Lecture 19: A Meme By Any Other Name: Memes Redefined

KEY TERM:

• Digital literacy
• Vernacular creativity
• Cultural artifacts
• Rhetorical actions
• Qualitative and quantitative procedures

WHAT IS MEMETIC SUCCESS:

• Shifman distinguishes between a memetic success, which she argues are not coextensive factors
  • THE FEATURES OF A MEDIA OBJECT WHICH LEAD US TO SHARE DIFFER FROM THE FEATURES THAT LEAD US TO MIMIC OR REMIX IT
• Shifman distinguishes between “users”

WHY STUDY MEMES:

• Joh Paul, in his introduction to a 2009 paper on meme mapping called memetics, “a immature discourse which is potentially valuable for considering the diffuse

MEME RESEARCH METHODOLOGY:

• Choose a meme genre
• Track its spread across platforms (select range)
• Identify adaptations in form, content and/or stance (i.e. How has it been imitated and how this imitation adapted across time/space/place
• Recommended resources: knowyourmeme

HOW MIGHT WE VERY THING METHODOLOGY?

• *note that even small changes to the foundation will yield substantially different results (for one, because of the differences in cultures, practices

SHIFMANS METHEDOLOGY TO MEME CREATION:

• Identify popular memetic videos
• Assembling a corpus – the top 100 meme
• From the 400 plus things she was able to narrow it down to 30 most popular memetic videos
  • How are 30 most popularized memetic videos on the internet possibly related
• Yet systematic, qualitative and quantative did narrow there connection down to 6 related topic

MEME RESEARCH METHEDOLOGY:

• Choose a scope:
  • Choose a platform/community
  • Choose a range
    • Compare the top content according to most viewed, most responded, most discussed, most favourites
    • (note: scope will depend to the affordance of the platform, both for users and for researchers
• Analyze data:

WHERE DOES IT END?

• Information saturation:
  • Taken-for-granted
    • No new surprises from participants’ actions or meanings
• Theoretical saturation

END OF QUALITATIVE CODING:

• SUMMARY: identity them and their qualities

ANALYZE MEME GENRES ON A SUBREDDIT:

• Get into a group of 4
• Note content type

 

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