He talks about how memes involve users in three specific kinds of transformation. Shifman (2013), for examples, approaches memes from a communication studies perspective. Surprisingly, there hasn’t been much written about memes/gifs as communication, but there are some ideas out there. I want to know more about what memes and gifs ‘mean’ and how people use them to communicate in actual social interactions. But, for me, as a linguist, there is something left out from these explanations. Most of these observations I’ve made so far focus on either the narrow psychological dimension of memes, the way they reveal something about the fundamentally creative nature of the human brain, or on their broader cultural dimension, the way they circulate and how they connect people together through the mutual recognition of shared cultural texts. Memes are very much about references, making intertextual links to other memes or to cultural products like movies and songs. While memes connect users to the wider culture, they also create ‘sub-cultures’, so if you are not someone who regularly circulates memes or animated gifs, you may not ‘get’ the references. This is especially true of animated gifs, which are often short clips taken from movies or television shows that most of their users recognise. And we aren’t constrained by the rules about what “goes together.” Why else was putting the Barbie in the toy car wash more fun than putting the car in the car wash? The visual web frees us to return to this childlike state, where we can adventure through a whole array of different, seemingly unrelated images and clips–be they old, new, from a world away or own backyard–sparking our all-important synapses and helping us come up with new combinations and ideas so easilyįinally, an important aspect of memes is that they create a ‘shared cultural experience’. As kids, that happens all the time because everything is new. In other words, synapses firing equals creative joy. The more random the components connected, the more synapses occur. Neuroscientists explain that synapses occur inside the brain when we’ve made a connection between various different things. She elaborates on this with reference to neuroscience, writing: Abigail Posner says that memes “reconnect us to an essential part of ourselves’ - our desire to seek new perspectives on things we’re already familiar with. Most people define creativity using exactly these concepts: creativity is part imitation, part transformation, a way of combining the familiar with the new. So creativity is a big part of understanding memes. They are transformed and altered-memes are given new captions, sometimes different memes are combined together, and new memes are created. But in the course of this circulation, memes don’t stay the same. The first is ‘circulation and imitation’ – the whole point of memes is that they ‘spread’ – people encounter memes and then they pass them on to others. So I want to use this post to start thinking about what has happened to memes and gifs and digital communication in the past few years, and whether theories from linguistics can help us to understand it.Īccording to Shifman (2013), a meme is ‘a ‘(unit) of popular culture that (is) circulated, imitated, and transformed by Internet users, creating a shared cultural experience.’ This definition highlights the key features people usually focus on when talking about memes. Popular apps like WhatsApp have even integrated a feature where users can search and select animated gifs from Giphy without even leaving the app. But sometime last year or the year before I noticed that a large proportion of the digital communication my niece and nephew were engaging in consisted of the exchange of animated gifs (which, by the way, is pronounced /dʒɪf/ not /gif/). I need to start off by admitting that I don’t really know what I’m talking about.
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