global success stories of the power behind the Inter-
net’s viral force, but it also allowed for a refined cultural
adaptation by offering a solid matrix to generate thou-
sands of other memes.
Graphics and linguistics systems
Cataloging and listing memes is a highly developed

activity in some Internet communities. Sites such as
“know your meme” identify each one and trace its ori-
gin, development and interpretations. Memes reproduce
according to various imitative logics that characterize
both similarities and differences.
Sometimes it’s just a sentence, as in the case of the cry

“This Is Sparta!” from the movie 300, or only a character,
such as the character Stan from the video game “The Secret
of Monkey Island,” that plays the role of the replicative
09
unit. The unit shown is found in various contexts, and its

comical effect is a function of the distance from its original
context.
Viral content, for example a successful video, may give rise

to parodies that take the visual, narrative or sound struc-
ture of the model without adhering strictly to the form.
Thus most successful Internet videos are grouped under
the form of parodies. The video “Charlie Bit Me,” in which
a baby bites his brother’s finger, has given rise to many
remixes and dramatizations. Some of these remixes com-
bine two memetic lineages, with the king from “This is
Sparta!,” for example, replacing the face of the boy bitten
by his brother.
Finally, some memes form genuine graphics or linguistics

systems. “Image Macros” are a visual format that graph-
ically combine certain types of images and typographic
elements according to recognizable models. Among the
most widespread image macros systems, LOLcats usually
presents a photograph of a cat and a humorous caption,
written in broken English in capital letters with a specific
font. These graphics systems are invitations to produce
other messages following the same pattern and to invent
other derivative expression templates. Innovation there-
fore takes place on two fronts: in the message content and
in the message template.
The broken English used in LOLcat, also called LOLspeak,

consists of syntactic and orthographic forms that are
10
INTRODUCTION
deliberately bizarre but that tend to stabilize to form an

independent language. Stereotyped phrases are routinely
imitated and adapted for different contexts. As such, the
imitative reproduction is built around syntactic patterns.
The bias of a new syntax sometimes includes the collateral

effects of rough translations. Since the late 1990s, this lin-
guistic phenomenon has been emblematized in the iconic
phrase, “All Your Base Are Belong to Us,” a poor English
translation of a Japanese sentence. The strangeness of this
formulation was then standardized as a generic template
for producing other sentences of the same type.
Autonomization of memetic replication and absurdity
One singular and destabilizing characteristic of

memetic replication is that it tends to be presented as a
goal in itself. While viral replication consists of sharing
content that has been deemed relevant, memetic imitation
can transform cultural content without its own quality in a
replicative matrix used to produce thousands of derivatives.
In an apparently arbitrary manner, an image of a sad Keanu
Reeves or a dancing baby are thereby selected as replica-
tive patterns. The global memetic “machine” thus seems
to produce an autonomous and absurd culture whose sole
purpose is fascination with the memetic process.
Is this autonomous and reflexive fascination that leads to

producing memes “for the sake of it” an indication of the
early stage of global memetic processes, or is it the signature
11
of a new twenty-first century cultural logic? The arbitrari-

ness and absurdity of the memetic replication echoes the
surrealist or Dadaist aesthetic of the first half of the twen-
tieth century. Are we facing an immense work of popular,
democratic art that is collectively and continuously con-
structed? Might the ostensible absurdity of the imitated
content mask other political or dissenting discourses? To
what extent is adherence to this arbitrary and apparently
fatuous aesthetic a sign of community recognition?
Sociology of replication
The diversity and aesthetic complexity of memes make

them natural signs of recognition for communities. There
are those who can recognize, understand and decode and
those who remain bewildered, as if facing an incompre-
hensible language. There are those who have sufficiently
mastered the codes to appropriate them and participate
themselves in the processes of replication and reinterpre-
tation, and there are those who have not been sufficiently
initiated to be active players.
As such, memetic culture is naturally hierarchical. Making

a “selfie” and posting it on Facebook is already participat-
ing in a simple and common form of memetic replica-
tion by applying a standardized procedure for producing
a simple and contextually specific visual object. Several
specific subcultures are associated with this practice.
Making a “duck face selfie” (i.e., narrowing the lips like
a duck) is a practice that was fashionable for a moment
12
INTRODUCTION
with adolescents. Putting a hand over one’s face to repro-

duce the “Facepalm” gesture from a famous photograph
of Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek implies a “geek”
reference more specific to a widespread Internet meme.
Making a “selfie” with black sunglasses could be inter-
preted in China as an action in support of the activitist
Chen Guangcheng.
The mastery of complex graphics and linguistics sys-

tems thus identifies specific communities with differing
forms of elitism. To the cultural “literacy” for the “geek”
and “nerd” is added the mastery of a number of tools and
software of varying complexity — particularly Photoshop
— that further divides the population between those play-
ers who are in the know and those who are not.
This sociology of memetic practices is also geographically

delineated. Despite the trend towards globalization induced
by the Internet’s replication processes, cultural differences
remain. There are few countries where the cute cat pic-
tures accompanied by texts are not preferential cultural
vehicles. Memes certainly help create cultural bridges, but
are far from uniformly standardizing behavior. In contrast
to traditional mass media, their participatory dimension
allows subtle re-appropriations that are adapted to local
issues.As with any linguistic system, memes are caught up
in a constant process of dialectalization and creolization.
Spreading a meme by deconstructing a pattern into a

new form or inventing a derivative pattern is, above all,
13
an act of communication. It sends a message to a more or

less well-identified community. Moreover, some memetic
practices are structured according to the nature of the
message being expressed. The creation of image macros
quickly gave rise to archetypal images suitable for the
expression of certain messages. The “Advice Animal” or
“Annoying Facebook Girl” are several examples of mod-
els in which a visual figure supports some type of speech.
These archetypes constitute a narrative visual vocabu-
lary for the expression of a wide range of comments. The
memetic practice thus identifies both a global conversa-
tion structured around sub-communities and the con-
struction of a continuously evolving collective oeuvre.
Something is shifting in media history. The culture of

“memes” offers a new landscape to study that is both rich
and complex. For the first time ever, a cultural phenom-
enon that is at once global and local, popular and some-
how also elitist; and that is constructed, mediated and
structured by technology can be studied with precision.
Studying memes is not simply about understanding what
digital culture is and may become. It also entails inventing
a new approach to capturing the complexity of circulation
patterns on a global scale.
14
15
Iconic typology
As characterized using Scott McCloud's triangular model.
The picture plane
Rage guy
Philosoraptor
Double rainbow LOLcat
Language
16
INFORMATION VISUALIZATION
Diagram 1
Represented here are three main factors that

influence the crafting of memes, based on Scott
McCloud’s triangle typology of character iconic-
ity in comic books. Using this model, Internet
memes can be located according to proximity to
reality, the use of written language or pictures /
comic-book structure.
17
Temporal structure
Dynamic
Nyan Cat Gangnam Style Charlie bit me

Static
LOLcat Philosoraptor Rage guy
Narration
18
INFORMATION VISUALIZATION
Diagram 2
This diagram depicts Internet memes according

two typologies based on both the narrative and
the temporal structure of the visual material pre-
sented to Web users.
Depending on the presence of multiple panes as

well as written material, the memes can be sim-
plistic (a stand-alone image) or shown as a story
(with a clear narrative). In addition, the use of
video and animation can be a way to go beyond
static images to offer a dynamic representation
of content.
19
Internet meme cases
20
≥ P.25
An image macro series that features a picture of an

animal (dog, penguin, etc.) on a multicolored wheel
background. The image is combined with two lines of
text written in the format of guidance / advice.
All Your Base Are Belong to Us
A popular catchphrase that swept across the Internet

in the late 1990s. The text comes from the opening
cutscene of a video game called Zero Wing.The awkward
grammar of this phrase is an example of “Engrish,”
originally written in an Asian language but translated
poorly into its closest English approximation.
Annoying Facebook Girl
An image macro series featuring a photo of a teenage

girl rolling her eyes accompanied by a blue and white
color wheel background. The overlaid text typically
depicts bland and attention-seeking Facebook status
updates.
C Charlie bit me
A video featuring an infant biting his toddler brother’s

finger making him yelp in pain and proclaim in a
British accent “Ouch, Charlie, that really hurt! Charlie
bit me.”
21
Chuck Norris Facts
Satirical factoids about martial artist and actor Chuck

Norris that are absurd and hyperbolic claims about his
virility and toughness.
D Dancing Baby
A 3D-rendered animation of a baby dancing, which

became one of the first viral videos around 1996.
Downfall (also known as “Hitler Reacts To…” )
A series of parody-subtitled videos based on a scene

from Der Untergang (2004), a German WWII drama
revisiting the last ten days of Adolf Hitler. The videos
depict anachronistically subtitled videos of the dicta-
tor getting upset over topical events and trivial gossip.
Double rainbow
A YouTube video of a visitor of Yosemite National Park,

in the U.S., showing his ecstatic reaction to a double
rainbow.
Dramatic Chipmunk
A video is a five-second clip of the “chipmunk” (a prai-

rie dog) turning its head while the camera zooms in
and dramatic music is played.
22
CASES
≥ P.26
The act of placing one’s face in one’s hands that conveys

a message of dismay. One of the most popular facepalm
images is one of Captain Jean-Luc Picard from Star Trek:
The Next Generation in which he is shown reacting to a
stressful situation.
Fail
Internet slang that became popular through image

macros and short videos depicting situations with
unfortunate outcomes.
Free Chen Guangcheng
A series of pictures based on photographs of people

wearing dark sunglasses, which served to defend civil
rights activist Chen Guangcheng in China.
Fry Squinty Eye
An image macro series that uses a still of Fry — a
23
character from the TV show Futurama — typically

paired with overlaid text using a phrase representing
an internal monologue.
G Gangnam Style
A 2012 dance pop single written and performed by

Korean pop singer PSY with comical dance moves. The
track has spawned hundreds of parodies and copycat
dance videos on YouTube.
Graphjam (or LOLgraphs or silly graphs)
A series of statistical representations and diagrams

typically designed to describe trivial topics for humor-
ous effect.
Grass Mud Horse
An image macro series that originated on the Baidu

Baike (the Chinese equivalent of Wikipedia), docu-
menting fictional creatures whose names vaguely but
obviously refer to Chinese profanities.
Grumpy cat
An image series of an angry-looking snowshoe cat that

rose to fame online after its pictures were posted to
Reddit in 2012. It gave rise to photoshopped parodies
and image macros from other scornful looking cats.
24
ADVICE ANIMAL
TRIP ON ACID WANT TO LOOK COOL?
WATCH JAPANESE TV START SMOKING
CAN'T AFFORD IT?

BUY
GET ANOTHER CREDIT

CARD AN IPAD
BRING GUNS TO YOU KNOW WHAT CAN SAVE
YOUR RELATIONSHIP?
SCHOOL
SHOW EVERYONE
HOW COOL IT IS A BABY
25
FACEPALM
26
CASES
H Harlem Shake
A series of videos inspired by a 2012 instrumental song

produced by Baauer featuring a style of dance that
involves pivoting the shoulder out while popping the
other shoulder out at the same time.
Hovercat
An image macro depicting a cat flying in mid-air, some-

what resembling the shape of a bullet or a cannon mis-
sile. Typically employed to restore the orderliness in
online conversations.
I It’s Over 9000!
A popular catchphrase derived from the Japanese

anime series Dragon Ball Z in which one of the char-
acter reads the “power level” of his opponent and yells,
“It’s over nine thousand!” Often used as an innumer-
able quantifier to describe large numbers.
K Keyboard cat
An image series showing a cat in a shirt playing the

keyboard and filmed in the mid-1980s. Often used as
an indicator of failure on forums and communities.
27
L Leeroy Jenkins
A World of Warcraft character that is known for

screaming out his name before ignorantly charging
headlong into battle, killing everyone in his party.
This character made several appearances in World of
Warcraft products afterwards.
Lipsynch (or lip sync)
A series of video mash-ups in which lip movements

are matched with with sung or spoken vocals.
LOLcats
Image macros consisting of humorous photos of cats

with superimposed text written in a form of idio-
syncratic and grammatically incorrect English also
known as LOLspeak.
M Mormon porn
Photoshoped pictures of girls looking like they are

naked, which are made by concealing their outfits by
the “bubbling” procedure, a photo editing technique
which positions transparent circles in an opaque color
layer to make it look like subjects in a photo are naked
when they are not.
28
SAD KEANU
29
SUCCESS KID
THOUGHT TODAY WAS MONDAY THOUGHT I ONLY HAD

ONE BEER LEFT
IT'S SUNDAY TWO LEFT

POSTED A TWEET DROP THE SOAP
GOT 15 RETWEETS CAUGHT IT IN MID-AIR
NO WIFI AT THE HOTEL FOUND OUT
CAFE NEXT DOOR SHE LIKES VIDEO

HAS UNSECURED WIFI GAMES
30
CASES
N Nintendo 64 kids
A series of videos inspired by a sequence in which two

children unwrap their Christmas presents and hap-
pily scream when they find that they have received a
Nintendo 64 console.
Numa Numa
A series of videos that spawn after the release of the

clip made for the song “Dragostea din tei” performed
by O-Zone.
O O RLY
An image macro made of an snowy owl with superim-

posed text written captions. Often used as a response
to any statement that is deemed highly doubtful or
obviously true.
P Pedobear
A cartoon mascot that became a well-known icon

through its usage on 4chan to signal moderators and
other users that illegal pornographic content had been
posted.
Peanut Butter Jelly Time
A flash animation that consists of an animated Dancing
31
Banana character and the song “Peanut Butter Jelly

Time” by The Buckwheat Boyz. This character then
made various appearances in YouTube.
Philosoraptor
An image macro series featuring a clip art of Velo-

ciraptor on a green wheel background and deeply
immersed in metaphysical inquiries.
Planking
A photo meme which involves lying face down with

arms to the sides in unusual public spaces. Prior to the
outbreak of “planking,” the act of planking had been
documented with the phenomenon known as the
“Lying Down Game.”
R Rage Guy (FFFFFUUUUUUUU-)
A series of crudely-drawn four-pane comics portraying

situations which can bring rage and exasperation, with
the main character screaming in anger as a result.
Rickrolling
A bait-and-switch practice that involves providing a

web link supposedly relevant to the topic at hand, but
actually re-directs the viewer to Rick Astley’s hit sin-
gle “Never Gonna Give You Up.”
32
CASES
≥ P.30
A series of images showing a baby at a beach with a proud

facial expression overlaid on top of a multicolored wheel
33
background. The image is combined with a short text

describing a situation that goes better than expected.
T This is Sparta
A series of mash-ups that that parody the scene from

the film 300 where the King of Sparta declines peace
with the Persians by shouting at the Persian Messenger,
“This is Sparta!”
Trayvon Martin hoodie
A series of videos of people wearing hooded sweat-

shirts to protest the killing of an African American
teenager who was shot by a community watch captain
in Florida.
Trololo
The Russian equivalent to Rickrolling, a bait-and-

switch prank that leads people to the Soviet-era pop
song “I am Glad” sung by Eduard Khil.
W Weegee
A series of pictures where the avatar of Luigi (found in

the educational video game Mario Is Missing!) is placed
on images in order to create awkward situations.
34
35
TOP TEXT
BOT…
TOP TEXT
BOTTOM TEXT
36
HOW TO
How to create
an Internet meme
?
1. Go to https://imgflip.com/, which provides users

with the “the Fastest Meme Generator on the
Planet.”
2. Select “Make a meme” on the right-hand panel.
3. Background Image selection: In the “Popular
meme” thumbnail, look for an image, for example
the “Success Kid” picture (a picture of a toddler
at a beach with a smug facial expression taken
overlaid on a blue / violet wheel background).
4. Top text: write few words that consists in a situ-
ation (e.g. “Late to work”).
5. Bottom text: write few words that describe how
this situation went better than expected (e.g.
“Boss was even later”).
6. Click on “Generate meme.”
7. Save the resulting image and spread it on social
networking sites.
37
Interview
38
Kenyatta Cheese
Kenyatta Cheese is the co-founder of Know Your Meme

(KYM), a web series and meme database which has been doc-
umenting the specificities of Internet culture since December
2007. Here, he talks about the importance of exploring and
observing meme culture.
NICOLAS NOVA
Why did you and your colleagues found Know Your Meme?
What motivated you to launch this online database?
KENYATTA CHEESE
We created KYM back in 2008 while we were all
working for the web video company Rocketboom. We’d
spend our days in Internet forums where we’d see peo-
ple develop and share jokes and exploitables and image
macros — the things that we now call Internet Memes. If
a particular meme wasn’t very good, someone else would
iterate the idea, and if it got very good, people would start
sharing that meme outside of that particular forum and
39
onto larger social networks where — if it had mainstream

appeal — it would spread far and wide. Watching this hap-
pen in real time was fascinating.
Eventually we started seeing more and more Internet

memes show up in mainstream media but without the
context — without any credit for the communities that
had made them. So we thought we’d make a video series
documenting their spread. Eventually that turned into the
Meme Database (MemeDB) which is now fully powered by
the KYM community with oversight and coordination
from the KYM staff and volunteer mods.
NN You started KYM in 2007 and have accumulated quite

a lot of material. That makes it a very interesting place
to observe Internet culture and memes. Can you give us
numbers / statistics about the KYM database?
KC Yeah, when we started, we didn’t fully know what we

were doing, but Jamie Wilkinson was a brilliant developer,
and Ellie Rountree,Andrew Baron and Chris Menning really
knew their memetic hubs. So we started by documenting
and creating entries for about 20 memes or so. It wasn’t a
lot, but it was enough to bootstrap Jamie’s MemeDB. It was
also enough so that people who were paying attention to
what we were building understood what we were trying to
do, understood the voice and tone, understood how it was
different from efforts like Encyclopedia Dramatica, which
allowed them to roll up their sleeves and start contributing.
40
INTERVIEWS
Now there are roughly 2000 confirmed memes on the

site along with many other phenomena of note, includ-
ing web communities, Internet subcultures, special events
and a handful of persons who the community has deemed
important to the creation and spread of Internet memes.
Counting submissions from the Internet and memes
whose origins are still being researched, the MemeDB
stands at about 12,000 entries.
NN Can you tell us more about the “research & evaluation”

process you deploy? How do you trace the origin and spread
of a meme?
KC Anybody can submit an entry. The submission form

asks for basic information about the name of the meme, a
description, where it was first found — that sort of thing.
Research moderators and community volunteers then go
in to review the submission. If there is insufficient evi-
dence of the meme’s notability, or if the entry is poorly
written, it gets moved to the “Deadpool.”
But if there’s something there, members of the Know Your

Meme community will volunteer to start researching and
documenting further details of a meme’s verified point of
origin, it’s various iterations, along with the volume and
and reach of its spread. Most of this is done using publicly
available tools such as search engines, Google Trends, and
the Internet Archive.
41
One of the things we realized early on was that we wanted

to value people’s experience over their expertise. You may
know nothing about critical theory or data science, but
you may have a URL bookmarked where you encountered
prior art for an image macro on some forum fifteen years
ago. There is so much noise out there when researching
a meme that sometimes those are the best leads. As new
evidence is found and verified, it gets added to the entry.
NN Over time, KYP has aggregated a lot of content, which

makes it an interesting observatory for understanding
Internet culture. What have you learned about memes
from the site?
KC Oh, lots.We learned that memes don’t just come out of

nowhere. At first someone has an idea, they introduce that
idea to a community that then improves on it through a
process of iteration until it reaches a certain fitness — which
usually means that it is able to draw an emotional or ratio-
nal reaction out of people — and once that happens, the
meme is more likely to get passed on to larger audiences.
We learned that people tend to share ideas within commu-

nities that make them feel safe. Sometimes safety comes in
the form of rules about participation and encouragement.
Other times, anonymity gives you a shield behind which
to share your thoughts.
Also, meme diffusion seems to follow well-worn paths of

ideation, iteration, amplification and replication. They
42
INTERVIEWS
start off on Internet forums, social platforms and content

creation communities before they start leaking out to
other, bigger nodes on the Internet. More importantly, we
learned that the importance and meaning of any partic-
ular meme comes from group participation and not the
consumption of content.
NN Do you see any evolution in meme creation and spreading?
KC I don’t know if KYM says anything new — we seem

to use Internet memes to create connections between us
and other people. What is new is the scale and velocity at
which we can share these ideas in an unmediated fashion.
However, I think the past few years has seen a contraction

in the diversity of what we commonly refer to as Internet
memes. Andy Baio — the American technologist and blog-
ger — makes a compelling argument that as we’ve moved
to mobile devices and siloed apps, it’s become harder to
manipulate and iterate content. It’s possible that this has
lead to fewer variations on any particular meme.
But while traditional Internet memes have suffered, other

forms have emerged and evolved. GIFs have taken the
place of exploitables on platforms like Tumblr and Live-
journal. Instagram and Vine are full of image and video
based memes. Meanwhile, YouTube stars and T V and
music fandoms exploit Twitter hashtags faster than mar-
keters can. Human creativity is like water. Put something
in its path and it routes around it.
43
NN Most of the memes you document on KYM come from

the anglophone sphere. Are you also looking at other lan-
guages and communities? Do you see any cultural speci-
ficities based on languages?
KC The vast majority of entries on Know Your Meme are

in English because that’s where many of the researchers’
domain knowledge is from. But the community is interna-
tional, and so there are subgroups on the KYM forum that
discuss, research, and curate memes from Brazil, China,
Korea, Japan, Mexico, France, Germany, Russia and other
places. While KYM’s non-anglophone collection is not yet
comprehensive, outside research from folks like An Xiao
Mina seem to confirm some patterns to the popularity
of image-based memes. Image macros are popular in the
Americas, Europe, much of Asia and in many Arabic coun-
tries. Stories that play out over 4 panes seem prevalent in
Northern Africa. And Rage Comics in particular seem to
translate almost universally.
NN An intriguing part of the KYM website is the “deadpool”

part of the site, which corresponds to a list of unproven
or “fictional” cases. What’s remarkable here? What does
the accumulation of examples in the deadpool tell us?
Can you see them as more than a basic work-in-progress?
KC The most immediate lesson of the Deadpool is a

confirmation of our own “filter bubbles” — to borrow Eli
Pariser’s concept. Just because all of your friends on
Facebook think something is a meme doesn’t mean that
44
INTERVIEWS
its volume is actually significant enough to warrant an

entry on Know Your Meme.
Some Deadpool entries are the work of marketers or trolls

trying to game the system (“If I get my entry confirmed,
people will think that it’s real.”) Because the members of
the KYM community are also members of the communi-
ties that they research, they can usually spot fake entries
pretty quickly.
But sometimes a deadpooled entry can be well written,

well documented, and of great significance to members
of a particular subculture but not have the volume, influ-
ence or longevity to be considered for inclusion in the
MemeDB. These are the entries that are the most interest-
ing, because determining “significance” is relative. As the
network grows and Internet culture evolves, that inner
sense of “relevance” is changing every year. I consider this
a very good thing.
45
Interview
46
An Xiao Mina
An Xiao Mina is a writer and designer based in the US. In

this interview, she discusses how Internet culture and memes
address political issues around the world.
NICOLAS NOVA
A big chunk of your work is about the political roles of
Internet memes, especially in China and Uganda. Can you
tell us how you became interested in this?
AN XIAO MINA
I’d always had a cursory interest in memes, and I
was already deeply interested in social media and cre-
ative expression, which I explored quite a bit while in
New York. However, it was while working in China that I
saw a side of memes I hadn’t considered before: that they
might be used to evade censorship and to express sensi-
tive political issues. Where once I had expected fairly
sterile, censored conversation, I saw instead a flowering
of creative, political and social expression with a mixture
47
of puns, image remixes, even songs and dances. To be sure,

the Chinese web’s memes are by and large not political,
and they can be just as silly and fun as apolitical memes
in the United States.
I’m particularly drawn to the notion of memes being used

as an important form of expression for human rights and
social justice issues. As an artist who cares deeply about
these issues, I believe that creative expression is a basic
part of what it means to be human. We should be careful
not to conflate expression with systemic social change,
but we should also be careful not to diminish the power of
this expression. Creating a meme in a powerless situation
is a way of exerting power over one’s media environment
and building community with other participants. And as
I noted in a recent talk at the Personal Democracy Forum,
many socially engaged memes serve as counterbalances
to the many micro-oppressions that accumulate in our
lives. These memes act as micro-affirmations whose
power is cumulative.
NN Beyond that, what have you learned about memes and

practices related to memes?
A X M I learned most importantly that the memes we see

online are very much culturally situated. If some memes
seem juvenile or silly, perhaps they are juvenile or silly
(and there’s nothing wrong with that, by the way!). But the
medium and practice itself can be quite meaningful and
powerful when harnessed effectively by activists. An essay
48
INTERVIEWS
I’m publishing soon in the Journal of Visual Culture looks

at the Chen Guangcheng meme, which was largely kicked
off by the anonymous artist Crazy Crab, who encouraged
participants to wear sunglasses as a show of support for
Chen, who is a blind lawyer. Because Chen was held in
illegal detention at the time, the presence of sunglasses on
profile pictures across the social web became a powerful
show of solidarity and visibility for someone whom the
government was trying to make invisible.
And as I wrote in Ethnography Matters ¹, even cats — the

Internet is made of cats, right? — are memetic only in cer-
tain contexts. In places where people don’t keep cats as
pets, like in Uganda, you’re much less likely to see funny
cat images. As more of the world gets online, we should
expect a wider variety of creative expression online, like
“Saudis kissing camels.” Memes are rich vehicles for
human expression, and they are perhaps as diverse as
human beings themselves.
NN Memes seem like a way to get around censorship. To some

extent, it’s close to the long tradition in art (paintings,
literature) of doing so, but what’s inherently new with the
Internet medium?
AXM You’re right, there’s a long tradition historically all

over the world of using creative media to sidestep censor-
ship. Chinese painters and poets were known to allude to
sensitive political issues in their images and words. What’s
new about memes is that they have a very low barrier to
49
participation; it’s relatively easy for large groups of people

to join in with their own version of a pun, or even just to
republish the pun and therefore broadcast it to their social
networks. It’s a little more difficult to participate with an
image or video — these media assume greater technical lit-
eracy and access — but it’s definitely a lot easier than trying
to get a subversive painting seen by a large number of peo-
ple. And the culture of participation around memes means
they are more likely to be shared and remixed than other
media. What’s more important than the semantic content
of the memes is the signal they send to others. By sharing
and remixing memes, people send each other social signals.
I also think it’s important to note that there’s an inher-

ent silliness to a lot of these memes. Though the Chen
Guangcheng meme had very serious beginnings, it soon
turned farcical, with a whole string of memes remixing the
#FreeCGC hashtag into a Free KFC-like poster, featuring
Chen as the Colonel. Humor has always been a pathway
to telling difficult truths. The Ugandan humorist Ernest
Bazanye once told me that you need humor to remind us
of the banality of oppression; it’s the constant remix and
change that keeps vital issues at the top of our minds.
NN In a text published in Ethnography Matters, you

described how Internet culture — and memes — could be
a bridge culture. What do you mean by that?
AXM I wrote in The Atlantic about the amazing similari-

ties between the Chen Guangcheng sunglasses meme in
50
INTERVIEWS
China and the Trayvon Martin hoodie meme in the United

States. Both involved historically disempowered groups
using symbolic action and selfies to generate greater
visibility for an important issue ². That both arose inde-
pendently of each other suggested that they came from
a common Internet culture, a culture that’s long fostered
selfies and participatory creative action.
Just as hip hop, Michael Jackson, Hollywood films and

Coca Cola have become cultural bridges for many parts
of the world — I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen
someone’s rendition of the Moonwalk, for instance, regard-
less of what continent I’m on — memes could potentially
become a reference point across cultures. I’ve seen rage
faces, for instance, being repurposed by the Egyptian Sar-
casm Society and Chinese activists. Could these common
referents be used as a window into another culture? That’s
something I’m interested in exploring with The Civic Beat,
a new publication I’m co-founding with Jason Li that
looks at creative political expression on the global web.
Maybe by seeing another culture’s memes, we can learn a
little more about that culture too. There’s something char-
ismatic about seeing a flock of penguins on the Turkish
Internet. It gives us a window into issues of media cen-
sorship in the country.
NN You live in the US and observe meme culture in China

or Uganda. What cultural differences have you noticed?
Does censorship (and the risk of censorship) have an
influence on meme production per se?
51
A X M Government censorship certainly forces a certain

level of creativity in China that produces some incredible
puns, like “grass mud horse.” However, people are silenced
in many ways. Uganda doesn’t exert the same level of
control over media inside the country as China does, but
certain views are still considered sensitive. And while the
United States has a more free media environment, not all
views are represented equally; the Trayvon Martin hoodie
meme was a direct response to the fact that Martin’s story
wasn’t getting as much attention in mainstream media as
its organizers felt it deserved. In all countries I’ve looked
at, there are a wide variety of silly, apolitical memes, and
a number of memes with social and political content.
52
INTERVIEWS
1. http://ethnographymatters.net/blog/2013/03/25/the-chickens-and-goats-of-
ugandas-internet/
2. Source : http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/07/a-tale-of-
two-memes-the-powerful-connection-between-trayvon-martin-and-chen-
guangcheng/259604/
53
Observations
on the life cycle of
Internet memes
54
Christian Bauckhage
FRAUNHOFER IAIS
In this short text, Christian Bauckhage explains how meme

dynamics can be analyzed and understood using mathematical
models.
While viral content is not a new phenomenon, the par-

ticipatory nature of modern social media turned Internet
memes into a staple of contemporary Web culture ¹. This
has led to increasing research ¹ ⁴ ⁵ ⁸, yet many aspects of the
phenomenon are still poorly understood. Here, we briefly
address characteristics of meme dynamics.
Figure 1 shows a meme-related time series retrieved from

Google Trends that indicate how collective attention to
individual memes evolved over time. Apparently, there
are common general trends. After a point of onset, pub-
lic interest in a meme explodes but once it reaches peak
popularity, interest fades more or less quickly. In Fig. 3, we
analyzed time series for more than 200 popular memes
and found that lifetime distributions provided plausible
models for the observed dynamics. This is interesting
55
because such models capture the dynamics of hype cycles,

and our results therefore suggest that individual Internet
memes are mere subcultural fads.
Recall that fads are forms of behavior related to ideas, activ-

ities, or products that are enthusiastically followed by large
populations for a period of time because the respective
concepts are perceived to be novel. When a fad “catches
on,” the number of adopters grows rapidly. However, once
the perception of novelty is gone, the behavior will fade
again ⁷. These dynamics match the global behavior of the
graphs in Fig. 1 and can be modeled statistically ⁶.
In Fig. 3, we were interested in general trends in meme

related time series and therefore considered simple
two-parameter models that were unlikely to over-fit the
data. The Weibull distribution can assume various shapes
but is typically skewed to the right and short tailed. The
Gompertz distribution may be skewed to the left or to the
right and is short tailed. The Frechet distribution can be
seen as a Gompertz on a logarithmic scale ². It, too, can
assume a large variety of shapes but has a sharp peak and
a long tail. One can show ³ that, when used to model atten-
tion dynamics, all three models implicitly depend on the
amount of attention attracted so far.
Considering a collection of 214 Internet memes, we

trawled Google Trends for weekly summaries of meme
related queries between January 1st, 2004, to February 8th,
2013. Since Google only reveals search frequencies, the
56
FIGURE 1
• llama song • has cheesburger • y u no • o rly • fmylife • call me maybe

100
80
60
40
20
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
Positively skewed, broad peaks, Positive skew, narrow peaks,
shorter tails. log tails.
Examples of meme related time series retrieved from Google Trends.

While details are chaotic, there are common global trends of how interest
in individual memes evolves.
FIGURE 2
• k = 1.0 • g = 0.0125
• k = 1.5 • g = 0.0250
• k = 2.0 • g = 0.2500
• k = 2.5 • g = 0.5000
∫wb(t)
∫go(t)
• k = 3.0 • g = 1.0000
1 3 5 7 9 11 13 1 3 5 7 9 11 13
t t
Weibull distributions Gompertz distributions
• a = 0.75
• a = 1.00
• a = 1.50
• a = 2.00
∫fr(t)
• a = 2.50
1 3 5 7 9 11 13
t
Exemples of possible shapes
of the models considered here. Frechet distributions
57
FIGURE 3
• Google Trends data • Gomperz fit • Weibull fit • Frechet fit
100
80
60
40
20
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
fmylife o rly
Frechet fits best. Frechet fits best.
100
80
60
40
20
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
lol wut has cheeseburger
Weibull fits best. Weibull fits best.
100
80
60
40
20
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
haters gonna hate it’s over 9000

Gompertz fits best. Gompertz fits best.
Example of time series of search

frequencies related to different
Internet memes and results of global
trend analysis using lifetime models.
58
CHRISTIAN BAUCKHAGE
data neither allows for estimating absolute interest nor

for inferring who was interested. Our data thus provides
averaged, compartmentalized indicators as to the evolu-
tion of a meme’s popularity and results obtained from
there have to be understood as statistical expectations.
Figure 3 presents prototypic examples for how the mod-

els considered here fit our data. Looking at the figure, it
appears that they are indeed able to characterize the gen-
eral dynamics of collective attention to individual memes.
A quantitative analysis revealed the Frechet to give the best
fit in the majority of cases (66%).The Weibull was the second
best fitting model (21%), followed by the Gompertz (13%).
It therefore appears that there exists a latent mechanism

that accounts for how collective attention to memes devel-
ops over time. Although the dynamics represented by the
Weibull, Gompertz and Frechet distributrions are of differ-
ent types (polynomial, exponential and inverse polynomial
in time, respectively), they all depend on the amount of
attention attracted so far. Not only do these models provide
good characterizations of general trends in meme related
time series, they also describe these trends in terms of a
simple mechanism: the sum total of attention attracted
so far influences the future popularity of a meme. In other
words, Internet memes undergo a hype cycle; the more
people get used to a meme, the quicker it looses its appeal.
Among the models we considered, the Frechet provided

the best fit for most of the memes we analyzed. As it is
59
characterized by a rather steep initial increase, a narrow

mode, and a considerably long tail, it appears that the
majority of memes quickly reach peak popularity and
begin to slowly decline shortly after. A closer examina-
tion revealed that this is especially characteristic for viral
YouTube videos. Yet, since the Weibull and the Gompertz
also account for a substantial percentage of meme related
time series, there seem to be at least two different kinds
of Internet memes. On the one hand, there are short-lived
memes that go in and out of popularity rather quickly.
On the other hand, there are memes that persist over
extended periods of time. These observations raise inter-
esting questions for future work: which (social) mecha-
nisms or content characteristics are responsible for the
longevity of different memes?
60
CHRISTIAN BAUCKHAGE
1. C. Bauckhage, “Insights into Internet Memes”, in Proc. ICWSM, 2011.

2. C. Bauckhage, “Characterizations and Kullback-Leibler Divergence of
Gompertz Distributions”, in arxiv:1402.3193 [cs.IT], 2014.
3. C. Bauckhage, K. Kersting, and F. Hadiji, “Mathematical Models of Fads
Explain the Temporal Dynamics of Internet Memes”, in Proc. ICWSM, 2013.
4. M. Bernstein, A. Monroy-Hernandez, D. Harry, P. Andr, K. Panovich, and
G. Vargas, “4chan and /b/: An Analysis of Anonymity and Ephemerality in a
Large Online Community”, in Proc. ICWSM, 2011.
5. M. Cosica, “Competition and Success in the Meme Pool: a Case Study on
Quickmeme.com”, in Proc. ICWSM, 2013.
6. J. Lawless, Statistical Models and Methods for Lifetime Data, Wiley, 2003.
7. R. Meyerson and E. Katz, “Notes on a Natural History of Fads”, in American
J. of Sociolog, 62(6):594–601, 1957.
8. L. Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture, MIT Press Essential Knowledge, MIT
Press, 2013.
61
Remix culture:
an ordinary poetics
of the web
62
Laurence Allard
IRCAV-PARIS 3/LILLE 3
It would be simplistic to limit remix culture solely to new

“digital talents” and other “mashup” artists who are in the
process of becoming recognized.¹ This elective consecra-
tion only concerns one aspect of remix culture, referring
simply to the “prose of the web.” Indeed on social net-
working sites, each expression of remixed content, such as
Monsieur Jourdain, is speaking in prose without knowing
it. Within the waves of usage, a form of online life has sta-
bilized that consists of interacting through existing con-
tent and its transformative appropriations. This prosaic
use, which has the effect of promoting controlled access
to meaning and thereby to the private lives of digital
practitioners, does not exhaustively represent the Remix
Culture. For younger participants, in a way that is both
more specific and misunderstood, there is a “defensive”
use of parodies and music clips. For the militants, follow-
ing in the path of the Situationists, remix then proves
transformative in more ways than one — not only in terms
of the remixed content but also in the social contexts in
which it is produced and received.
63
Socializing the meme
Without overestimating changes related to the digital

realm, it is important to remember that the development
of the Internet, web and mobile phone is performing
a communications revolution by placing the means of
expression and socialization in the hands of many (from
the simplest mobile phone to the computer).² Such socio-
economic conditions for the distribution of communi-
cations technology, however, do not fully explain all the
social uses of remixed content in a connected world.
Henceforth, this tendency to naturalize the remixing of

content, epitomized by the concept of “memes” and the
issue of virality, must be resisted. This misuse of essential-
ist metaphors to describe the production and circulation
of content on computer communication networks has the
drawback of concealing the individuals who are creating
digital conversations, denying their subjectivity and all
intersubjective dynamics. On the sociological level, condi-
tions are favorable for the development of remixing prac-
tices for the purpose of interaction on social networking
sites. In the contemporary societal context of reflexive
individualism which offers the opportunity, at the very
least, to reflect on who one wishes to be, the web services
and mobile applications of social networks can be con-
sidered as a reflexive space in the formation of a personal
and social identity that has become more exploratory than
reproducible.³ By fulfilling part of their social lives online,
individuals in the age of digital existentialism perform
64
LAURENCE ALLARD
their identities as a sign and interact with others through

the intermediary of a multimodal language through
images, text and the most commonly recycled sounds.
Speaking through image-texts... to avoid talking
The most common expressive process on socio-digital

networks is speaking through interposed images, follow-
ing the issue of the “rise of the visual web” or, more pre-
cisely, in image-text layouts.⁴ What can be designated as
“creative conversations”⁵ by the sharers of articles, images
or videos, proceeds from a symbolic appropriation of con-
tent following automated features and usually without
structural transformation. These conversational processes
via photography and videos have become relatively stan-
dardized through the “share” button on social network
accounts, retweeting and reblogging.An ethnographic sur-
vey conducted during the 2012 French presidential cam-
paign⁶ made us see that, for some, “speaking politically
through images” and sharing and commenting on the
“ready-made” caricatures of candidates was either about
compensating for their political indecision through more
or less creative and personal expressions or not breaking
the voting taboo on social networks, thereby conforming
to a logic of “civic avoidance” to avoid an open “political
dispute” within their social network.
Remixing pre-existing content with a comment, a title or

a dedication for online expression and interaction is also
about controlling privacy about topics such as political
65
leanings, by setting up inventive means of controlling

access, as suggested by danah boyd and Alice Marwick in
their essay, “Social Privacy in Networked Publics: Teens’
Attitudes, Practices, and Strategies.” ⁷ However, this discur-
sive strategy, relevant to the monologism to “say without
saying” or “speak for oneself and others,” is not limited to
teenagers. It demonstrates how ordinary practitioners of
social networking services do not recklessly expose them-
selves without protective linguistic mediation.
A defensive use of remix:

juvenile identities and copy-paste expression
The analysis of juvenile digital productions reveals a

routine copy-paste poetics in the making of a Facebook
status or Tumblr posts via content arrangements and
assembling various texts from different sources. These
expressive sharing practices involve a cultural logic of
“appropriability” or even “manipulability.” In the practice
of copy-pasting content, young people appropriate not
only elements from other sites, but also the TV shows that
are increasingly nourished by the video creativity of the
network, as a way to create their own digital expressions.
Sites like 9gag, animated GIFs, videos of Cyprien (FR) or
Bethany Mota (EN) and video tutorials of all kinds provide
a visual database of laughable images that are ready to
post. Among these are the parodic remixes of “bling bling”
clips with their hypersexualized representations of girls
or boys or even the famous series of remixes from a TV
show about the dangers of the Internet from which was
66
LAURENCE ALLARD
extracted the juvenile web jingle, “cuckoo you want to see

my cock.” Through the distancing of these “shocking”
images — due to their gender stereotypes — that these
parodic remixes create, their reception is more remote and
reflexive than passive and literal. The Internet becomes a
machine by which they protect themselves from offensive
content since they have decrypted, reinterpreted and resig-
nified it.The remix constitutes a form of self-protection for
youth that the Internet offers by inviting the same mini-
mal rewriting through a comment, a new title, a retag, etc.
This defensive strategy through parody (the older saying
to the younger, “Did you see what you were looking at?”)
completes the discursive strategy of protection through
the monologisms described above.
Protest video: transformative remix

for a different version of the story
Some transformative appropriations of second degree,

in relation to ordinary copy-pasting, make use of differ-
ent methods of parodic détournement.⁹ These include
the poop genre, which consists of a crosscutting of TV
shows, cartoons and video games (Super Mario, Zelda,
Tintin), mixed in small units. Alternately, there are even
mashups made in the context of dedicated festivals such
as the Mashup Film Festival at the Forum des Images.¹⁰
Various methods for structural transformation of pre-
existing content include renaming, re-categorization, reso-
norisation, cropping, re-assembly, mixing of small units
or mashup of integral content, along with its re-creation.
67
This is also the case of User Generated Games developed

from platform games for Nintendo DS.¹¹
Reappropriated videos used for protest purposes can be

included in the category of transformative remix. Through
converted images this kind of video protest produces a dis-
course of transformation on the societal level. These trans-
formative appropriations echo Russian filmmaker Dziga
Vertov’s editing practices in the 1920s, which were then
repeated by the Situationists, who held that a discourse
should be produced by editing beyond the internal mean-
ing of each image. Through the years, a body of politicized
video remixes has accumulated that share a voice and a
sense of protest solidarity around initial content that
has been transformed through different processes. Some
of them deal with the suburban riots in November and
December of 2005 and show how young people in French
suburbs appropriated the flow of television staging to
deliver their own narration of events. An example is The
French Democracy by Alex Chan (2005),¹² who recreated the
thread of events in machinima using software to make cin-
ematic sequences with CGI. Another type of protest remix
relies on the principle of universal narrative patterns. The
Fall by Oliver Hirschbiegel (2004) created a global setting
for re-describing events of all kinds organized around a
narrative of defeating evil. James Cameron’s Avatar (2009),
as a grand story of the struggle of the weak against the
strong, inspired the story of Palestinians being driven from
their land in Bilin Reenacts Avatar Film,¹³ and likewise with
the parents of students in Le Havre protesting against the
68
LAURENCE ALLARD
closure of a class Havratar.¹⁴ The music video Happy from

Pharrell Williams served as global soundtrack for staging
the pride of the inhabitants of Cotonou¹⁴ or, on the contrary,
the rancor of unionized firefighters in France.¹⁶
The artistic origins of protest video:

Situationist filmic détournement and culture jamming
The historical conditions of protest through transfor-

mative remix finds its origins in the Situationist move-
ment. Following the failure of avant-garde movements of
the 1920s, the Situationists tried once again to politicize
art, this time by “détourning” popular culture — movies,
comics and advertising — to subvert their discourses in
political favor of the radical left. “Overall, the literary and
artistic heritage of humanity should be used for partisan
propaganda purposes,” urged Guy-Ernest Debord and Gil J.
Wolman in “A User’s Guide to Détournement.”¹⁷ One fully
realized project responding to this call for détournement
is Can Dialectics Break Bricks?, by René Viennet (1973),
which provides a full re-dubbing of the Chinese film Crush
by Kuang chi-Tu (1972).
The Situationist heritage met cyberculture in the 1990s

through the practice of culture jamming. Roughly defined
as “cultural sabotage,” it incorporates different cultural
practices of détournement implemented throughout the
last century. According to Mark Dery in “Culture Jam-
ming: Hacking, Slashing and Sniping in the Empire of
Signs” (1997),¹⁸ the term culture jamming was used for the
69
first time in the USA by the sound collage band Nega-

tivland to describe the sabotage of the media as resistance
against the invasion of mass media. For the culture jammer,
the entire world serves as a studio. This elastic category
covers a multitude of sub-cultural practices, from hack-
ing IT giants to slashing or pornographic détournement
of Star Trek published in fanzines. Historically, jamming
refers to the interference of mass consumption. Pirated
radio and television, counter-surveillance videos, and
advertising détournements are the modes of operation
for culture jamming.
Beneath the remix video lies the issue of copyright
The band cited by Mark Dery, Negativland, is an experi-

mental group created in 1979 in California that used remix
video to campaign for the right to appropriate pre-existing
material content.
Negativland plead the “right to quote” arguing that, as

with Marcel Duchamp, “the act of selection can be a form
of inspiration as original and significant as any other.” ¹⁹ It
is possible to recognize here the role of “artistic critique”
through the shaping of a public issue using various meth-
ods of discourse and mise-en-scène. Among them must be
included the group’s remix project of Disney’s The Little
Mermaid — Gimme the Mermaid ²⁰ — on the walls of the
headquarters of the World Intellectual Property Orga-
nization during the counter-summit held in Geneva in
December 2003 during the WSIS.
70
LAURENCE ALLARD
When the remix makes the audience
Over the past 10 years, the world of art and culture has
been at war against the Internet. The recovery of content
from cultural industries, its appropriation and transfor-
mation for expressive or activist purposes, has been crimi-
nalized by various state and cultural actors. As far as we’re
concerned, we have always defended the issue of socio-cul-
tural legitimacy and legal fairness of these transformative
expressive practices. This is so especially because they
ended up nourishing the web 2.0 business model known
as crowdsourcing, i.e. the direct support of web content by
users themselves, according to the definition given by the
designer of crowdsourcing: “All these companies grew up
in the Internet age and were designed to take advantage
of the networked world. But now the productive poten-
tial of millions of plugged-in enthusiasts is attracting the
attention of old-line businesses, too. For the last decade
or so, companies have been looking overseas, to India or
China, for cheap labor (outsourcing). But now it doesn't
matter where the laborers are — they might be down the
block, they might be in Indonesia — as long as they are
connected to the network.” ²² A little-known aspect of the
culture of crowdsourcing, which we call “audienciation,”
refers to how the audience co-produces itself through var-
ious processes within the creative conversation (like, share,
comment). With these audienciation practices, web content
is distributed, promoted and popularized — at no charge
whatsoever — by users’ expressions and interactions. They
have become one of the pillars of marketing 2.0 of pop
71
culture with several milestones to date: Britney Remix

remixed despite herself; Lady Gaga announcing a remix
contest for “Born This Way” in May 2011; and PSY giv-
ing full creative scope to Fair Use for its “Gangnam Style”
which inspired a quasi-autonomized stream of remixes.
Audienciation also refers to the co-creation and co-distri-
bution of content on the web that some also designate as
Digital Labor.²³ Derived from the free “expressive work” of
Internet users, the only financial benefactor of user-gen-
erated remixed content is GAFA.
Recognition of transformative creation...
A new recognition of the transformative remix is

detailed in a recent report written for the French Minis-
try of Culture by Pierre Lescure in 2013. It addresses “The
Transformative Creation in the Digital Era” by highlight-
ing the contribution of Internet users to the creation of
value through “transformative works” (remix, détour-
nement, parody) and the emergence of an economy from
the metadata thereby produced.²⁴ One can equally see how
the remix seems to have become the iconic format for
the appropriability of cultural content by the public and,
therefore, has made its way into other institutional set-
tings. This is the case with museums, for example through
pioneering proposals of Muséomix ²⁵ to co-create “new
ways of approaching exhibitions.” This cultural consecra-
tion of the remix is justifiable, as it is the prose of the web.
It is the ordinary speech of online conversations and, as
such, an inclusive modality with respect to content. Aside
72
LAURENCE ALLARD
from the task of strengthening this symbolic recognition,

what remains is to legalize Fair Use — granted in the USA
since July 2010 — not only to mashup artists but also to
any remixers from the general public.²⁶
73
Links verified on 09.22.2015.
1. See the demonstration in France,“Digital Autumn in October 2013,” around a

“mashup” workshop by the Ministry of Culture and Communication: http://
www.culturecommunication.gouv.fr/Actualites/En-continu/Education-
artistique-L-Automne-numerique-en-trois-dates
2. See our article, “Express Yourself 3.0! The mobile phone as technology for
itself and some others in double communicative action and disjunctive
soma-technological continuum,” in Téléphone Mobile et Création, edited by
Laurent Creton, Roger Odin, Laurence Allard, Armand Colin, 2014. Updated
working title, “The mobile media as the inner voice,” November 2014: http://
www.mobactu.fr/?p=1074
3. Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, Scott Lash (1994), Reflexive Modernization.
Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order,Stanford University
Press.
4. See Laurence Allard, “What is a picture in the era of digital and mobile
phone?”, “Emoji, the ‘image as word’ of mobile culture?” at http://www.
mobactu.fr, and “Conversational video: play with the images (vine, Snapchat
story, dubsmash)” at http://www.mobactu.fr/?p=1305, December 2014.
5. On a significant level “social technographics” has, since 2010, introduced
the “new” category of “conversation analysts,” who post on social networks.
6. See a body of screenshots selected for the conference “Creativity in the
digital public hours: pluralities versus dualisms… always ambivalence?” as
part of the event “Creative Europe — For a cultural Europe in 2020. Presenta-
tion day for Creative Europe.” November 12, 2013, Beaubourg, Paris: http://fr.
slideshare.net/laurenceallard/relacrativite-des-publics-lheure-digitale-
pluralites-vs-dualismeslambivalence-toujours-is-culture-slide-share?
related=1
7. https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.danah.org%2F-
papers%2F2011%2FSocialPrivacyPLSC-Draft.pdf
8. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=coucou+tu+veux-
+voir+ma+bite
9. In Palimpsestes, Gérard Genette distinguishes two main types of relation-
ships to the original text, transformation and imitation, and two structural
functions, namely satire and parody. Parody, as defined by Gerard Genette,
is a minimally transformed détournement, while the travesty falls from a
stylistic transformation whose function is to degrade; finally, the result is
a satirical pastiche “in the style of.” Next comes the pastiche itself, which
is defined by its non-satirical imitative function. See Gérard Genette,
Palimpsestes,La littérature au second degré, Seuil, pp. 40– 41.
10. http://www.mashupfilmfestival.fr/
11. See Laurence Allard, “User Generated Games: The Terrain of Code Remix-
ability Virtuosos,” in Numérique et Transesthétique, edited by Sylvie Thouard
and Gerard Leblanc, Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg, March 2012. Work
74
LAURENCE ALLARD
version available at http://culturesexpressives.fr/lib/exe/fetch.php?media=

allard_usergeneratedgamesdef2.pdf
12. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stu31sz5ivk
13. The film was restored and replayed IRL, and the video is posted on YouTube.
14. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I7L1vgPM80.
15. Pharrell Williams — Happy (We are happy from Cotonou) #HAPPYDAY
#makingafrica at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwLLbLSMMMo
16. “SNSPP-FO-27 The Eure Firefighters Are Angry,” aka “I'm not happy”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkP3fSn69Ik
17. in Les lèvres nues, n. 8, May 1956.
18. http://markdery.com/?page_id=154
19. “Right to cite” in Free Children of Digital Knowledge, ed . Olivier Blondeau and
Florent Latrive, ed. L'Eclat, 2000. http://www.cairn.info/libres-enfants-du-
savoir-numerique--9782841620432-page-421.htm
20. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTZoxVH7OCg
21. http://www.geneva03.org/polimedia/display.php%3Fid=27&lang=en.html
22. Jeff Howe, Wired, June 14, 2006. http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/
14.06/crowds.html?pg=1&topic=crowds&topic_set=.
23. See Trebor Scholz ed., Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory,
Routledge, 2012. Introduction en ligne : http://www.academia.edu/2303176/
Introduction_to_Digital_Labor_The_Internet_as_Playground_and_Factory
24. Mission Culture — Act II. “Contribution to Cultural Politics in the Digital
Era,” May 2013. C9 sheet: “Creative Transformative in the Digital Era”
(pp. 433–441). http://www.culturecommunication.gouv.fr/var/culture/storage/
culture_mag/rapport_lescure/index.htm#/433
25. http://www.museomix.org/
26. See the proposed pathways, as in France with the CSPLA’s mission report on
“transformative work” written by the lawyer Valérie Laure Benabou, in Octo-
ber 2014, that moves toward a recognition of the authors of transformative
works through, for example, “ending the automated removal proceedings
against remixes and mashups” or the “guarantee of effective access to cre-
ative materials” (information on rights, the register of public domain, open
formats, etc.): http://www.nextinpact.com/news/90264-to-allow-mash-up-
CSPLA account-involved-hebergeurs.htm
75
Richard Dawkins
THE SELFISH GENE
In a book published in 1976 entitled The Selfish Gene,

the English biologist and writer Richard Dawkins coined
the term meme to refer to any cultural entity that one
might consider a replicator of a certain idea. The following
excerpt introduced this concept.
We need a name for the new replicator, a noun

that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmis-
sion, or a unit of imitation. “Mimeme” comes from
a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable
that sounds a bit like “gene.” I hope my classicist
friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to
meme. If it is any consolation, it could alternatively
be thought of as being related to “memory,” or to
the French word meme. It should be pronounced to
rhyme with “cream.”
Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases,

clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of build-
ing arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in
the gene pool by leaping from body to body via
sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in
the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via
a process which, in the broad sense, can be called
76
READER
imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good

idea, he passes it on to his colleagues and students.
He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the
idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself,
spreading from brain to brain. As my colleague
N.K. Humphrey neatly summed up an earlier draft
of this chapter: “... memes should be regarded as
living structures, not just metaphorically but tech-
nically. When you plant a fertile meme in my mind
you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a
vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way
that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism
of a host cell. And this isn't just a way of talking
— the meme for, say, ‘belief in life after death’ is
actually realized physically, millions of times over,
as a structure in the nervous systems of individual
men the world over.”
REFERENCE
Dawkins, R. (1976), The Selfish Gene,
Oxford University Press, p. 192.
77
Susan Blackmore
THE MEME MACHINE
As a freelance writer and psychologist, Susan Blackmore

contributed to the research on memes and their evolu-
tionary nature. In her book The Meme Machine, she
gave a follow-up to Dawkins’ work by discussing their
empirical bases as well as the shortcomings of this
concept.
Many meme-copying steps have gone into

the creation of the computers on which all this
depends. They include the invention of language,
its increased longevity by writing, increased com-
munication between people by the building of
roads and railways, the invention of telephones
and televisions, the invention of digital computers,
programming languages, digital storage devices,
and finally the creation of user packages such as
word processors, statistical packages, spreadsheets,
and databases, which consist of memeplexes
whose vehicles are the documents they make pos-
sible. We may expect this process to continue with
the creation of more and more computer-based
instructions whose operations are inscrutable to
their users but whose products determine whether
they are replicated or not.
78
READER
Note that this evolutionary process has made

memetic-copying mechanisms more similar to
genetic ones. One of the great worries for memet-
ics was the accusation that memes are passed on
by Lamarckian “inheritance of acquired char-
acteristics.” We can now see that with further
developments of meme-copying technology the
tendency is, just as it presumably was for genes,
towards a non-Lamarckian mechanism — that is,
copy-the-instruction not copy-the-product. The
precise way it is done will always be different for
memes and genes but the basic evolutionary prin-
ciples are the same. The competition between rep-
licators forces the invention of better and better
systems for copying those replicators. The best
systems are digital, have effective error-correction
mechanisms, and copy the instructions for making
the products, rather than the products themselves.
REFERENCE
Blackmore, S. (2000), The Meme Machine,
Oxford University Press, p. 215.
79
Pascal Boyer
RELIGION EXPLAINED
Pascal Boyer is an anthropologist and Professor of

Collective and Individual Memory at Washington
University in St. Louis (USA) interested in the neuro-
cognitive underpinnings of individual and cultural mem-
ory. In this excerpt from his book Religion Explained,
he describes the evolutionary nature of culture.
Culture is the name of a similarity. What we

mean when we say that something is “cultural” is
that it is roughly similar to what we find in other
members of the particular group we are consider-
ing, and unlike what we would find in members of
a contrast group. This is why it is confusing to say
that people share a culture as if it was common
property.
[…]
Cultural memes undergo mutation, recombination
and selection inside the individual mind every bit
as much and as often (in fact probably more and
more often) than during transmission between
minds. We do not just transmit the information
we received. We process it and use it to create new
information, some of which we do communicate
to other people. To some anthropologists this
80
READER
seemed to spell the doom of meme-explanations

of culture. What we call culture is the similarity
between some people's mental representations in
some domains. But how come there is similarity at
all, if representations come from so many sources
and undergo so many changes?
REFERENCE
Boyer, P. (2000), Religion Explained:
The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought,
Basic Books, pp. 35–39.
81
Henry Jenkins
MEDIA VIRUSES AND MEMES
As a Professor of Communication at the University of

Southern California, Henry Jenkins focuses on inves-
tigating various aspects of media and popular culture
such as media convergence or audience participation.
In this short excerpt, he highlights the importance of
human agency in the circulation of memes.
Central to the difficulties of both the meme

and the media virus models is a particular confu-
sion about the role people play in passing along
media content. From the start, memetics has suf-
fered from a confusion about the nature of agency.
Unlike genetic features, culture is not in any mean-
ingful sense self-replicating — it relies on people to
propel, develop and sustain it. The term “culture”
originates from metaphors of agriculture: the anal-
ogy was of cultivating the human mind much as
one cultivates the land. Culture thus represents the
assertion of human will and agency upon nature.
As such, cultures are not something that happen
to us, cultures are something we collectively cre-
ate. Certainly any individual can be influenced by
the culture which surrounds them, by the fashion,
media, speech and ideas that fill their daily life, but
82
READER
individuals make their own contributions to their

cultures through the choices which they make.The
language of memetics, however, strips aside the
concept of human agency.
Processes of cultural adaptation are more complex

than the notion of meme circulation makes out.
Indeed, theories for understanding cultural uptake
must consider two factors not closely considered
by memetics: human choice and the medium
through which these ideas are circulated.
REFERENCE
Jenkins, H. (2009), “If It Doesn’t Spread, It’s Dead (Part One):
Media Viruses and Memes, Confessions of an Aca-Fan”,
available at the following URL : http://henryjenkins.org/
2009/02/if_it_doesnt_spread_its_dead_p.html
83
Lev Manovich
DEEP REMIXABILITY
Lev Manovich, Professor in Computer Science at City

University of New York, is a prominent researcher inter-
ested in the theorization of new media and digital tech-
nology. In his excerpt from his latest book, he describes
the importance of remixability, which is a core mecha-
nism of meme creation.
To describe how previously separate media

work together in a common software-based envi-
ronment, I coin a new term “deep remixability.”
Although “deep remixability” has a connection
with “remix” as it is usually understood, it has its
own distinct mechanisms. Software production
environment allows designers to remix not only
the content of different media, but also their fun-
damental techniques, working methods, and ways
of representation and expression.
Once they were simulated in a computer, pre-

viously non-compatible techniques of different
media begin to be combined in endless new ways,
leading to new media hybrids, or, to use a biological
metaphor, new “media species.” As just one exam-
ple among countless others, think, for instance, of
84
READER
the popular Google Earth application that com-

bines techniques of traditional mapping, the field
of Geographical Information Systems (GIS), 3D
computer graphics and animation, social software,
search, and other elements and functions. In my
view, this ability to combine previously separate
media techniques represents a fundamentally
new stage in the history of human media, human
semiosis, and human communication, enabled by
its “softwarization.”
REFERENCE
Manovich, L. (2013). Text available at the following URL: http://
multimodal-analysis-lab.org/_docs/07-Lev%20Manovich.pdf
85
Glossary
86
4 4chan
An English-language imageboard website where

anonymous users post pictures. A highly active locus
of Internet subcultures and activisn, the users are
responsible for both the formation or popularization
of memes such as LOLcats, Rickrolling or Pedobear,
among many others.
C Click bait
An eyecatching link on a website that encourages

people to read on, often paid for by an advertiser or
generating income based on the number of clicks.
D Deep remixability
A term coined by new media researcher Lev Manovich

that refers to the hybridization of previously non-
compatible techniques of media design (cinema, cel
animation, photorealistic computer graphics, typogra-
phy, graphic design).
DeviantART
An online artist community that features user sub-

mitted artworks and a discussion forum where partic-
ipants can address their works, along with a category
section dedicated to educational resources and tuto-
rials for artistic techniques.
87
K Know Your Meme
A wiki-based website that documents Internet memes

and other viral phenomena.
I I can haz cheezburger
The name of a weblog featuring LOLcats, created in

2007 by Eric Nakagawa and Kari Unebasami. The web-
site is one of the most popular Internet sites displaying
Internet memes.
Image macro
An image superimposed with text for humorous

effect.
L LOLspeak
An idiosyncratic and grammatically incorrect variant

of the English language featuring acronyms usually
only encountered in text messages and electronic mail.
Usually employed in reference to LOLcat pictures.
M Mash-up
A term that originally designated a music track created

by blending two or more pre-recorded songs, usually
by overlaying the vocal track of one song seamlessly
over the instrumental track of another. The term also
88
GLOSSARY
refers to web pages or web applications that combine

multimedia content.
Meme generator
A web-based platform to browse existing memes, rate

them and create derivations.
N Noelisme
A controversial social movement within the French-

speaking web using the Santa-hat Smiley, and respon-
sible for a range of activities ranging from vigilante
justice to cyber-bullying.
R Remix
A song that has been edited or completely recreated to

sound different from the original version.
Y YTMND
An online community that hosts user-generated

remixes and parodies of popular culture in the form
of multimedia web pages featuring a still image or
animated GIF with an overlay text and looped audio
track. YTMND is an abbreviation of the phrase “You’re
the man now, dog!” uttered by the character William
Forrester in Finding Forrester.
89
Will memetics become

an exact science
?
Can we imagine a future in which the under-

standing of memes has advanced far enough that
companies or individuals know how to design
successful memes? If that were the case, produc-
ing enhanced memes could become an extremely
effective marketing tool. The design of memes
could be used to destabilize political opponents or
— why not? — even to bring down entire systems.
Internet users are the conduits of this new cultural
pattern; despite their apparent participation, they
would in fact become transmitters enslaved to this
fine-tuned cultural force. This form of subjuga-
tion could be characterized as “memetic violence.”
90
CONCLUSION
Can a machine successfully

create a meme
?
The passage from a “science of memes” to “engi-

neering memes,” i.e. their automated production
by machines, would mark a new stage in the cul-
tural hybridization already underway within dig-
ital culture. If it is no longer cultural replicators,
individuals, nor organizations producing memes,
but rather autonomous productions generated by
algorithms, then a complex form of creolization,
in the linguistic sense of the term, could emerge.
91
Could memes become

physical objects
?
The widespread use of 3D printers to turn digi-

tal files into physical objects makes it possible to
imagine a materialization of memetic phenomena
in the form of object production. The virtuosity of
image remixers could then spread into the field
of producing three-dimensional objects. New cul-
tural loops in which the object templates would
be disseminated, transformed, printed and then
re-photographed or re-modeled could extend and
complicate the phenomena of memetic circulation.
92
CONCLUSION
Can memes become

weapons of war
?
The notion of memetic war as an extension of a

form of “soft power” is considerable. Hollywood
certainly has a cultural influence whose political
effects can serve as a kind of weapon. Similarly,
memes could reinvigorate propagandistic prac-
tices. It is likely that the study and understanding
of this new logic of cultural propagation is already
the focus of some military studies.
93
Are memes just a fad

?
Will memes endure? Is the concept helpful for

understanding the complexity of digital cultural
phenomena? It is quite possible that, in certain
ways, the concept of memes is still unclear and
open in its definition, driven by stronger and bet-
ter defined concepts. However, it is difficult to
imagine that the phenomena now widely known
as “memes” could completely disappear from
the landscape of digital culture. The only plau-
sible scenario for such a change would be that
the media becomes subjected to either a general-
ized control or a trivialization of this enhanced
commercial and political content. Under those
conditions, the most innovative Internet users,
meaning those who are today at the forefront of
the creation of new memes, would undoubtedly
withdraw from the inundated platform to rede-
ploy their creativity elsewhere.
94
Edited by Frédéric Kaplan and Nicolas Nova
A new global phenomenon is changing the history of media in a

major way. Millions of people are producing, altering and sharing
“memes” — digital content comprised of stereotyped patterns.
This “culture” is both inscribed within and shaping a new land-
scape ripe for a rich and complex investigation. For the first time,
a phenomenon that is simultaneously global and local, pop and
elitist; one that is constructed, mediated and structured by tech-
nology, can be observed with precision. Studying memes doesn’t
just mean merely understanding the digital culture that produces
them; we must also invent a new approach if we are to grasp the
complexity of the creation and dissemination of these patterns
on a global scale.
BIG NOW
The Big Now collection is your guide to navigating digital culture.

Each volume is a concise anthology of new articles, interviews and
founding texts, and includes a glossary — all essential keys to a
better understanding of the subject. Volume by volume, the col-
lection will become a conceptual atlas of a world in constant flux.
ISBN
978-2-940222-94-0
0 0 1
#
B I G
N O W

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FRÉDÉRIC KAPLAN

The Big Now collection is edited

Translation of all texts except

The EPFL Press is the English-language

All rights reserved, including those

How to create an Internet meme 36

Richard Dawkins coined the term meme as an analogy to a

The relative ease of reproducing and modifying digital content

Viral logic and memetic logic

The process of memetic replication differs in com-

Memetic reproduction always implies a process of con-

(Ban Ki-moon, David Cameron) as it is to thousands of

Graphics and linguistics systems

Cataloging and listing memes is a highly developed

Sometimes it’s just a sentence, as in the case of the cry

unit. The unit shown is found in various contexts, and its

Viral content, for example a successful video, may give rise

Finally, some memes form genuine graphics or linguistics

The broken English used in LOLcat, also called LOLspeak,

deliberately bizarre but that tend to stabilize to form an

The bias of a new syntax sometimes includes the collateral

Autonomization of memetic replication and absurdity

One singular and destabilizing characteristic of

Is this autonomous and reflexive fascination that leads to

of a new twenty-first century cultural logic? The arbitrari-

The diversity and aesthetic complexity of memes make

As such, memetic culture is naturally hierarchical. Making

with adolescents. Putting a hand over one’s face to repro-

The mastery of complex graphics and linguistics sys-

This sociology of memetic practices is also geographically

Spreading a meme by deconstructing a pattern into a

an act of communication. It sends a message to a more or

Something is shifting in media history. The culture of

The picture plane

Double rainbow LOLcat

Represented here are three main factors that

Nyan Cat Gangnam Style Charlie bit me

LOLcat Philosoraptor Rage guy

This diagram depicts Internet memes according

Depending on the presence of multiple panes as

An image macro series that features a picture of an

All Your Base Are Belong to Us

A popular catchphrase that swept across the Internet

Annoying Facebook Girl

An image macro series featuring a photo of a teenage

A video featuring an infant biting his toddler brother’s

Chuck Norris Facts

Satirical factoids about martial artist and actor Chuck

A 3D-rendered animation of a baby dancing, which

Downfall (also known as “Hitler Reacts To…” )

A series of parody-subtitled videos based on a scene

A YouTube video of a visitor of Yosemite National Park,

A video is a five-second clip of the “chipmunk” (a prai-

The act of placing one’s face in one’s hands that conveys

Internet slang that became popular through image

Free Chen Guangcheng

A series of pictures based on photographs of people

Fry Squinty Eye

An image macro series that uses a still of Fry — a

character from the TV show Futurama — typically

A 2012 dance pop single written and performed by

Graphjam (or LOLgraphs or silly graphs)

A series of statistical representations and diagrams

Grass Mud Horse

Kaplan & Nova - Internet Meme Culture

Kaplan & Nova - Internet Meme Culture