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MASARYK UNIVERSITY

Faculty of Social Studies

Department of

Internet as Means of Communication

Master’s Thesis

Brno 2012

Author: Bc. Branislav Buchel

Study Advisor: Bernadette Nadya Jaworsky, PhD.

I declare that I worked on this diploma work independently and with the use of the listed literature.

Brno, 19 May 2012 Branislav Buchel

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I would like express my gratitude to Ms. Nadya Jaworsky for guiding me through writing of this thesis as well as all the feedback and encouragement she provided me with.

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Table of Contents

1. Introduction ...... 6 2. ...... 9 2.1 Arriving at a method ...... 9 2.2 Narrowing down the sample ...... 11 2.2.1 Data collection sites ...... 12 3. Theory of memes ...... 17 3.1 Key features of memes ...... 19 3.2 Modes of Transmission ...... 24 4. memes ...... 29 4.1 Demotivational posters ...... 30 4.2 ...... 33 4.3 “All your base are belong to us” ...... 34 4.4 Xzibit Yo Dawg ...... 35 4.5 Disaster girl ...... 37 4.6 ...... 38 4.7 Creating memes intentionally ...... 41 5. The Internet ...... 43 5.1 Hypertextuality ...... 43 5.2 ...... 46 5.3 Insider ...... 50 6. Communication ...... 52 6.1 Popular ...... 54 6.2 The Casually Pepperspray Cop ...... 56 6.3 Rage Faces (Rage Comics) ...... 58 6.4 Advice Animals ...... 61 7. Conclusion ...... 63 8. Bibliography ...... 67 9. List of figures ...... 70 10. Name index ...... 71 11. Annotation ...... 72

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1. Introduction The Internet is the newest of media and so far it is also the most complex. It can provide most of what previous media have provided. We can talk person to person like via the telephone, we can listen to broadcasts, we can watch movies and even live events streamed through the Internet just as we do on , and we can also use it to read books or news. What is also remarkable is the that the introduction of the internet was able to shift the equation in effect in the rest of the media. Previous types of media were predominantly one-way communication channels. By this I mean that there was “one” central transmitter of and the rest were just receivers. This state has been challenged by the spread of the Internet. Suddenly, there is a medium which provides all its users with an easily accessible opportunity to be transmitters of information, to be active. People have eagerly grasped this opportunity and now we spend gradually more and more connected online. The Internet gives a completely new meaning and dimension to Simmel’s of individualization. There would be few, if any, who would not be able to find something that is relevant to their interests. And not only can they find information pertaining to the subjects of their interests, but there are also public spaces available for people with similar interests to share and interact with others. However, these public spaces are different from those we have been used to so far and thus their new virtual inhabitants are still trying to figure out the options they provide and how to best utilize them in the most beneficial way. One such area, where people are still just exploring the options provided by the Internet is communication. The Internet provides many options and opportunities for interaction and communication while almost bypassing entirely obstacles of physical distance and time. On the other hand it also poses substantive constraints on our communication and those attempting to communicate in the same way as they do in physical world might be very surprised by the outcome of their efforts. Communication on the internet poses several substantial obstacles to communication. The complete absence of mimics and voice modulation reduces the content of the message substantially unless the video or audio is used and even then it is distorted by the of the recording equipment. However, the vast majority of the internet communication today is actualized through textual forms of communication where the quality of computer hardware does not

6 even factor in. One of the ways to overcome the difficulties of communication in the internet environment which have emerged is internet memes.

I first started to take an interest in internet memes several years ago. At the time I did not know what internet memes were – or even memes in general; all I saw were witty and funny pictures. The first time I encountered an internet was probably when I was seeking some advice regarding my computer. While searching for some advice I stumbled upon an internet message board forum where someone posted a question about a problem which looked very similar to the one I was struggling with. Luckily there were many kind people who were trying to answer the question and solve the problem at hand. However, their view of how the problem should be solved differed, substantially as it seemed, and the discussion strayed far from the original problem to some particular details. I was interested to see how the discussion had ended, since I still wanted to know if they had come up with a solution to the question asked. At one point somebody apparently lost patience and instead of trying to argue further posted a picture of Nicolas Cage with a strange bird on his head saying “My hair is a bird Your is invalid.” At that time, I did not know that what I had just seen was a very basic , but since then I was noticing similar pictures on various internet sites and later I learned to distinguish even more types and forms of internet memes. I have also learned that they are referred to as memes. From a sociological point of view I have found it interesting to discover what internet memes actually are, who uses them and why. I answer these questions in my thesis and thereby contribute to sociological understanding of the internet environment.

Because I have been using the grounded theory approach to explore and describe internet memes I have decided to organize my thesis accordingly. I put the methodology chapter at the beginning, and just then I continue with theoretical chapter and the rest of analytical chapters. In the first chapter I describe the methodology which I have employed to explore and analyze the internet memes and answer the research questions I am posing, my sampling and the criteria upon which the sampling was made.

In the second chapter I provide an overview of the literature dealing with the general theory of , as I will be using its and terminology to frame the theoretical contribution I am trying to make into the larger picture.

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In the third chapter I have decided to provide my own definition and analysis of what internet memes actually are, because I found the already available definitions and descriptions lacking in one way or another.

The fourth chapter is a description and conceptualization of the internet environment which has a determining influence over how the internet memes evolve and the forms they take. I the last chapter I arrive at analysis of internet memes as means of communication and I also provide a brief depiction of as one of the most widely used reference frames which provides common ground for understanding the internet memes. In the end I provide several notable examples of the internet memes used as means of communication also explain why they are important for their users.

To conclude, I briefly discuss the “spillage” of internet memes into the offline world and discuss the significance of my analysis and research.

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2. Methodology Based on the subject of my interest as well as the research questions I am trying to answer, I decided to use the grounded theory approach. Grounded theory as Corbin (2011) says is an attempt to provide “one possible of how and why persons, groups, organizations and communities or nations experience and act/interact emotionally to the events/happenings/situations/problems they encounter in life,” which is what I aim to do in my research. The phenomenon I am researching is internet memes and I aim to explain what they are for the people who use them.

The main goal of the grounded theory approach according to Dey (1999) is to “generate or discover a theory.” Its most distinctive feature, which fit my purposes very well, is that the researcher approaches the research field without any theoretical preconceptions and theoretical preparation. Instead the researcher starts to gather data in the field and starts to systematically analyze them as soon as possible. From these data he or she develops concepts and generalizations which should be able to explain the data and their relations. The concepts generated from the data are continuously exposed to the newly acquired data and those concepts which cannot explain the data or contradict them are discarded. Instead new concepts which can describe the old and the new data are introduced and new generalizations are generated. This continues until point when the new data do not generate any new incentives for changes in concepts or their generalizations. In other words, the research achieves “theoretical saturation.”

2.1 Arriving at a method The course of my research of this topic can be divided into two main parts. The first one can be called exploratory and the second one can be called systematic. The exploratory part was several years long and I actually was not aware that I would be conducting this research or writing this thesis about the topic of internet memes. However, I had a keen interest in the internet memes phenomenon and I always followed the new memes which I had come across while browsing the Internet. I have also spent some time looking at sites and forums, where the internet memes were abundant. Based on these I started to have

9 some about what internet memes are and decided to study them further and write a thesis about this topic. In order to conduct a research I, of course, needed a more systematic approach to the problem. Because of the relative newness of the topic as well as the type of questions I wanted to answer about the internet memes I chose the grounded theory as a way to approach the research. My research questions, which range in analytic focus, are as follows:

What are internet memes? (definitional) What communities use internet memes? (descriptive) What is the purpose of internet memes for the communities using them? (explanatory) Is it possible to categorize internet memes into some typology? (theoretical)

As a method to conduct my research I chose covert or to be more precise “lurking.” According to Lindof and Taylor (2006) among its benefits are, minimizing the impact of the researcher on the research community, which could distract the normally occurring interaction. Also in my case the lurking did not suffer from the drawbacks of lurking which can be present when conducting research of IRC1 channels or MUDs2. This is because in case of IRC channels and MUDs, the presence of arriving users is announced to other users present there. “In this way, the may not be active participants, but this does not mean that the others do not orient to them.” (Lindof and Taylor, 2006: 265) The other is that in some cases asking questions could even be perceived as bad manners. One of the so-called rules of the Internet, which is actually considered to be a part of an internet meme (knowyourmeme.com) is called “lurk moar” and implies that one should observe and try to learn the of the site before attempting to post or even ask questions answers to which can be learnt by observing others.

1 Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channels. Usually real-time, interactive, text -based discussion system delivered via a networked computer chat server (Clarke, 2000: 4).

2 Multi User Dungeons.

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2.2 Narrowing down the sample After some time of intensive observation I came to conclusion that following many internet sites was no longer necessary, and that I should instead focus more intensively on smaller sample of sites chosen based on the previous observations. I also decided to focus on the internet memes in picture format (mostly they are combination of an image and a text) as opposed to videos or pure text. I chose to follow mainly internet sites which have a lot of visitors, because from what I have observed there are internet memes which are specific to certain sites and then there are those which are frequent on all internet sites. However, the memes which were specific to a given site did not have any special feature apart from their niche communities.

The criteria upon which my choice of the sites to follow was based are, as already mentioned, high internet traffic,3 features that users have at their disposal to manage the discussion, the under which the posts can be made, and characteristics of the site regarding posting of new topics, i.e. threads. I have chosen internet traffic a criterion based on the assumption that the sites with most visits will be more influential in spread of memes. Further, I observed that the internet memes which are discussed on these sites are the ones which are generally best known and understood on the Internet and thus best for purposes of explanation and generalization. The features which are available to the users are important because they greatly influence the level of complexity of communication which is possible at that particular site. For example, if there is no threading available and there is an upvote/downvote option the communication between the users cannot become too complex, because the order of the responses would not be chronological but instead ordered based on popularity votes. The identity under which the posts can be made, ranging from posting under your own name to completely where everyone can have the same nickname, based upon my observations, influences the hostility of the environment which in turn influences what gets posted and what does not. The characteristics of the site in terms of new topics influence how the new post can catch attention of users.

3 I have used the site alexa.com for the sites‘ world rankings. The internet traffic ranking I quote stands for place on the worldwide ladder of attendance of internet sites.

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It is important to note, that the concept of internet memes is known to many internet users (Knobel& Lankshear, 2006). As a result of this, there are internet sites which gather the internet memes and provide space to talk about them or even sites, which enable their visitors to create their own internet memes by using simple tools available on the sites. In my research I decided to follow sites which are used to talk about the internet memes and also on sites where the internet memes are used in interactions among its users. Due to this fact I have decided to include a palette of different sites in my observation with intent to ensure that the gathered data will be varied enough to make generalizations about internet memes. Thus I have included in my observation sites that have internet memes as their primary focus as well as sites which have other focus but use the internet memes for one purpose or another. I have included sites which produce a lot of internet traffic and can be considered as hubs through which many users will pass, such as imgur.com, .com and also smaller sites.

All the of the internet sites which I have followed have free public access. Anyone can visit them and is free to view their content.4 This means that the data I gathered during my research and based my research on do not include cases from sites which require registration and membership to view their content. Contrary to freely accessible sites, the lurking method can cause suspicion among the users/members of sites that require registration in order for the site’s content to be viewable. The freely accessible sites were able to provide a great abundance of data. From previous experience with such sites I was already aware, that the memes which are used there are either the widespread ones which are used generally also on another sites, or they are just specific to the subject of interest of the sites community, but their use is essentially the same as those observable elsewhere.

2.2.1 Data collection sites In the following part I list the internet sites which I have followed, along with the characteristics I perceive to be relevant to the topic of this research.

4chan.com

4 Some of the subforums may require age confirmation for content inappropriate for minors.

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4chan.com (internet traffic ranking 908) is a BBS site which is considered to be among the most influential when it comes to creation and spread of the internet memes. On this site users are able to upload a picture which will be shown next to the post. The most important features of the site are the ability to post completely anonymously and that the site does not have any permanent . Later I discuss in depth how the site’s unique environment was one of the crucial factors in the of internet memes. At this site I have followed mainly the /b boards which are designated for random topics and are considered to be the most important subforums of the site.

Reddit.com

Reddit.com (internet traffic ranking 121) is a bulletin board (BBS) style internet hub that deals with a wide variety of topics, ranging from political and social to sports, and . It also has subforums which deal specifically with internet memes. When starting a new thread the reddit users are able to link a picture which will be visible in the list of the topics. In the threads the users are not able to post pictures but instead can provide a clickable hyperlink, which the users can click to view the picture. One of the most important features of the site is that it contains an upvote/downvote mechanism for whole threads as well as individual posts, indicating whether other users feel positively or negatively about them. The topics (threads) which receive the most upvotes are shown on the top of the list and the individual posts which have received the most upvotes are visible at all while the rest may be viewable just after specifically selecting the option to view them. This mechanism is very important when talking about the internet memes as I will show later. Last of the features of the site which I see as relevant with regard to my research is that the users are posting under their registered5 nicknames thus ensuring their , but enabling identification of the posts made by an individual user.

Imgur.com

Imgur.com (internet traffic ranking 70) is an internet site which enables its users to submit pictures with different topics from serious to entertaining. The site also provides option to post comments to the pictures as well as upvote/downvote mechanism for the pictures as

5 Here the term merely registered refers to the fact that the user needs to be logged in to post on the site. However, they do not need to provide any information which would reveal their identity.

13 well as individual comments. There is no thread functionality and thus the viewers are not able to see the comments in a chronological order, but they are listed based on the number of upvotes they received. Similar to reddit.com, with which imgur.com is closely linked,6 imgur users are submitting their pictures under their registered nicknames thus enabling individual users to be identified.

9gag.com

9gag.com (internet traffic ranking 274) is an internet site on which the users post pictures, mostly of a humorous or entertaining nature. It also provides option to upvote/downvote a picture. The most important feature of the site which makes it different from imgur.com is that on 9gag.com the users post comments under their identities. This means that the comments they make are visible on their Facebook profile and also that posting and commenting on this site is not anonymous, which greatly influences the tone of the discussions as well as the content of pictures which are posted. The responses made on the 9gag are in general friendlier and more mannered than on sites where the users are more anonymous.

Memebase.com

Memebase.com (internet traffic ranking 4516) serves as a repository of internet memes where the users are able to post their contributions and other people can vote if the contribution, usually a picture is in accordance with the original concept of the meme or discuss it more thoroughly. The site was relevant to my interests, because there are a lot of discussions about the most recent memes.

Knowyourmeme.com

Knowyourmeme.com (internet traffic ranking 2559) is an internet site originally intended to be a site which gathers internet memes and provides research on their origins and spread, evolved into encyclopedic site which covers internet memes and related topics. Users can make new entries which are voted on to be accepted or rejected as legitimate internet memes. Contributions can be discussed using Facebook profiles and real names or using a

6 Reddit users are often linking to images uploaded on imgur and imgur pictures are commonly discussed on reddit when the threading functionality missing on imgur is desired by users. The ability to post in threads enables the users to hold discussions, and conversations which are longer, more complex.

14 nickname registered on the knowyourmeme site. The site also has a forum where the users can discuss internet memes, and talk about many different topics as well.

I also utilized a number of other BBS sites and forums less regularly to crosscheck if my observations were accurate and thus further validate my findings. I will be focusing on the bigger sites named above, though, because they are more influential in the creation and distribution of internet memes.

During my observations, I have been asking the following questions about the internet memes I have encountered:

Does the picture fulfill the original gist of the meme? If not what is the reaction of other people? This is very important when considering image text and macros. If the meme does not fit the original idea it can derail the discussion from what the author was trying to tell. What is the meme trying to tell us? The point the author was trying to make is obviously important. How does the “audience” respond to the meme? Sometimes, the “audience” develops further the idea presented by the meme. What is the use of the meme for the person who posted it? Basically the poster of the meme may want to get attention, share an idea, use the meme as a response to previous posts, pull a prank on someone or even derail a topic. How does the environment (type of internet site) influence the response to the meme? This question came up after some time of observation when I realized there were different reactions according to the type of site, mainly in terms of hostility to a similar meme posted on different sites. According to what I found out the less anonymity the posters have the less hostile will their responses be.

Based upon the answers to these empirical questions, I considered each of my broader research questions – in definitional, descriptive, explanatory and typological terms – and began to build my theory about internet memes. It is important to note, that the questions

15 were changing over time and the focus of the questions was always shifting more toward the interaction between the internet meme and the users replying to it. This is what convinced me that I should be focusing on the interaction and communication.

After I built a substantial part of my theory and understanding of the internet memes I of course wondered if I could fit my findings into some broader theoretical context of memetic theories. Thus I started to look into general theory of memes and also into the work that has been done with internet memes. I have found out that it was possible to apply the general theory of memetics onto internet memes. However, I also found that in some regards I could not agree with the small body of existing scholarly work internet memes and thus I would be able to offer a unique contribution with my own input about the topic. For example, as I was not able to find any satisfactory sociological definition of internet memes, I sought to conceptualize one myself. In the next chapter I will provide an overview of the general theory of memes. In subsequent chapters I will provide my own and findings about the internet memes and where applicable I will also try to frame them in terms of the general theory of memes.

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3. Theory of memes

Before we can even begin to talk about memes we need to talk about the theoretical contribution of Gabriel Tarde. He wanted to approach the exploration of the social world by looking at products, acts and and their reproduction which can then bring us understanding about the itself. (Marsden, 2000) The reproduction of society and all of its manifestations occurs, according to Tarde, by means of imitation. He goes as far as stating "What is society? I have answered: Society is imitation". (Tarde, 1962: 74) The goal of his sociological approach is to identify the why some ideas are reproduced while the vast majority of them are going to be forgotten. These are the questions that are being asked also by the scientists claiming their affiliation to the memetics, and imitation is a core of the theory of the memes. Even though his work is very well fit to be incorporated into foundations of the theory of memes, surprisingly, Tarde is not cited in the basic works of memetic theories.

The concept of memes as such was developed by evolutionary biologist while trying to explain cultural transmission, human behavior, cultural evolution and development of human society. The need for the new theory came from his dissatisfaction by often ad hoc explanations of human behavior by existing scientific theories, which were “trying to find ‘biological advantages’ of various elements of the human society.” (Dawkins, 1989:173) This kind of approach often contains implicit assumption that humans are a different kind of specie and that mechanisms driving the evolution of human society are different from those which are at work in the rest of nature.7 Dawkins chose to take a step back and abandon the complex and purpose-built explanations in favor of a simpler one which would be able to address the differences and the commonalities among the species at once. For this he turned to the theory of evolution the basic idea of which can be summed up as follows: genes are competing with each other for a chance to reproduce and spread in their environment. Genes can also be called replicators, because that is their primary

7 Cultural transmission can be found also on other species. For example, it was shown that songbird songs are not transmitted genetically, but are taught by listening to songs of other members of the specie and imitating them. Also there are cases when the song was changed by a bird making an error while imitating the song which was subsequently copied by other songbirds. (Jenkins, 1978 cited in Dawkins 1989)

17 purpose. To explain cultural evolution, Dawkins looked for similar and thus he identified another form of a replicator, a meme.

A meme is a replicator of another kind. It is an idea, a thought, or a concept which can be passed between minds. It can be anything from a catchy tune you adopt unwittingly, which you keep humming subconsciously through slogan from a commercial, to intricate and abstract ideas of grand design or the Big Bang. All of these have been passed into your mind from someone else’s mind. Memes are often compared to viruses, replicating agents which need a host (carrier) in order to replicate. To some extent the comparison works, because like viruses, memes, i.e. ideas, thoughts, concepts, tunes, etc., need a host to ensure their replication and spread. However, due to the nature of memes and the means they employ to replicate, memes are much more susceptible to “mutations” and changes than genes: “A meme reaching an agent, if it is reproduced at all, will typically be transmitted in a changed form, possibly recombined with other information learned earlier.” (Heylighen and Chielens, 2008: 7) In this sense, the reproduction of memes is more Lamarckian than Darwinian, because the changes transmit not only among subsequent generations of hosts, as is the case with genes, but they spread among the same generation as well. This implies that memes can spread much more rapidly, but at the same time with much less fidelity than the genes. Thus we come to the most important difference between genes and memes and that is the way in which they replicate. Genes replicate by vertical transmission by copying from generation to generation. Memes on the other hand are also capable of horizontal transmission among members of the same generation by imitation, which means their copies won’t be as accurate; in other words, the fidelity of their replication is lower, but it gives them ability to spread faster. “While memes have a much higher fecundity than genes, their plasticity implies a much lower copying-fidelity: a message as received and understood by an individual will rarely be identical to the one that was expressed, as illustrated by the many misunderstandings and reinterpretations during communication.” (Heylighen and Chielens, 2008: 7) Mutation is a crucial characteristic of memes, because it is in the process of imitation where they are let loose from their hosts. Blackmore says: “When you imitate someone else, something is passed on. This ‘something’ can then be passed on again, and again, and so take on a life of its own. We might call this thing an idea, an instruction, a behavior, a piece of information ...” (Blackmore, 1999: 4) As Heylinghen and Chielens point

18 out, memes are subject to the principle of natural selection because the acquired new characteristics along with the core idea of the meme are passed on selectively, based on the fitness of the meme: “Natural selection by definition will pick out the memes who survive this transmission process relatively unchanged. Therefore, the fittest memes, such as certain songs, religious beliefs, scientific , or brand names, will have a stable, recognizable identity, even though they may differ in appearance, as exemplified by the many renditions of a song or joke.” (Heylighen and Chielens, 2008: 7) This implies that it is in the process of imitation where the memes which will survive are chosen, because their core idea is strong enough while they are still able to adapt to their surroundings. Every day we come into contact with thousands and thousands of pieces of various information, ideas etc, but only some of them we do remember and even fewer of them we actually share with someone else. This is because the capacity for remembering is limited and the resources for sharing i.e. time we have to talk to other people or write some text are limited and at the same time the attention we can get from others is limited as well. Thus only the most interesting, the most memorable, the most useful etc memes are passed on.

3.1 Key features of memes So far, we have come to a point, where we can say that the memes are replicators which spread from a host to a host by imitation and that they are subject to the principle of natural selection. Now we can identify some of the key features of memes, which will be both important and useful when while we talk and explore the memes. The most basic characteristics which memes need to posses in order to be eligible to be considered replicators are variation, selection and retention (i.e. heredity) according to Blackmore. These can be characterized as follows:

Variation – stories are rarely told exactly the same way twice, no two buildings are absolutely identical, and every conversation is unique – and when memes are passed on, the copying is not always perfect.

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Selection – some memes grab the attention, are faithfully remembered and passed on to other people, while others fail to get copied at all.

Retention of some of the ideas or behaviors in that meme – something of the original meme must be retained for us to call it imitation or copying or learning by example. (Blackmore, 1999: 14)

Dawkins (1989: 194) identifies as key characteristics of memes their fidelity, fecundity and longevity. These can be used to measure “success” of particular memes.

Fidelity with which the meme is copied shows how strong the core idea of the meme actually is. While the meme will still be subject to variation the core idea should remain intact in order for the meme to be successful. An example of an unsuccessful meme can be found in this well-known joke:

Question for radio Yerevan: Is it true that Jurij Gagarin received a new car in Moscow?

Answer: Yes, this is true. Even though it wasn’t in Moscow but in Leningrad. It wasn’t Jurij Gagarin but a local music teacher. It wasn’t a car but a bicycle. And he didn’t get it but it was stolen from him.

Fecundity is an indicator of how rapidly can the meme replicate. Basically it is a number of copies or imitations made in certain period of time.

Longevity shows for how long a particular meme can survive. For example memes for everlasting life after death and gods i.e. apart from being very fecund is also have very high longevity, because they have survived in their varying forms for millenniums.

Religions survived for such a long time probably because they were somehow useful to people, but usefulness is not a necessary characteristic of a successful meme. It can improve its chances for success, but there is always a possibility of a different meme, which will be much more successful or even will completely prevail and replace the useful meme. The useful ones can spread just as well as the pointless ones or even harmful ones. Example of this can be houses built in areas endangered by floods. People building new houses opted

20 for new materials and building techniques, which they thought brought them advantage by saving money. However, when the floods actually came, the houses built by new techniques and from new materials such as concrete, instead of wood and clay, remained wet for several months and some of them even needed to be torn down while the houses built of traditional materials by traditional techniques were habitable in of two weeks. This can also serve as an example of a meme, which has retained its core idea, meaning the houses built in the traditional way were much less affected by the floods and at the same time it has lost all the explanatory parts which actually explained why the houses should be built in this way leaving the people quite surprised when they understood what was the purpose of the materials used and techniques employed.

As stated above, memes do not need to be useful. Some of them can even be outright harmful or even deadly, such as samurai honor code which required the warrior to commit suicide by slashing his stomach; and they are still able to spread to their new hosts. However, researchers have already identified criteria with potential to increase the chances of memes to spread. As proposed by Heylighen (2008), these criteria can be split into three different classes, based on the entity it pertains to. There are objective criteria, which pertain to the object the meme refers to, subjective criteria pertaining to the subject, the host who assimilates and remembers the meme, and intersubjective criteria pertaining to the process of transmission of the meme between its hosts. These are as Heylighen and Chielens (2008) list them:

Objective criteria: Distinctiveness: information that refers to something precise, distinct, or detailed can be confirmed more easily by observation.

Invariance: information that remains valid over a wide range of contexts or situations is more stable and broadly applicable.

Evidence: information that is supported by independent observations is more reliable.

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Subjective criteria: Utility: information that is valuable or useful to its carrier is more likely to be remembered and passed on.

Affectivity: information that provokes strong is more likely to be remembered and passed on: this typically stimulates instinctive reactions, such as fear, desire or (Heath, Bell & Stenberg, 2001).

Coherence: the better information fits in with the knowledge that individuals already have, the more easily they will understand and accept it (Thagard, 1998).

Simplicity: short, simple messages are easier to assimilate, remember and transmit.

Novelty: information that is unexpected will attract more attention.

Repetition: repeated exposure to the same message helps it to be assimilated and retained.

Intersubjective criteria: Publicity: the more effort an individual puts into spreading a message, the more people will receive it.

Formality: messages formulated explicitly and unambiguously are less likely to be misinterpreted.

Expressivity: information must be easy to express in a given language or medium.

Authority: an authoritative, trustworthy source of the information makes it more likely to be accepted.

Conformity: information confirmed by many people is more easily accepted (Boyd & Richerson, 1985).

Collective utility: information, if adopted by a group, may help the group to function better, and therefore to grow or function as a model for others. Examples are

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standards, linguistic conventions, and traffic rules.” (Heylighen and Chielens, 2008: 18)

Potentially, even more criteria can be identified. Further, memes can be successful even if they do not meet these criteria, or even straightforward contradict some of them. For example many of the religious memes could not meet the objective criteria of distinctiveness or , but they would probably do better in case of invariance criteria.

We have already established that the memes transmit through means of imitation and that the reason why they propagate is that they are in fact replicators. Spreading is their primary purpose and the rest of all the things they achieve is just a byproduct helping them in some way to reach their goal. At this point it is important to mention that the memes often spread jointly with other memes. These joint groups of memes were called “coadapted meme complexes” by Dawkins, but are more commonly known as memeplexes. (Speel 1995, Blackmore 1999) The principle is that there are certain memes which support each other and make each other stronger.

Imagine two memes, one ‘send a scratchcard to x’ and another ‘win lots of money’. The former instruction is unlikely to be obeyed just on its own. The latter is tempting but includes no instruction on how to. Together, and with some other suitable co- memes, the two can apparently get people to obey – and copy the whole package on again. The essence of any memeplex is that the memes inside it can replicate better as part of the group than they can on their own. (Blackmore, 1999: 19-20)

Often cited examples of these are religions. Religions, if we think about them in terms of memetics, the religions can be viewed as groups of memes which support each other and protect each other from competition of other memes, such as other religions, science or any other meme which would rival the exclusivity of the religious memeplex.

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3.2 Modes of Transmission Now we will take a closer look at possible ways of their transmission as well as on the process of the meme replication itself. There are six basic types of memetic transmission as identified by Aaron Lynch. As is the case with many other typologies, none of these types is mutually exclusive and most often the meme or memeplex is spread by means which would fit more of these “” types.

1. Parental transmission: is a type of a vertical transmission, when the memes are spread by parents onto their children. This is a very obvious and logical way of meme transmission as parents mostly have significant influence over their children and thus it is logical, that the children would take over their view and opinions i.e. memeplexes. Lynch describes two types of parental transmission. The first one is quantity parental transmission, which basically means that the holder of the meme is encouraged to have more children, thus more possible carriers for the memes. The second type of parental transmission is efficiency transmission which increases the chance that the parents will be able to spread their ideas onto their children. Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long upon the land which the Lord your God is giving you, is a good example of a meme supporting this type of transmission.

2. Proselytic transmission: is a type of a horizontal transmission. In this case the memeplex encourages its hosts to spread it among the rest of the population, in other word among their peers.

3. Preservational mode: is not a type of transmission per se but more precisely a strategy to hold onto the hosts already under influence of the memeplex, often promising some kind of reward or advantage to its holders e.g. positive thinking philosophy promising better problem resolution , or threatening those who would abandon the memeplex by some kind of or setback e.g. right wing political threatening voters by transition of the country to or even and all the horrors related to such state and versa in case of left wing political ideologies.

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4. Adversative approach: is the most hostile of meme transmission strategies. It encourages hosts of the memeplex to attack or even kill the hosts of competing memes. The latter is an approach still used in cases of political or religious memeplexes. The former can mean physical attacks, but also verbal offense of opponents. The possible advantage which can be gained by this strategy can be either shocking or discrediting the opponent or reducing the population of hosts of competing memes making the propagation thus increasing the percentually increasing portion of hosts of the meme.

5. Cognitive approach: is an approach taken by memes which are perceived to be logical and well-argued. This is approach is most effective in based on rationality such as academia or democratic societies.

6. Motivational strategy: the meme induces the potential hosts into considering the benefits of hosting the meme compared to not hosting the meme. Simple example would be a religious that god exists which should grant you access to heaven after you die compared to being sent to hell if you choose to not believe. There can also be social benefits promised as reward for adopting these memes. This strategy engages hosts imagination.

There are also other possible transmission strategies which will come to mind, that were not mentioned in this typology. None of the abovementioned types included moral values as a basis for adopting the memeplexes. Someone might argue that these can be part of some of the previous type, but I would argue that the distinction between right and wrong, or good and bad is one of the essential attributes people are looking for when adopting some beliefs.

These were the strategies employed by memes to ensure their survival and spread onto more hosts. While the strategies of transmission focus on transmission of the memes among groups the process of replication describes how the host acquires the meme and passes it onto other hosts. The process of the meme replication was described by Heylighen and Chielens (2008) in four consecutive stages. The meme, in order to be successfully replicated, needs to complete all of these stages. The four stages are as follows:

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“1) Assimilation by an individual, who thereby becomes a carrier or host of the meme;

2) Retention in that individual's ;

3) Expression by the individual in language, behavior, or another form that can be perceived by others;

4) Transmission of the thus created message or mediotype8 to one or more other individuals.” (Heylighen and Chielens, 2008: 10)

These four stages are crucial to understanding memes; thus, I elaborate each below.

Assimilation

“A successful meme must be able to “infect” a new host, that is, enter into its memory, and thus acquire its memotype9 form” (Heylighen and Chielens, 2008: 10) i.e. be assimilated by the host. When a person is introduced to a new meme either by being told, shown, etc, or by discovering it on his/her own, it needs to be noticed, understood and accepted in order to assimilate it. To be noticed the meme needs to be salient enough to get attention of the potential new host. Then it needs to be understood, which means that the meme needs to be fitted into context with the rest of knowledgebase of the person. This basically suggests that certain memes can be mutually exclusive e.g. and religiousness. And as the last step, the meme needs to be accepted by the host, making it part of his cognitive structures. An idea which was noticed and understood by a potential host can still be regarded as unbelievable, unreliable, or uncredible to assimilate it.

8 A meme as expressed in an external medium, such as a text, an artifact, a song, or a behavior. (Heylighen and Chielens, 2008: 2)

9 A meme in the form of information held in an individual’s memory. (Heylighen and Chielens, 2008: 2)

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Retention

Throughout our lives, we are able to retain only limited only limited amount of information in our , the rest are forgotten, either temporarily or permanently. The longer the meme is retained in our memory, the higher are its chances of spreading further onto other hosts. This is an individual dimension of the longevity characteristic established by Dawkins (1989). Each day we come across hundreds or thousands of memes which we assimilate even subconsciously only to forget them later. Example of this can be the news we read on the internet or see on the television. Most of them we will not be able to recall in few days.

Expression

“To be communicated to other individuals, a meme must emerge from its storage as memory pattern or memotype and enter its mediotype phase, i.e. assume a physical shape that can be perceived by others. This process may be called ‘expression’.” (Heylighen and Chielens, 2008: 10) There are memes, which can be regarded as so important by its hosts that they feel urge to express them very often and there are those which are kept as secrets or considered to be too insignificant to even mention to someone. An example of the former case can be a person telling all his friends about healthy and as an example of the former we can consider washing your hands on the toilet. The means of expression can vary from speech, gesture, text, and drawings, to creating representations of the memes like statues or other art artifacts. In order to express the meme the person does not need to be aware of expressing it. For example a very common way of expressing the memes unknowingly can be the way a person dresses and how he/she behaves in these clothes.

Transmission

At this stage, the appropriate way of transmission of the meme needs to be chosen. As Heylighen and Chielens put it, “To reach another individual, an expression needs a physical carrier or medium that is sufficiently stable to transmit the expression without too much loss or deformation.” (Heylighen and Chielens, 2008: 10) This stage is a counterpart to Dawkins’s fidelity and is crucial for successful spread of the meme, because it is at this stage where the meme takes some form which it will reach its new potential hosts. Regardless of what the meme actually meant to be prior to this step, this is the one where it becomes a mediotype

27 which will be further interpreted by the carries who will or will not assimilate it based on how they will understand it. As an example of this we can imagine a person attempting to describe an idea of his/her house. The house does not exist yet and so the person is the only one who knows exactly how the house is supposed to look. Based on the fidelity with which he/she will be able to convey this idea to the architect the project drawn by the architect will resemble the original idea described. The ways in which the house can be described are numerous of course. It can be, described by words, drawn in pen on a piece of paper, sketched in some computer program, or built from Lego blocks. The person attempting to describe the house will use the way which he/she deems as the most appropriate to convey the idea, based on if he is proficient with the computer program, good in drawing, or eloquent.

In the end of this chapter I would like to briefly return to Tarde and why I think that his thoughts should yield more weight in the theory of memes. In comparison to Dawkins and especially Blackmore, Tarde gives much more agency to people over what memes they spread and how they use those memes to their advantage. Of course, Tarde does not use the term meme, but it is very much implicitly present in his writings.

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4. Internet memes

In the previous chapter I have focused on and explained what a meme in general is, how it spreads among the population and how is all this operationalized by authors writing about memes. In the following chapter I will be focusing on internet memes. I will try to describe the internet memes in the terms of the previous chapter, but I will also give examples of what the internet memes are, because I think that the very brief descriptions often given by authors writing about internet memes are insufficient for this purpose.

First of all, let us take a look at how internet memes are described by authors who research them and write about them. Quaranta writes, that “the phenomenon is known as an ‘Internet meme,’ and could be described as ‘media objects’ (for the most part videos) that would probably have been destined for invisibility and then for some bizarre reason go viral, becoming ‘’ and contaminating other media, and at times even entering spoken language.” (Quaranta, 2010: 3) Apart from the fact that the claim about internet memes being mostly videos is highly debatable and probably untrue other characteristics mentioned by Quaranta are true about internet memes. Knobel and Lankshear (2006) characterize an internet meme as “a popular term for describing the rapid uptake and spread of a particular idea presented as a written text, image, language “move,” or some other unit of cultural “stuff”.” (Knobel& Lankshear, 2006: 202) and Bauckhage describes them as “phenomena that rapidly gain popularity or notoriety on the Internet. Often, modifications or spoofs add to the profile of the original idea thus turning it into a phenomenon that transgresses social and cultural boundaries. It is commonly assumed that Internet memes spread virally but as to this assumption is scarce.” (Bauckhage, 2011: 42) We also need to consider the definition provided by the site knowyourmeme.org, which is an encyclopedia- like site which gathers internet memes and attempts to provide insight into their origins and further spread.

Internet memes are typically associated with media, catchphrases, and more general trends that spread throughout various outlets on the like chat

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clients, , social networking sites, , forums and image boards. It’s often used to point out how trends online evolve and change over time, creating various new derivatives. (knowyourmeme.org)

When we look at these definitions of internet memes, we can see that what they have in common is an emphasis on the rapidity of spread of internet memes. Other than that they focus on different aspects of internet meme characteristics. If we attempt to merge these definitions together to form more complete one, we can say that the internet memes are (1) rapidly spreading by means of electronic communication such as e-mail, forums, image boards, chats, etc. and (2) that they are media objects such as videos, pictures, texts, audio recordings, etc. Internet memes also transgress social and cultural boundaries, their successful spread is almost always very surprising and unexpected, and they are often humorous imitations of some product or concept. This characteristic of internet memes is more complete than the partial ones which served as source and a person familiar with the concept of internet memes would be able to identify a meme based on it. Those who are not familiar with the concept of memes or even did not encounter an internet meme while browsing the internet, which I doubt, would have a problem identifying a meme if they encountered one. For purpose of clarity I will now provide examples of internet memes which should help to better explain what I am going to talk about further ahead in this paper.

4.1 Demotivational posters

Maybe, while browsing the Internet, you have already run across a picture with black borders coupled with title written in capital letters and more text written in smaller font under it. It could have been something like this: a picture of lot of light bulbs lying around and a text saying: “CLUELESSNESS, There are no stupid questions, but there are a LOT of inquisitive idiots” (Figure 1). What you saw was a “demotivational poster.” The idea for demotivational posters is based upon the motivational posters which could be sometimes found on walls in offices of companies. Their purpose is to demotivate and discourage you, to make you feel powerless and as if every effort was futile. This particular internet meme is

30 very popular and widespread on the internet and over the time it has many derivates and spinoffs. The original topic of the meme i.e. corporate motivational pictures was expanded and nowadays the demotivational posters often stand for cynical or ironic statements over wide variety of topics.

Figure 1. Demotional: Cluelessness

After reading the previous paragraph someone could be asking himself a question, if this is in fact correct, because he remembers seeing a picture fitting the visual description, but there was no sarcasm or , but instead it was just some humorous statement referring to the picture. It might have been for example: “Apple, Now with dual core technology” with a picture of an apple with two cores. (Figure 2) This is in fact a misinterpretation of the original concept of the meme which happened during the assimilation stage of the memetic transmission process. Now, I could just end the description with statement, that there are demotivational posters and then their stillborn imitations and move on to the next example of an internet meme. But instead let us take a look how the original meme is able to protect its fidelity and thereby further its longevity.

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Figure 2. Demotivational: Apple

So, at this point the meme is losing fidelity of its transmission and if this failed imitation will find its hosts, the original meme will lose its power, because the two memes are obviously not distinctive enough for some of the hosts to distinguish. However, the internet memes actually are not single memes, but rather memeplexes consisting of at least two memes. The first one is the idea of the gist i.e. the demotivational poster and the second one is an idea of an internet meme. As Knobel and Lankshear point out, “The concept of a ‘meme’ itself has become something of a meme online” (Knobel & Lankshear, 2006: 202), which suggests that the carriers of this memeplex will know that the demotivational posters are an internet meme. Upon encountering this failed attempt of a demotivational poster, they will react according to some of the strategies of memetic transmission. In this particular case the reaction was an aversive one as we can see on the webpage reddit.com, sub forum

32 demotivationals where the picture of dual core apple was posted. For illustration, I will quote: “OP10: How many people need to say it? Demotivational posters are NOT just some picture with a funny caption, take that shit to /r/funny or /r/pics11. Im tired of this shit.” In this case the person reacting to the posted picture objects to the picture being called a demotivational poster and tries to expel the unwanted picture from the space reserved for this particular internet meme. After subsequent exchange of arguments, he succeeds in persuading the original poster that the picture he posted in fact is not a demotivational poster and he agrees to post similar pictures into this sub forum. Thus the fidelity of the demotivational poster meme was protected by the accompanying meme of internet memes and the discussed picture will not be able to pose as a demotivational poster. Behavior similar to the one cited above is quite common in cases of failed attempts to create internet memes.

I have shown an example of an internet meme picture which actually is a memeplex of the demotivational poster concept plus a concept of the internet meme and its failed copy. I have also demonstrated how the host of the demotivational poster meme defended the fidelity of the original meme against perceived rivaling meme. The fidelity of the internet memes is important for their users since they use them as a form of communication. If the fidelity of the meme becomes compromised too much it can become confusing, essentially the same as a word which has shifted its meaning.

4.2 Rickrolling

Up to date the Rickrolling is one of the most well known and widespread internet memes. Rickroll is an internet prank used by internet users to amuse themselves at expense of other people. The gist of Rickrolling lies in tricking a person, usually by promising content relevant to the topic at hand, to click a link leading to video of Rick Astley’s 1987 single, “,” uploaded on YouTube. When the person clicks the link he or she has been successfully Rickrolled. According to knowyourmeme.org this is a “spin-off of an earlier practical joke known as duckrolling, in which an external link with a sensational title (i.e., a

10 Original poster. An acronym commonly used on internet forums. 11 /r/ funny or /r/ pics are tags for subforums designated for funny topics and pictures respectively

33 specific picture or news item) would be redirected to an edited image of a duck with wooden wheels.” (knowyourmeme.org) As we can all imagine, after several instances of this prank being pulled on someone this would get quite annoying and frustrating (and it was). People would get more suspicious about links they would click on, especially if it led to YouTube and so the pranksters began to mask the links by using services such as a tinyurl, the original purpose of which is to shorten the long links, but in this instance they were used to mislead the people into being Rickrolled. But there are those who would go even further in their effort to Rickroll someone and amuse themselves and possibly even those who would be victims of their prank. Some creative variations of Rickrolling include spelling the lyrics of the song by the first letters or word of each line in a conversation (Figure 3. See appendix 1), rewriting the lyrics by using synonymous words, editing videos in a way that in the first few seconds they show some other content and just then the clip starts etc.

Among other things, this example shows how the meme will change its mediatype in order to spread further. The original internet meme of duckrolling, which was able to propagate itself only in the environment of 4chan, where it originally evolved, when changed into Rickrolling it was able to spread much further onto another hosts. In addition, when the original form of video would already be so recognizable, that the people who knew the meme would just instantly cancel it and even warn other internet users from clicking the link, the hosts of the meme attempting to Rickroll someone devised different ways how to accomplish the goal. From memetic perspective this can be seen as the meme influencing its host to propagate it further by any means necessary. I will further refer to Rickrolling later on when I will be talking about how internet memes have influence beyond the “borders” of the internet and also when talking about 4chan and its role in evolution and spread of internet memes.

4.3 “All your base are belong to us”

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The “All your base are belong to us” internet meme is one of the oldest. Its origins can be traced back to a Japanese video named Zero Wing. In the introductory part of the game there is a computer-animated video, where the leader of the enemy invading human territory among other important things says also the phrase “All your base are belong to us.” This is a result of poor translation from Japanese into the English language. People playing the game found it amusing enough to spread it further and thus the meme was born. For our purposes it is interesting, because it is a primary and probably the most prominent example of subgenre of internet memes which can be called “Engrish.”12 Over the years there have been numerous variations of this meme and it was already made into songs, videos, photoshoped into pictures etc. I chose it as an example of internet memes, because like with many other internet memes it is very unclear why exactly this phrase out of all misspelled, mispronounced, and probably equally amusing cases of Engrish words and phrases it was this one which became so successful. As Danung says, “*It is+ interesting to observe that the meme in whole is based on the accidental, uncontrived to properly translate the game into English.” (Danung, 2008: 9) Also it points on another key characteristic of internet memes in general and that is making fun of botched, flawed or otherwise broken products of popular and consumer culture. From memetic point of view, we can say that the central meme is making fun of the Engrish translations and this particular meme is just the most prominent and well known derivate. Another successful memes of this type according to knowyourmeme.org are: “Shamefur dispray,” “I am error,” and “A winner is you.” All except for Shamefur dispray have their origin in old videogames translated into English. The Shamefur dispray originated in a new videogame Shogun 2, where the narrator is talking with heavy Japanese accent.

4.4 Xzibit Yo Dawg

This internet meme has its origins in the MTV show Pimp My Ride hosted by rapper Xzibit. The premise of the show was to take a car of some person and customize based on his or hers preferences. The show was “known for putting awesome things like fish tanks, clothes dryers, and even fireplaces in the back of your car.” (knowyourmeme.org) This plus the

12 Engrish is a term referring to bad use of English by Japanese and other East Asians.

35 specific way in which Xzibit was talking on the show sparked the of the Yo Dawg . Similar to the Demotivational posters it consists of a picture with a written text. In this case the text has a specific formula which is followed: “Standard: {yo,sup} dawg, I herd you like X, so I put an X in your Y so you can VERB while you VERB

Repetitive: {yo,sup} dawg, I herd you like X, so I put an X in your X so you can X while you X

Abstract: {yo,sup} dawg, I herd you like X, so I put an Y in your Z so you can VERB while you VERB” (knowyourmeme.org)

Important part of the macro is that it is recursive, which makes it appealing for creative use in many different cases. The original form of the meme with picture of Xzibit’s face (Figure 4) can be changed for a picture of some event or a on which the formula can be successfully applied. A popular application of the meme is the movie Inception where the main characters move in dreams and they do not know if they are already in their or still dreaming. The basic text macro would go like this: Yo dawg, I herd you like to dream, so I put a dream in your dream so you can dram while you dream.

Figure 4. Xzibit Yo Dawg

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The format of image macros is very popular in creation of internet memes. In this particular case the interesting point is the formula which can be played around with a lot, providing an opportunity to creatively engage. This is also one of important characteristics of internet memes. They are often stimulating of their hosts while providing a simple template to follow. The other characteristic which helped this internet meme to spread is its geekiness.

4.5 Disaster girl

Disaster girl (Figure 5) is a very simple internet meme which originated in a photo of a little girl standing near a burning house with a rather devilish look on her face. The photograph was taken by her father and uploaded it on a flickr server13. Later it was submitted into photo competition with theme “ capture” which is when it caught wider attention from internet users. Soon Photoshopped14 pictures with the face of the girl and some disaster or calamity in the background, thus insinuating that she was responsible, started to show up on the internet. For our purposes the interesting point is that the girl is not an anonymous face without name. Her name is Zoe Roth and she lives in Mebane in North Carolina.

13 Flickr.com is a server dedicated to sharing photos. Many people use it as online albums. 14 Photoshopped means edited using the Adobe program Photoshop. The word is often used as synonym for advanced photo editing.

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Figure 5. Disaster girl

What this example should illustrate is that virtually any picture or in fact any piece of information can become an internet meme and we cannot really be sure which one will catch the attention of people. Another important point is the fact that the main protagonist of the meme is not anonymous and there is a name and a story linked to the picture which is known and can be found. This is characteristic also of many other internet memes when a random person suddenly became face of an internet meme, such as Scumbag Steve, StarWars Kid, or Success Kid. (Figure 6. See appendix 1) The stories behind pictures of these people do not really reflect the purposes for which they are being used. Zoe Roth did not really start the fire it was by firefighters who were having a live training.

4.6 LOLcats

This internet meme consists of cats photographed in various humorous positions with a text written in so called lolspeak15. The origin of the picture stems yet again in a random picture

15 Lolspeak is an internet dialect of English that is used in conjunction with images of cats, exhibits distinctive variations and patterns which differ from those of standard English. Lolspeak has influenced other language use

38 from a Russian website with misspelled text “Can I has a cheeseburger?” While its origins can be traced to other internet sites, the main role in the wide spread of this meme is attributed to 4chan forums. Over the time of this meme’s , many mutations and spinoffs have appeared. There is a “Caturday” submeme which is a name for 4chan to create threads on Saturdays, and among thousands of random cat pictures there are few which became submemes of the genre. Examples are Ceiling cat (Figure 7), Longcat (Figure 8. See appendix 1), Kitler (Figure 9. See appendix 1) and so on. There are several interesting points about this meme. The first is a question. Why cats, when there are more dogs than cats on the internet? in her interview for the knowyourmeme.org came up with this answer: I think they are easier to anthropomorphise and harder to herd. There’s something secretive about them. When I was a child I used to imagine that all our local cats met up every night after dark to plot schemes against the grown-ups (I wished!). One would never imagine this of dogs, so Ceiling Cat ruling the world from the loft is perfect.

Figure 7. Ceiling Cat

and may have a significant impact on the English language, due in part to the internet’s role in the evolution of English (Crystal “Language and the Internet,” 2006:26-27)

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What is important for us about her answer when researching internet memes and probably memes in general is that the sheer amount of base material does not suffice there also needs to be a spark which ignites the appearance of the meme. The other interesting point is the lolspeak. According to Lefler, lolspeak can be considered an English dialect and is influencing the spoken language due to its large popularity. “Not only is the sentence structure of Lolspeak different from that of standard English, but the verb forms and spellings differ as well, and in a distinctive fashion. Some elements of Lolspeak (such as spelling) are found in Netspeak16 as well. This is a factor of shared origin of both of these forms of English on the internet.” (Lefler, 2007: 3) In general, when creating memes people often use the Netspeak and they use it on purpose.

Of course, there are many more examples of internet memes, which would help to paint even more complete picture of the internet memescape. However, the important points have been covered and the examples I have provided are sufficient to illustrate what the basic forms of internet memes are. If we try to describe the internet memes based upon these examples what we will arrive at a more complete definition than those theorized previously. The phenomenon which we call internet memes actually consists of mediotypes of memeplexes. These memeplexes consist of the concept of the internet memes plus one or more concepts which are the actual subject matter of a particular internet meme. The strategies used for their transmission seem to be mostly proselytic, adversative and motivational. Internet memes can be found in all forms of information transmission available on the Internet i.e. text, sound, video, pictures and their possible combinations. Internet memes most often come from completely unexpected sources and theoretically it is possible for everyone to become an internet meme. In most cases of internet memes the origin of the meme can be backtracked and the story of their emergence is known. Key characteristics of internet memes are humor, playfulness, and ability to engage its hosts in a creative way. They are an important part of internet subcultures and are even able to incite creation of new forms of language and have other consequences even outside of the internet. I will come back to how the internet memes influence our physical or the offline world later. In

16Lolspeak is a part of Netspeak, which is the term for acronyms, abbreviations, , and slang produced by internet users for keyboarding on the internet (Crystal “Language and the Internet” 2006: 12)

40 the next chapter I will discuss the Internet and why the contemporary form of internet memes is a very logical consequence of how the people use it. Remarkably, I did not encounter any internet meme, which would be explicitly sexual, nor did I find any reference about such meme. The reason for this is, in my opinion, that the internet memes are in fact a form way to communicate and sexuality is still, even on the Internet where everyone can post anonymously, is a private matter, which we do not really share with others. Although is one of the main themes for internet sites, they are not “communities” as such from what I have been able to find. This of course does not mean that there are not any references to sex and sexuality in the memes altogether, there are plenty of double entendres, allusions or hints, but explicit, which might come as a surprise.

4.7 Creating memes intentionally

Before I move forward to discussing the Internet and how it influences internet memes I want to touch the issue of their intentional creation. As I have already stated above, we can never be sure about what will become a meme and what does not. However, the uncertainty does not stop people from attempting to create memes on purpose and some of those will actually succeed. For example, Knobel and Lankshear have described cases of what they have named deliberate counter-memes. These have been created with the intent to counter already existing memes and their makers have made an effort to spread them thus ensuring that they caught on. These were for example Black People Us! (blackpeopleloveus.com), which is a “wry, if not scathing, commentary on white American liberal paternalism towards black Americans” (Knobel & Lankshear, 2006: 212) or the , which is a meme created to counter the intent to teach intelligent design at schools in Kansas. There are also instances of variations of existing internet memes which are intended to become memes. Notable examples of these are mutations of the Advice Animals meme. Pictures claiming affiliation to this meme often consist of picture of an animal on a colors wheel background to imitate the customary mediotype.

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Tarde too was interested in the problem of creating memes, in his terms imitations, on purpose. He perceived them as function of power held by those to whom the memes were supposed to be beneficial according to Marsden (2000). Tarde’s input on this matter can be seen as fruitful in instances of politically charged memes. He assessed that the reproduction of the goals takes priority over the reproduction of means to achieve the goals. Also he identified that the imitations in society often spread by so called trickle-down effect from those in position of power and prestige, the elite, on those who want to mimic them, the mass.

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5. The Internet

Now that I have described the internet memes in general I will talk a bit about the environment they originate from and how this environment influenced their contemporary forms. In this chapter I will describe the internet as the perfect environment for a meme and I will also extensively discuss a particular case of 4chan, which as stated by researchers (Danung 2008, Liu 2011, Saklofske 2011, Underwood and Welser 2011) was instrumental in the evolution of internet memes into the shape they are in today. First all we need to briefly define what the Internet is, what is it made for and how that influences what can be done with it or at it. For our purposes it suffices to say that the Internet is comprised of the physical infrastructure i.e. the servers, the networking devices such as routers, cables, etc, and also of computers of the individual internet users. Then of course there are programs which are run by the computers and servers. And, most importantly, the internet contains information in the digitalized form i.e. video, audio and text. The important qualities of the Internet relevant to our topic are: “ 1. Digitization: the standardization of diverse forms of information (e.g. text, audio, and video) as binary computer “bits” 2. Synchronicity: the relative capacity for simultaneous (versus delayed) interaction 3. Interactivity: the capacity of systems to generate and experience of relatively synchronous and responsive communication between users (Downes & McMillan, 2000) 4. Hypertextuality: the systematic linkage of information in nonlinear, weblike fashion.” (Lindof, 2002: 249)

5.1 Hypertextuality

You have probably already experienced a situation when you have gone online for some reason, for instance, to read some particular news article, watch a video or find some information, and when you went offline again you suddenly realized that you have looked

43 onto many other things during your online stay. Perhaps you have not even finished the originally intended task. If this was the case my bet would be that the culprit to blame for this, apart for your lack of concentration, is the hypertextual and interactive nature of the internet. In other words while you were reading through the article you might have run into a hyperlink leading to another site with information on some particular phenomenon described in the article (just imagine the structure of ). “More and more information wrestles for the diminishing space available space now. The obvious result of this is that every one of us has to limit the time he or she dedicates to a single piece of information.” (Eriksen, 2001: 85 – translated) Eriksen wrote these words in a Facebookless, Twitterless world, in a world without RSS newsfeeds. Now the amount of pointless and superfluous information being thrown at us is even larger. This represents a problem for memes as this largely increases a pool of competitors for the attention of potential hosts.

On one hand the Internet and its digital nature provide, “probably more than any previous medium, is suitable for large-scale meme distribution.” (Shifman and Thelwall, 2009: 2568) If we look at characteristics describing the effectiveness of the memetic transmission which were introduced by Dawkins i.e. the fidelity, the fecundity and the longevity of memes, we find out that in this regard the conditions for meme transmission are great. The fidelity of the transmission can be really high as the digital technologies provide copying options are generally superior to those available for other mediums. The fecundity can also be much higher, since by few clicks a person can make large number of copies of the information in digital format. The longevity can also be increased because on the internet the information can be stored indefinitely in archives (Heylighen, 1996), but for serious assessment of the longevity of the memes in the online internet environment not enough time has passed to really make any definite assessment. (Knobel & Lankshear, 2006) What Heylighen says about information is correct they can remain stored virtually forever in some archive.

However, it is important to make a distinction between a meme and information. Every meme is information, but not every information is meme. Stonier says about information: “Information exists. It does not need to be perceived to exist. It does not need to be understood to exist. It requires no to interpret it. It does not have to have meaning to exist. It exists.” (Stonier, 1990: 21) This of course is not the case for memes. In order to be considered as a meme the information needs to be copied, used, or imitated by

44 people. As it was made apparent in the previous chapter even the most insignificant picture or phrase can become an internet meme and usually it does not attain its memetic status over night. It needs to be noticed, to find its hosts who will carry it and spread it among the rest of the population. In this way information can be viewed as a potential meme. An example of information lying dormant on the internet and then suddenly becoming a meme can be found in “a song recording of a TV–show that was made in the year 1976 and which became famous as the trololoman. It has been uploaded to YouTube on November 26 of 2009 and hardly been recognized until February 25, 2010. Then it went viral and ended up with more than seven million views.” (Klasen, 2011: 64)

One of the common ways this can happen is that someone comes across this information accidentally and then posts a hyperlink at some BBS17 or chat. These can be understood as “affinity spaces,” which were operationalized by Gee (2004) and can be described as:

specially designed spaces (physical and virtual) constructed to resource people [who are] tied together . . . by a shared interest or endeavor . . . . [For example, the] many many websites and publications devoted to [the video game, Rise of Nations] create a social space in which people can, to any degree they wish, small or large, affiliate with others to share knowledge and gain knowledge that is distributed and dispersed across many different people, places, Internet sites and modalities (magazines, chat rooms, guides, recordings). (Gee, 2004: 73)

According to Knobel and Lankshear (2006), affinity spaces “instantiate participation, collaboration, distribution and dispersion of expertise, and relatedness.” (Knobel & Lankshear, 2006: 208) From this description and from what I have elaborated before it is clear that these places are ideal to facilitate spread of the memes. In regard to spreading the internet memes we can find many affinity spaces, which have had an enormous impact on their spread and evolution. The idea of affinity spaces is, I believe, in terms of the Internet closely connected to what Granovetter states about the cultural diffusion:

17 “Users of BBS connect to computers serving as hubs for particular, special interest conferencing or “newsgroups.” Users then post messages to a single address, and read and respond to messages posted by others. Messages are archived, and are produced and displayed in a “threaded” format corresponding to their topicality. Exchanges are asynchronous.” (Lindof, 2002: 251)

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What makes cultural diffusion possible, then, is the fact that small cohesive groups who are liable to share a culture are not so cohesive that they are entirely closed; rather, ideas may penetrate from other such groups via the connecting medium of weak ties. It is a seeming paradox that the effect of weak ties, in this case, is homogenization, since my emphasis has been the ability of weak ties to reach out to groups with ideas and information different from one's own. The paradox dissolves, however, when the process is understood to occur over a period of time. The ideas that initially flow from another setting are, given regional and other variations, probably new. (Granovetter, 1983: 215-216)

People can be members of various different internet communities and the membership is not mutually exclusive, thus through their ties to different communities the memes can be passed on. The most successful memes can then result into what Granovetter describes as homogenization i.e. some internet memes are spread all around the internet and can be considered to be almost universal, while other ones will remain group specific because at the other end of the ties there is no interest in them. The spread of the internet memes can be considered as a good example of how the weak ties can work as this kind of diffusion of the internet memes can reach very wide audience.

One of the most influential ones, if not the most influential at all is 4chan. It is often cited as a source of different memes and from the examples which I have cited in the second chapter most of the memes had been influenced or even originated at the 4chan message boards.

5.2 4chan

The 4chan message boards are not unknown to researchers (Danung, Saklofske, Liu, Lefler, Saklofske, Underwod and Welser) dealing with internet phenomena, internet memes in particular. Also many internet users are familiar with existence of the site, fewer are those who will actually go there and become a part of 4chan community, because of its nature. To be more precise, when 4chan is discussed the /b/ subforum is mostly meant. This part of the

46 site is designated for “random” which means that the users are free to post any content they desire there.

It is the place to go if you want to witness unbridled misogyny, racism, objectification, hatred, stupidity and spectacle. However, this is only a limited catalogue of /b/‘s contents. Less apparently (and also less frequently), I have also witnessed heartfelt emotional exchanges, political debates, empathy, , , egalitarianism, , and creativity. (Saklofske, 2011: 3)

As the description by Salkofske suggests, the site is very ambiguous and volatile place and you never know what you will find there. The reasons why these forums are so different from the rest of the BBS on the internet are the anonymity of the users and the temporariness of the content: “While users have the option to post messages using their real names, or , leaving the name option blank creates an in which the user‘s name is not shared with those reading the messages. IP addresses of those who post content are also not shared with the community.” (Saklofske, 2011: 4) One could argue that other internet BBS and chats are also anonymous, because no one has to post there under their real name and the rest of the forum users are unable to identify who the user really is, but the difference is that while on other forums the users are posting under aliases unique for each person, on 4chan everyone can post and most of the people do, under a same alias. On the other forums you can develop your own identity, you can make others perceive you based on your previous postings, your alias has a history of its posts behind it and the rest of the posters can have a unique relation to the identity you have developed on a BBS or chat. This is different for 4chan, because there is no personal history.

The other unique attribute of the 4chan is the temporariness of its content: “4chan preserves only 1118 pages of message postings on each forum. The rest are permanently deleted. As well, posts which include material that violate US are deleted by moderators. Thus 4chan makes no effort to archive or record its own history.” (Saklofske, 2011: 4) These qualities along with the number of users create a very unstable environment, meaning that there is no certainty that the content which was there a minute ago is still available there.

18 15 at the moment

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The memory and repostings of its anonymous, shifting populace sometimes manage to reinvent and reintegrate past memes into new contexts, but nothing lasts for long. Importantly, activity on the /b/ channel is often so voluminous, that refreshing your browser window every few seconds gives you an entirely new summary of recently contributed-to threads. When viewing individual threads, refreshing the page can often yield dozens of new replies within a few seconds, or reveals a 40419 screen, which means that the thread has been permanently erased. (Saklofske, 2011: 5)

It is this environment which has influenced and shaped the form of the contemporary internet memes. Let us imagine that in this volatile and shifting environment we want our post to be noticed. The tools at our disposal are a text window into which you can type your post and a space next to your post where you can upload a picture. In order to get the attention you are seeking the best bet is to post some interesting or obscure picture along with the text, because it is more likely to be noticed by people scrolling and browsing the site and thus give you the attention you desired. Now let us consider this situation from a standpoint of a meme, an internet meme in our case. As I have shown the 4chan environment is very unstable and the threads can appear and disappear very quickly.

As Eriksen states, “Compression of information into gradually shortening time intervals leads also to changes on the side of those who transmit them.” (Eriksen, 2001: 85 – translated) In terms of memetics this means that the “physical” representation of the meme needs to be such that it will be noticed by the potential hosts. This poses a question. How does a meme know which mediatype to take on in order to successfully catch attention? By imitation of course, it will attempt to copy the mediatype of another successful meme. The success of the meme on 4chan BBS can be measured for example by how many responses the thread has received or for how long it remains there undeleted. From 4chan the memes need to either spread elsewhere to another site, carried by one of the visitors of 4chan which happened to go by while it was there or become a part of 4chan sociotype20 otherwise they will get deleted permanently. This creates what we could call evolutionary pressure on the

19 The HTTP error message returned to the browser by the Web server when a requested Web page is not available. The error occurs because the page no longer exists or is restricted. (www.pcmag.com) 20 The sociotype denotes the group or community of individuals who hold that information in their memory (Blackmore, 2000).

48 memes on the 4chan to create effective mediatypes in order to escape the conveyor belt of information. As it seems, the most efficient mediatype today for transmission of internet memes is a picture and text macro. The reason behind this is that it can convey messages faster and probably even more effectively than pure text and in comparison with other formats i.e. audio or video, it requires much less proficiency with specialized software, also it is possible to produce it with the default hardware and software equipment available on all computers.

A proof of the effectiveness of this mediatype used to convey memes on 4chan is a fact, that these internet memes became an essential part of the language used on the forums.

In terms of grammar and content, 4chan is the English teacher’s worst nightmare. If 4chan was a country, the dialect of English utilized in the community could be considered a different language. On first examination, the language seems so foreign due to the many grammatical errors and inside jokes. But after reading enough posts and understanding the community, the lexis can be broken down into three simple categories. The first part of the unique lexis of 4chan is attributed to typing out words phonetically. The second element of understanding is to know the inside jokes or reasoning behind the humor of the language. Lastly, the “memes” that 4chan is infamous for are crucial for the total 4chan lexis experience. (Liu, 2011: 2)

Thus we arrive at point where we can see that the internet memes not only spread through communication, but are in fact a part of communication on the internet which has evolved to its contemporary state in conditions of the 4chan. One important thing to mention is, that while most of the other bulletin boards keep the threads archived for a very long time and have a different type of design, the evolutionary advantages of the memes which survived the 4chan environment and their ability to attract attention prevails in these milder conditions without many problems.

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5.3 Insider Knowledge

We have also learned that the internet memes require insider knowledge, which pertains to some particular internet community which utilizes the memes for its own purposes. Knobel and Lankshear have put the point well by expressing it as: “Many of these memes have become internet lore, and even though all of them are relatively “new” in terms of longevity, all of them draw deeply on popular .” (Knobel & Lankshear, 2006: 213) The memes are obviously not coming only from the 4chan, but from other sources as well.

The evolution of greater accessibility to internet has meant a truly gargantuan influx of new users with new faces popping out each day to keep flooding the previously barren landscape of the world of internet as all of them got plenty of opportunities to separate the grains from the chaff, to plant a plant, or simply add an ad to their website. The extensive freedom that one still could experience while browsing the what often looked like an endless content allowed the users to pick what they liked or considered interesting and ignore the rest with knowledge, that the extensive anonymity of the internet rendered their actual contribution having almost no impact on their real lives. For few years, memes have been mainly spreading through channels such as message boards, image boards and various forums which could be dedicated to basically any topic imaginable, and also through IRC channels and communication devices such as instant messengers and e-mails. Of these, only the latter did really put any stress on the users in a way that would make them consider their reputation while sharing the meme with others.

However, with nascent of internet social networks and even the bigger increase in a number of users and ways to access the web, the once all-covering shroud of anonymity has started to fade away. The new generation of users proved to be much more confident and came in accompanied with a new take on discussion and image boards; boards linked with social networks where one would be able communicate with the rest of the world in a much more intuitive way while not necessarily being able to keep his identity a secret. While this might seem as a tradeoff which one would have to spend a certain amount of time ruminating over, with most of the users, the period of reconsidering possible pros and cons was either very short or did not happen at all. Already being used to communicate with, and present

50 themselves in front of, they’re not so close but still Facebook-worthy friends, the new generation users did not consider staying low profile a priority. Of course, this is mostly an impression one gets due to the sheer amount of people using the internet and sharing their thoughts, photos and videos throughout the web. Nevertheless, while the great hubs of activity such as 4chan continue to be the content creating machines which are capable of turning a simple picture or an uninspiring phrase into internationally revered and recognized piece of art, both the audience which now judges new creations and also a category of people actually coming up with the new content have grown exponentially.

The two immediate effects of this transition are return of anonymity through belonging into the crowd and an increase in a number of mildly successful content which can now have enough supporters that enable it to survive. Indeed, many of the memes that originate from websites dedicated to picture sharing such as Imgur or 9GAG would have not survived the natural selection process that rules over websites such as 4chan. The difference, however, is that here, the processes of both publishing and selection are no longer completely, or at all, anonymous. And while the content creators who publish on 4chan can be rightly afraid of sharing too much information in order to protect them from any possibility of online harassment which even a harsh criticism can be a sort of, being stripped of anonymity, the users in the role of the virtual jury are much more lenient, forgiving or simply not willing to openly criticize and having to face the impending war of the words over a not that funny or interesting piece of paintbrush skills. A consequence of this change is that broader base of content creators and potential re-publishers have enabled for new types of memes which are nested in different communities, thus once again hinting at the role of internet memes as of an alternative medium of message relaying.

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6. Communication

When we look at internet memes as a form of communication we need to pose a simple question. Why should posting a picture be considered to be communication? This is, I believe, explained by Savoie when she talks about YouTube video content uploaded by internet users:

Broadcasting implies receipt of a message; the desire to broadcast oneself is synonymous with the desire to feel connected, to know that the meaningful encoded into a YouTube video are grasped by others out there. That is the desire to touch a common ground, to create community; that is not “depthlessness.” It is the opposite; it is connectedness. This connectedness may be shallow, but it is connectedness nonetheless. (Savoie, 2008: 187)

In other words, why would someone post something on the internet, which is a public space, if it was not to share it with someone else and in that way to communicate?

Another question which needs to be answered in order to understand how pictures can be an effective way of communication is, how can we be sure, that the other people looking at it will understand the intended meaning properly? As Heylighen and Chielens (2008) point out: “a message as received and understood by an individual will rarely be identical to the one that was expressed, as illustrated by the many misunderstandings and reinterpretations during communication.” (Heylighen and Chielens, 2008: 6) As Aunger explains, this problem was similarly formulated by Noam Chomsky:

Chomsky’s principle21 is true of communication in any context you care to mention: in communication between genes, viruses, cells, computer viruses, or memes. There

21 This is the “poverty of the stimulus” dictum - that what gets transmitted in signals is insufficient in content to account for what people can make of them. We recognize this ourselves when we commonly say that a single gesture or word “speaks volumes.” (Aunger, 2002: 247)

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isn’t a single example of a communication process in which all the necessary information is transmitted from sender to receiver; messages are always depauperate and insufficient to explain how the receiver reacts. The receiver (whether a computer, a cell, or a mind) must always engage in some kind of interpretive or reconstructive process, based on the message as well as other contextual factors, to determine what the source of the message “meant” by the act of sending the message in the first place. (Aunger, 2002: 247)

In terms of memetics, this means that the person receiving the message goes through the assimilation stage of the memetic transmission process and attempts to interpret the message according to his knowledge and experiences. The reason why pictures can work as a way to transmit the memes is that in the process of interpretation and understanding of the information we encounter our mind almost always fills in the gaps and comes up with a resolution. This can be anything from a very complex theory e.g. conspiracy theories which are often used to explain things which “do not add up” to just simply conceding that the thing is just stupid and has no logical explanation at all. The latter is an approach many people take when confronted with abstract art, without the background knowledge, the common ground, they are unable to find plausible explanation and thus in order to solve the problem they can either research more or solve it simply by stating that it is nonsense.

This brings us to the next problem, which is that in order for memes to spread there needs to be some kind of common ground for meanings which would ensure that what is meant and what is understood is similar. “More than any previous medium, the Internet has the technical capabilities for global meme diffusion. Yet, to spread globally memes need to negotiate their way through cultural and linguistic borders.”(Shifman and Thelwall, 2009: 2567) One of the most common is popular culture thus making it an ideal source of the memetic material and references.

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6.1 Popular Culture

As popular culture I regard products of entertainment industry, such as movies, music, books, computer and so forth. The key features of pop culture relevant to this work are its wide reach and coverage, its simplicity or sometimes even outright naivety and great abundance of production. Products or popular culture are basically a pastime for people which are consumed in great quantities.

Popular culture has at least two very important aspects in regard to internet memes. The first one is that it serves them as one of their reference systems. People need reference systems, which they can use to express themselves and which would be easily understandable by others. When we want to find such systems, we need to be looking for something which is widespread so that it can form a basis for understanding with others, simple to be easily graspable so that wide variety of people can use it, and the people need to be able to relate to it in some way. We can imagine this as a situation in which someone is giving an example. The example needs to be something to refer to that the other person can imagine and understand it in the same or nearly the same manner as the person explaining his thoughts intends it should be understood; otherwise, it wouldn’t be of any use. This suggests that people will be inclined to pick such examples or such reference systems which can be expected to be understood by the listeners without much difficulty. As a good example of this we can look at the numbers of internet memes listed at knowyourmeme.com which are related to well known movies or actors. Thirty-one references can be found for Star Wars movies, Harry Potter has 21, and then there is Star Trek with 15, Lord of the Rings with 12, Twilight with 7. From animated series we can name My Little Ponies series which has 57 submissions; Simpsons have 17; Futurama 8. There are also 321 submissions with an anime22 tag. From actors there is Nicolas Cage with 8 memes, Arnold Schwarzeneger with 5, with 4. There are also numerous memes related to computer games, the most notable are World of Warcraft with 22 references, Skyrim with 21, Portal with 12 and Half-Life with 11. In these numbers there are confirmed submissions as well as those which were rejected or not yet confirmed as memes by the members of the site, because I find even these unconfirmed memes to be an important pointer of popularity

22 Japanese animated movies and series

54 and wide spread of the mentioned titles. We can see that the most popular titles and persons are very frequent sources of memetic references. This suggests that the general knowledge of the reference frame of the meme can be one of the deciding factors in deciding whether the meme will successfully propagate or not.

The second one is that memes are a form of agency, means to react to the contents of popular culture, to express opinions about it or use it for people’s purposes as it suits their needs when they are looking for amusement, good comparison or symbolic reference. Allen talks about a "Meme warfare" which “involves countering commercial images or ideas with a "metameme," a meme that both repositions a corporate meme and invokes a larger critique of corporate culture. One of the metamemes identified by Lasn is "True Cost," which calls attention to the ecological and human costs of a product beyond its sale price.” (Allen, 2003: 21)

The reference frame is most important when pertaining to memes which refer to some kind of event. Very common events which often spark creation of internet memes are premieres of movies in cinemas. Worldwide premieres of movies can create an event which can incite many people to express themselves and many of them will do so by means of internet memes. This is for example case of the movie series Twilight, about a boy vampire and a human girl who fall in love with each another and struggle against hurdles of fate in strife for their . These movies prompted emergence of internet memes which are predominantly mocking the movies for their cheesiness, bad storytelling, and acting performances. One of the popular ones is very simple catchphrase “Still better love story than Twilight.” This meme usually points to something which is very poorly done, and often is not a love story at all, for example this thesis. This can be seen as a way to oppose the media pressure which promotes the movies and also their main protagonists very aggressively.

In the following examples I will show how the internet memes are used as means of communication about topics ranging from current events that are being talked about to topics and events of everyday life which from the essence of everyone’s lives.

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6.2 The Casually Pepperspray Everything Cop

Another type of event which can incite an inception of an internet meme can be an affair which is so shocking that people just want to talk about it and express their views. A perfect example of this is the meme called “The Casually Pepperspray Everything Cop”

This meme refers to event which took place at the University of California Davis campus on November 18th, 2011. A group of students gathered there inspired by the Occupy protests which were taking place all around the world. During the protest some of them were sitting on the ground and holding their hands. At one point of the protest they were requested to cease the protest and leave by the police forces which were called to disband the protesters. When the students did not comply with the request, they were pepper sprayed by a police officer who casually walked around the group and sprayed the pepper spray into their faces while they were still sitting on the ground.

Tremendous media exposure ensured that many people were familiar with the story. The most widely spread was a video of an officer using pepper spray on a group of students who were sitting on the ground peacefully. The figure of the police officer, the cop, became a , an icon representing the whole situation and thereby the whole meme. The whole story which pertains to this event is important, because it gives the meaning to the meme. There have been many variations of this meme where people expressed their opinions about the incident. Perhaps the most iconic one is the picture where the officer is spraying the Declaration of Independence on the painting by John Turnbull (Figure 9). Many others have followed shortly.

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Figure 10. The Casually Pepperspray Everything Cop

Of course, they also presented their views by writing about what happened and what they thought about it. The important fact is that there were also picture memes about the event which were able to convey the views of their creators in a very powerful way and address much wider audience than by writing a plain text.

Yet another type of events which can start a meme are criminal acts. This was the case for example in instances of “Basement Dad/Joseph Fritzl”, “Casey Anthony Trial”, or to mention a case of a local internet meme Devínska Nová Ves Massacre. The Basement Dad meme refers to the infamous case which took place in Austria. There Joseph Fritzl held his daughter Elizabeth captive in a basement for 24 years and over the time he repeatedly sexually abused her and raped. During the time Elizabeth gave birth to seven children and miscarried once. Casey Anthony was a mother of two years old Caylee whose body was found in the forest near the house where she lived with her mother. The girl was reported as missing by her grandmother after not seeing her for 31 days. The case sparked much controversy and memetic activity on the social networks when even though the evidence was pointing to the

57 mother as the culprit, she was acquitted. Devínska Nová Ves Massacre refers to shooting spree which took place on 30 August, 2010. During the spree the shooter killed seven people and injured another 17. Primary targets of his spree were six members of family living in the flat next door, because they have been bullying him and the rest of the block. The incident was used to point on the Roma ethnic as maladjusted people and unpleasant neighbors and up to these days it is possible to find hints about the incident present in the internet discussions when Roma neighbors are talked about. All of these cases were unusual in one way or another and as a part of the public discourse about them, internet memes were created.

A characteristic attribute of event related memes is that that in terms of longevity they come as suddenly as the event to which they point and after the public moves on to another topic the occurrence of these memes declines rapidly. This does not mean that they are forever forgotten, but that they are merely dormant and can be made use of if a fit opportunity arises. On the other hand they are much more diverse than the next type of internet memes I am going to talk about. This type usually has better longevity than the previous one and also the fidelity of the meme is higher. These are what I would call utility memes.

Contrary to cases described above when talking about utility memes the story of its origin does not matter to a large degree, even though it is known. These memes, we can say, have liberated themselves from their original and now people recognize their meaning and their purpose without knowing much or even anything about their origins. Such situation is, of course, very advantageous for a meme, because this way it can transmit more freely i.e. without need to explain its background. For example, “The Casually Pepperspray Everything Cop” would have a very hard time, spreading if people did not know about the event it references to. In this sense we can say that the utility memes refer to situations or concepts which are more common occurrence and thus are understandable even without the story of their life.

6.3 Rage Faces (Rage Comics)

The Rage Faces or how they are of then referred to Rage Comics are a set of faces made in the basic picture-editing program called Paintbrush. Drawing in the Paintbrush can be in

58 general considered to be synonymous to amateur picture editing skills as opposed to Photoshopping which is professional picture editing software. Thus also Rage Comics (Figure 11) are very amateurish by their appearance. The result of this undemanding nature of this meme is its wide-ranging spread. However, the fact that it is easy to make would hardly be sufficient reason for its popularity. The main reason of the popularity of this meme is its utility and possibilities it gives to its users.

Figure 11. Rage Comics

The meme consists of number of submemes. Each of the submemes is represented by a picture of a face and each stands for concept of more or less complex emotion or behavior. The first of these concepts was the Rage Guy, thus the name, and the meme originated on

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4chan forums. Because of the aforementioned ease with which it can be imitated it gained popularity and soon other Rage Faces started to appear. Among the most notable are Forever Alone Guy, which is a concept for someone who is lonely and disappointed in life and destined to remain forever alone which very frequently implies that the person will not be able to find a partner. Then there is a Troll Face implying the person is intentionally being mischievous and having a laugh at someone’s expense. These faces are not used as set characters but rather as representations of emotional states and so the protagonists of the story which is being told by the comics can exchange several of these.

The importance of this internet meme, or rather memeplex, lies in the fact that it is being widely utilized to talk about social life, to tell simple stories of everyday life as well as whole life stories. This gives people a way to share their story with an internet community and often get feedback on in. Oftentimes it can be just something as simple as: “This happened also to me!”

Most of the stories told by the Rage Comics are very ordinary and mundane and the advantages of sharing your story in this way instead of writing it down are obvious. It would be probably harder for many people to write them in plain text and also the rest of the community would not be as willing to read them. In this form, the Rage Face meme serves as a way to reach out to the community and talk about problems and situations of the everyday life and get some feedback on your story in other words, to feel connected.

This meme can be perceived as a means to socialize and share ones experience with others. Compared to writing about it it has several advantages which include that the Rage Faces help to express complex concepts by using a simple image. Also many people do not have god enough writing skills to be able to tell the story. With pictures the viewers will be able to fill in the blanks themselves, because the basic concepts are already defined. Also, reading a plain text which would be able to cover the whole story might be more time consuming than just looking at few pictures and on the contemporary Internet the time is of the essence so to say.

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6.4 Advice Animals

The Advice Animals memeplex consists of many single memes, knowyourmeme.com shows 79 instances. These memes, similarly to the previous one, enable people to talk about a range of different topics in a way which can be easily understood by others who understand the gist. And the gist is a very simple one. The meme usually consists of one picture, which serves as a label or an icon of the topic the meme will be talking about and the concept. For example there is Socially Awkward Penguin. The meme will consist of a picture of a penguin walking from right to the left and some text describing what the author perceives as a socially awkward situation (Figure 12). There are many others of these concepts which enable their users to talk about wide variety of different topics. There are First World Problems to talk about the things of our everyday life which are insubstantive in the larger scheme of things but yet they bother us. Then there is a Third World Success Kid which is used to describe the difficulties of life in underdeveloped countries and is a counterpart to the First World Problems and a spin-off of the Success Kid meme, which depicts a little boy clenching his fist in a seemingly victorious gesture. There are also memes which are used to mock , tell bad jokes (Bad Joke Eel), make bad puns (Bad Pun Con) , ask witty philosophical questions (Philosoraptor) (Figure 13), and many more.

Figure 12. Socially Awkward Penguin

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The utility of these memes is that they make it possible to talk about all these different topics just by the way, so to say. Anyone can sometimes have a philosophical or quasi- philosophical question or thought which she would like to share with others but if she had no way to bring the topic up she might just decide to abandon it. This way there is an option to share it and engage in interaction with the community which, if it will like the idea, will reward it with positive feedback. One might argue that it is not necessary to use a meme to talk about these topics and that would be right, but at the same time talking about the same topic without the use of the meme could require much longer introduction to what kind of idea is the person trying to convey.

The memes I have listed above are just a tip of the iceberg and there are literally thousands of other cases. I have picked just the few examples which I think are the most suitable to illustrate the point I am trying to make, which is that the internet memes are increasingly becoming prominent way to communicate on the internet. This gives its users option to effectively communicate their thoughts in the internet environment. Many internet communities have memes which are relevant to their interests and which they use to talk about their topics. For example, knowyourmeme.com contains 321 memes which are referring to topics related to anime. These would however require specific knowledge of the genre to talk about.

The use of the internet memes makes the communication on the Internet more understandable and more predictable for its users. We can say that the memes create a reference frame similar to the one created by the popular culture. The internet memes provide a way to talk about various different topics, whether they are pop culture, the current events, or the common mundane.

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7. Conclusion

On September 2, 2011, an American football game was played in Painesville, Ohio between two high school football teams that raised many eyebrows within internet communities. This was not due to exceptionally good or bad on account of the involved teams but rather because of a sign that supporters of one of the teams have held up during the game.23 The message on the sign said: “YOU MAD BRO?” On the Internet this is a very common phrase used by internet trolls24 all over the world and it is supposed to further infuriate an already upset person by asking him or the obvious question. The problem is that the sign was not understood in the way it was intended. Because of the use of the word “bro” and also because the majority of the opposition team were black players, the sign was marked as racial intimidation by the coach, several players and a NCAAP25 representative who was present at the game. The incident was reported in local television news as well as in newspapers. This caused a strong reaction of the Internet community and many people wrote posts where they expressed their dismay and amazement about the fact that something which, to them obviously, could not be possibly meant as a racial innuendo was in fact perceived in that way by some people.

What happened here is clear. After an internet meme ”leaked” out of the Internet into the real world, it was put out of its context and confronted with people who were not familiar with its reference frame. The intent of the message was misinterpreted, which had unfortunate unintended consequences for the young men who put up the sign and also it caused unnecessary upset of the people who did not understand the message.

In 2002, Rick Astley, whom I have already mentioned above in Chapter 3, has attempted a comeback (Liu, 2011) and he did not have any notable success. In 2008, after a wave of Rickrolling swept through the internet, Rick made another attempt, this time with very notable success when “a compilation of Astley’s most famous works … reached #17 on the UK Top 40 Albums Chart.” (Liu, 2011: 3) In this case the impact of an internet meme coming

23 “People Think ‘You Mad Bro’ Is Racist.” 2011. YouTube video uploaded by jackpmoore on September 5, 2011. Retrieved May 19, 2012 http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Rm30cepvMQA. 24 Trolling is an internet term which stands for deliberately infuriating people via talk, prank, or other means. 25 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

63 into contact with real world was different and the meme helped to bring back the faded star once more to the limelight.

These are just two examples of the impact that the internet memes can have in the offline world. I also think that this is a good reason to dedicate time to study the phenomenon of internet memes. As people are spending more and more time using the Internet or at least they are connected online via some portable device, such as a mobile phone, notebook, and readers such as iPad or Kindle, and soon there should even be glasses by Google, there will be more and more cases of the internet memes leaking to the offline world. And I believe that we should be available to understand them and interpret them properly when they do.

However, at the moment, internet memes are most influential in their own element, online, and if we want to study the online environment and the social life which is taking place there, we need to take memes seriously. While internet memes might appear as mere entertainment at first glance, their real purpose/function for internet users and their communities is much greater. They provide avenues for the effective communication of thoughts, views, and ideas as well as participation in the life of the community. By using them people are able to actively and creatively engage and to express their thoughts in a way which is comprehensible and easily graspable by others who are familiar with the concept utilized.

What are internet memes? (definitional)

As part of my contribution to the existing body of research on memes and the Internet more broadly speaking, I have explored and analyzed internet memes. I have come up with a definition of internet memes which, I believe, is more complete than the ones available previously. I have also connected the definition of the internet memes to the broader frame of the general theory of memes. As I have already said above, the memes we can find on the Internet are actually mediotypes of memeplexes. These memeplexes consist of the concept of internet memes plus one or more concepts which are the actual subject matter of a particular internet meme. Internet memes can be found in all forms of information transmission available on the Internet, i.e. text, sound, video, pictures, etc., and their possible combinations. Internet memes most often come from completely unexpected sources and theoretically, it is possible for everyone and everything to become an internet

64 meme. In most cases of internet memes the origin of the meme can be backtracked and the story of their emergence is known. Thus they can be, in some cases considered as bearers of the history of internet communities. Key characteristics of internet memes are humor, playfulness, and ability to engage its hosts in a creative way. They are an important part of internet subcultures and are even able to incite creation of new forms of language and have other consequences even outside of the Internet.

What communities use internet memes? (descriptive)

I have also looked at which communities are using internet memes. These have been mostly the big communities, using their own terms by which they refer to themselves, b-tards (members of the 4chan community gathering in the /b subforum), the redditors, the imgurians and the 9gagers and other communities gathering on forums and discussion boards of various sites. In this regard I can conclude that we should probably be able to identify internet memes in some form or shape in a majority of communities that gather online. In some cases they would be only short text phrases and macros, in some cases pictures with text, or videos with various degrees of difficulty in editing and compiling. This all depends on the technical attributes of the spaces used by the community to communicate, their technical prowess and wide variety of other factors that are seemingly impossible to predict. The memes will be referring to some notable events of the community, to various points of interest of the community of just to novelties the community finds interesting or amusing for one reason or another. The main point is that the memes will be there.

What is the purpose of internet memes for the communities using them? (explanatory)

I have focused my research mainly on memes which can be found in form of pictures, most often accompanied by text. This is due to the fact that this kind of internet meme is the most common in the contemporary internet environment. As I have explained this kind of mediotype of internet memes has many advantages for its users. First of all it is best suited to catch attention of the internet users who can assess the message the picture is supposed to convey much quicker than it would be the case if it was just plain text. On the other side videos are harder to produce than pictures, they require more attention and time to follow

65 through and often there are also technical difficulties of playing video files. Thus the pictures emerge as the best choice for a meme to spread around at this time.

As I have shown, internet memes have become an important part of community and social life within the contemporary online world. This is because they provide ways and means to talk about social life, about common everyday topics as well as about important or notable events which are being discussed at that time. By using internet memes people can share their ideas, views and stories with community and get feedback on them, thus engaging in a form of social contact mediated by means of internet communication. The memes form a reference frame which provides common ground for their users make the communication on the internet more understandable and more predictable for them. The internet memes also provide opportunities to be creative, playful in a social way.

Is it possible to categorize internet memes into some typology? (theoretical)

While looking at possibilities of creating a typology of internet memes I have come to the conclusion that in this regard the internet memes are somewhat similar to a an open can of worms, there is always something which does not fit in. I was able to broadly identify memes which refer to events and what I call utility memes, which can be distinguished in terms of their longevity. Memes can also obviously be put into categories based on their mediotype, but that does not tell us anything about their essence and thus I do not consider it as relevant enough to base a typology on it. Otherwise, I have found memes to be too diverse and their topics and characteristics to be so fluctuating and interchangeable that I consider any kind of complex typology to be impossible.

To conclude, I would just state that the internet memes are important integral part of the internet environment and that they can already now influence also the world offline. I believe that in my thesis I have shown, that they are worthy of our attention and our effort to explore them and understand them.

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8. Bibliography

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Blackmore, Susan. The meme machine. 1st pub. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. xx, 264 s.

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Corbin, J. C., & Holt, N. L. (2011). Chapter 13: Grounded theory. In B. Somekh & K. Lewin (Eds.), Theory and methods in social research (2nd ed., pp. 113-120). London: Sage.

Danung, J., Holloway Attaway L. “All Your Media Are Belong To Us: An Analysis of the Cultural Connotations of the Internet Meme.” Literature, Culture and , 17 April 2008

Dawkins, Richard. . 30th anniversary ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. xxiii, 360.

Dey, Ian. 1999. Grounding Grounded Theory: Guidelines for Qualitative Inquiry. San Diego: Academic Press. (pp. 1-24, 18 pp.)

Eriksen T. H.: Tyranie okamžiku. Doplněk, Brno 2005.

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Gabora, L. M., 'Memes: the creative spark', Wired, June 1997, pp 110-112.

Granovetter, M. S.,1983, “The Strength of Weak Ties, A Network Theory Revisited”, Sociological Theory, 1,201-233.

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Jenkins, P. F. (1978) “Cultural transmission of song patterns and dialect development in a free-living bird population.” Animal Behaviour 26, 50-78.

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Lindlof TR and Taylor BC (2002) Qualitative Communication Research Methods. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

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Marsden, P. (2000). “Forefathers of Memetics: Gabriel Tarde and the Laws of Imitation. Journal of Memetics” Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission, 4. http://cfpm.org/jom-emit/2000/vol4/marsden_p.html

Marshall, G. ´The Internet and Memetics´ School of Computing Science, Middlesex University,

Meyers. Encyclopedia of Complexity and System Science. Springer. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/Papers/Memetics-Springer.pdf

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9. List of figures Figure 3. Demotional: Cluelessness ...... 31

Figure 4. Demotivational: Apple ...... 32

Figure 3. Rickroll ...... 76

Figure 4. Xzibit Yo Dawg ...... 36

Figure 5. Disaster girl ………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 38

Figure 6. Scumbag Steve, Star Wars Kid, Success Kid ...... 77

Figure 7. Ceiling Cat ……………………………………………………………………………………………………. 39

Figure 8. Longcat ...... 78

Figure 9. Kitler ...... 78

Figure 10. The Casually Pepperspray Everything Cop ...... 57

Figure 11. Rage Comics ...... 59

Figure 12. Socially Awkward Penguin ...... 61

Figure 13. Lame Joke Eel, Bad Pun Coon, Philosoraptor ...... 79

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10. Name index

A K

Allen 22 Klasen 45 Aunger 52, 53 Knobel 12, 29, 32, 41, 44, 45, 50

B L

Bauckhage 29 Lankshear 12, 29, 32, 41, 44, 45, 50 Bell 22 Lefler 40, 46 Blackmore 18, 19, 20, 23, 28, 39, 48 Lindof 10, 43, 45 Boyd 22 Liu 49, 63 Lynch 24 C Chielens 18, 19, 21, 23, 25, 26, 27, 52 M Chomsky 52 Clarke 10 Marsden 17, 42 Corbin 9 McMillan 43 Crystal 39, 40 Q

D Quaranta 29

Danung 35, 43, 46 R Dawkins 17, 18, 20, 23, 27, 28, 44 Dey 5 Richerson 22 Downes 43 E S

Eriksen 44, 48 Saklofske 43, 46, 47, 48 Savoie 52 G Shifman 44, 53 Speel 23 Gee 45 Stenberg 22 Granovetter 45, 46 Stonier 44 T H Tarde 17, 28, 42 Heath 22 Taylor 10 Heylighen 18, 19, 21, 23, 25, 26, 27, 44, 52 Thagard 22 Thelwall 44, 53 J U Jenkins 17 Underwood 43

W

Welser 46

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11. Annotation

Author: Bc. Branislav Buchel Study Advisor: Bernadette Nadya Jaworsky, PhD. Number of character: 132 895

This thesis deals with the phenomenon known as the internet memes. It is an attempt to describe and conceptualize the internet memes by using the grounded theory methodological approach. It also attempts to connect the phenomenon of the internet memes to the broader theoretical framework of the general memetic theories and tries to tie it to several other sociological concepts. It does so by answering four central research questions with different analytical focus. What are internet memes? (definitional) What communities use internet memes? (descriptive) What is the purpose of internet memes for the communities using them? (explanatory) Is it possible to categorize internet memes into some typology? (theoretical)

In the end the thesis concludes that the internet memes provide the internet users with options and means to talk about various topics, ranging from mundane and common stories of the everyday life to unusual and exceptional events. Due to the fact that they can relate to topics and events inside the communities they can also be considered to be bearers of communities. They are an important and integral part of the internet environment which needs to be taken into account when researching the Internet and its communities.

Táto práca sa zaoberá fenoménom známym pod názvom internetové memy. Pokúša sa popísať a konceptualizovať internetové memy pomocou metodologického prístupu zakotvenej teórie (grounded theory). Zároveň sa pokúša prepojiť fenomén internetových memov s širším teoretickým rámcom všeobecnej teórie memov a naviazať ju na ďalšie sociologické koncepty. Tento cieľ je naplnený pomocou zodpovedania štyroch hlavných výskumných otázok s rôznym analytickým zameraním. Čo sú to internetové memy? (definičný) Ktoré komunity internetové memy používajú? (deskriptívny) Aký význam majú

72 internetové memy pre komunity, ktoré ich používajú? (vysvetľujúci) Je možné kategorizovať memy v nejakej typológii? (teoretický)

Záverom tejto práce je, že internetové memy poskytujú svojim užívateľom možnosti a prostriedky pre rozprávanie o rôznych témach, ktoré siahajú od banálnych a všedných príbehov z každodenného života až po neobvyklé a mimoriadne udalosti. Pretože sa často vzťahujú k vnútorným témam a udalostiam komunít, môžu byť tiež pokladané za nositeľov histórie internetových komunít. Internetové memy sú integrálnou súčasťou internetového prostredia a pri výskume internet a internetových komunít je potrebné ich brať do úvahy.

Key words: communication, communities, cultural diffusion, imitation, meme, Internet, internet memes.

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