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One Does Not Simply Preserve Internet Memes: Preserving Internet Memes
Via Participatory Community -Based Approaches

Thesis · June 2019

DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.18093.54240

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 One Does Not Simply Preserve Internet Memes
Preserving Internet Memes Via Participatory Community -Based
Approaches

A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts
in
Heritage Conservation and Site Management

by
Kenneth Melbourne Mick III
3704905

21 June 2019

Supervisors:
Anca Claudia Prodan, Ph.D.
Research Associate and Lecturer for the Chair of Intercultural Studies
Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus-Senftenberg

Mohamed Essawy Tawfik, Ph.D.

Faculty of Hotel and Tourism Management
Helwan University
 Contents

CONTENTS ........................................................................................................................................................ 2

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................................................................... 3

ABSTRACT ........................................................................................................................................................ 3

INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................................................. 3

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY .................................................................................................................... 10

STRUCTURE OF RESEARCH .............................................................................................................................. 10

PART 1: MEMETICS ...................................................................................................................................... 11

CHAPTER 1: MEMETICS................................................................................................................................... 11
Section 1: Origin and Evolution of the Term “Meme” .............................................................................. 11
Section 2: Controversies and Criticisms in Memetics ............................................................................... 14
Conclusions ............................................................................................................................................... 23

PART 2: INTERNET MEMES AS HERITAGE........................................................................................... 24

CHAPTER 2: THE INTERNET MEME ................................................................................................................. 24

Section 1: The Concept of Internet Meme and Internet Meme Definitions ................................................ 24
Section 2: Examples of Internet Memes ..................................................................................................... 31
Conclusions ............................................................................................................................................... 42
CHAPTER 3: INTERNET MEME COMMUNITIES ................................................................................................. 43
Section 1: Examples of Communal Formation Through Internet Memes .................................................. 43
Section 2: Internet Memes as Artifacts of Participatory Digital Communities ......................................... 51
Conclusions ............................................................................................................................................... 60

PART 3: PRESERVING INTERNET MEMES ............................................................................................ 60

CHAPTER 4: THE CURRENT STATE OF INTERNET MEME PRESERVATION ........................................................ 60

Section 1: Difficulties in Preserving Internet Memes ................................................................................ 61
Section 2: Current Efforts to Preserve Internet Memes ............................................................................. 70
Conclusion ................................................................................................................................................. 72
CHAPTER 5: PARTICIPATORY STRATEGIES FOR PRESERVING INTERNET MEMES ............................................. 73
Section 1: Participatory Strategies and Methods ...................................................................................... 73
Section 2: Obstacles to Participation ........................................................................................................ 78
Section 3: Proposals .................................................................................................................................. 80

CONCLUSION ................................................................................................................................................. 84

BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................................................ 87

FURTHER READING ................................................................................................................................... 103

2
 Acknowledgements

I wish to thank my supervisors, Dr. Anca Prodan and Dr. Mohamed Essawy Tawfik, for their
guidance, assistance, and instruction during the course of my research. I also acknowledge the advice
and assistance of Helena Schmiemann, the program coordinator at BTU, and the technical support of
Dr. Mona M. Raafat El-Sayed and Prof. Dr. Rasha Metawi, the coordinator and registrar, respectively,
at Helwan. I extend gratitude to all the BTU and Helwan faculty who instructed and aided me in my
Master’s studies. Lastly, I thank my fiancée, Jessica Evans, for her encouragement during the writing
process, as well as the encouragement and support of my family.

Abstract

The meme is an idea, element of culture or behavior passed down from one person to another
through imitation. A more specific form of meme is the internet meme, which involves images,
videos, text, or other content rapidly spread, and often modified, over the internet, and sometimes
transcending the mere digital into the material world. Internet memes are often global and therefore
help establish commonality between people across cultures, oceans, and national boundaries. They
also can help further knit together particular communities already bonded through digital interaction.
Yet, despite the cultural impact and pervasiveness of these virtual memes and artifacts in the late-20th
and early-21st century, the heritage field has only just begun to recognize the importance and impact
of online sub-cultures and viral phenomenon, and the future heritage value that these sub-cultures and
phenomenon will hold. Meme historians are few and meme museums even more scarce. Because
internet memes and cultures evolve so rapidly, and website links often move or expire, many,
probably most, of these virtual objects and intangible heritages, are in danger of being forgotten and
lost over the long term. Compounding this difficulty is the sheer volume of memes and artifacts to
curate and sift through for selective preservation. This thesis explores the research question of how
to select internet memes for preservation as virtual tangible and intangible heritage, and postulates
that participatory, community-based efforts could prove invaluable to developing and implementing
selection strategies.

Introduction

In 1976, the ethologist and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins published The Selfish
Gene, a controversial and ground-breaking book which popularized the argument that the
fundamental replicator for life is not the organism or group, but the gene. Toward the end of the book,
Dawkins suggested that perhaps other replicators exist as well. Dawkins proposed that, similar to how
genes replicate themselves self-servingly, human cultures and ideas replicate and “infect” hosts. He
3
named this replicator “meme”, from the Greek word “mimeme” meaning “imitated thing”.1 So long
as it demonstrates fecundity, longevity, and fidelity, the replicator will flourish, whether gene or
meme.2 Dawkins’ initial conceptualization of the meme was rather ambiguous and poorly defined, as
he intended merely to prove a point about the persistence of replicators, but it spawned an academic
field of study – memetics – and with that more specific definitions emerged. Oxford English
Dictionaries defines the meme as “an element of a culture or system of behaviour passed from one
individual to another by imitation or other non-genetic means.”3 While scholars from numerous
disciplines have critiqued, criticized, and debated the validity of the “meme” concept, or argued that
it is ill-defined or redundant, the concept of “meme” has nevertheless successfully spread through a
multitude of hosts. The meme became a meme.
Essentially, the meme could be called a “copy-me.” Whatever the content copied, what makes
it a meme is that it successfully replicates from one person to another. Memes manifest themselves
in innumerable ways. Music, religions, philosophies, scientific methods, idioms, political structures,
all these and more provide examples of the meme. The term “meme” was first applied in reference to
the internet in a 1994 article in Wired by Mike Godwin, the formulator of “Godwin’s Law,” an
internet adage that became a meme. In it, he explained how his introduction of the adage in 1990 was
a social experiment in memetics.4 Over time, as the idea of internet memes grew in popularity, a
second, slightly different and much narrower concept of meme arose, which Oxford English
Dictionaries defines as “an image, video, piece of text, etc., typically humorous in nature, that is
copied and spread rapidly by Internet users, often with slight variations.”5
Unlike Dawkins’ original conception of memes which evolve accidentally over time
according to principles of Darwinian evolution as they are copied over and over again, this second
kind of meme is often deliberately altered.6 These memes are not always faithfully copied. Intentional
change and variations are often introduced, changes that can themselves become memed and altered
in turn. For sake of clarity, in this paper I will refer to this second type of meme as the “internet
meme.” Online messaging forums such as 4Chan, 8Chan, and Something Awful, discussion groups
such as Reddit, microblog platforms like Tumblr, social networking powerhouses like Facebook and

1
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford University Press, 1989), 192–93.
2
Dawkins, 24, 194; Susan Blackmore, The Meme Machine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 58.
3
“Meme | Definition of Meme in English by Oxford Dictionaries,” Oxford Dictionaries | English, accessed March 19,
2019, https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/meme.
4
Mike Godwin, “Meme, Counter-Meme,” Wired, October 1, 1994, https://www.wired.com/1994/10/godwin-if-2/.
Godwin’s Law states the following: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving
Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.” Godwin applied the “law” to Usenet discussions, but it has since spread beyond that into
other internet discussions and even print writing and speeches.
5
“Meme | Definition of Meme in English by Oxford Dictionaries.”
6
Olivia Solon, “Richard Dawkins on the Internet’s Hijacking of the Word ‘Meme,’” Wired, June 20, 2013,
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/richard-dawkins-memes.
4
Twitter, internet video sites such as YouTube, and even emails all endlessly generate, spread, and re-
work countless internet memes. Spreading themselves literally the world over, internet memes insert
themselves into the lives of virtually anyone with an internet connection. For instance, after the death
of Osama bin Laden, the CIA discovered a cache of computer files in his hideout, and this cache
included the viral video “Charlie Bit My Finger.”7 For contemporary generations, digital interaction
is ubiquitous. Henry Jenkins et al. noted in 2006 that “according to a recent study from the Pew
Internet & American Life project, more than one-half of all teens have created media content, and
roughly one third of teens who use the Internet have shared content they produced. In many cases,
these teens are actively involved in what we are calling participatory cultures.”8 That study is now
almost 15 years old. I suspect that the proportions of media-creating and media-sharing teens are
higher. Even with no increase in those proportions, it is clear heritage formation for the generations
of the late-20th and early-21st century is inextricably entangled in the digital.
The question which now arises is if memes are by definition replicators and so spread
themselves at all costs, why bother with preserving them? If they are so widespread, so globally
impactful, why is there a need for intentional effort to preserve them? Have they not ensured their
own preservation? Yet there is a need, because memes evolve and die out. Some manage to last far
longer than others, but even these long-lived memes undergo substantial change over time. I can
illustrate this volatility of memes with an example from my own childhood: the floppy disc. In my
childhood and early teens, the floppy, as it was known, was ubiquitous to my computer usage. While
I might use compact discs to play games, the floppies were far more popular for saving files. In fact,
the floppies were so well-understood as the drive you saved files to that the save icon for a word
processor or other computer program often took the form of a floppy like so: 💾 Now, less than
twenty years later, floppies are obsolete. I need to purchase an extra device and attach it to my
computer if I want to use one. Assuming that I can still have one and that the files are still readable.
Yet, as I write using Microsoft Word 2016, I see, in the top left corner of my screen, a save icon in
the form of a floppy. While the actual disk is out of popular use and my computer’s compatibility,
the legacy of the floppy remains as a virtual image. A joke now circulates that youth who see a floppy

7
Michal Kranz, “Osama Bin Laden Had the ‘Charlie Bit My Finger’ Video on His Computer at His Time of Death,”
Business Insider, November 1, 2017, https://www.businessinsider.com/bin-laden-had-charlie-bit-my-finger-on-his-
computer-when-he-died-2017-11. “Charlie Bit My Finger” – full title “Charlie bit my finger – again !” – is a May 2007
viral online video featuring the three-years-old Harry Davies-Carr and then one-years-old Charlie Davies-Carr. Harry
twice sticks his finger into Charlie’s mouth, and each time Charlie bites it, the second time harder than the first. At the
end of October 2009, it was the most viewed video on YouTube with some 130 million views. See Maurice Chittenden,
“Harry and Charlie Davies-Carr: Web Gets Taste for Biting Baby - Times Online,” The Times, November 1, 2009,
https://web.archive.org/web/20110429140024/http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/arti
cle6898146.ece.
8
Henry Jenkins et al., “Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century,”
Building the Field of Digital Media & Learning, October 19, 2006, 3.
5
think that someone 3-D printed the save icon.9 In the Information Age, memes change and even die
often as quickly as they emerge. Internet memes prove especially volatile – they spread with dramatic
rapidity, but equally as quickly sink into the mire of time and memory. Fast-paced technological
change and replication and an increasingly connected global society accelerate the lifespan and
evolution of internet memes.
Additionally, internet memes sometimes transcend the virtual world into the actual. 10 They
are referenced in daily conversation and can manifest as intangible cultural artifacts, such as cosplay
or dance moves, and sometimes even as tangible artifacts. For example, in the form of stickers or
printed on t-shirts and coffee mugs. Thus, although such an integral part to contemporary social life
for billions of people the world over, the virtual and actual artifacts which manifest from the
intangible cultures – the memes – spreading inexorably across computer and satellite networks can
easily be lost if intentional efforts are not taken to preserve them for posterity. This thesis research
project will explore the research question of how to select internet memes for preservation as virtual
tangible and intangible heritage.
The challenge in preserving internet is daunting. Millions, probably billions, of internet
memes exist. Everyday countless more internet memes appear. Preserving everything on the internet
is technically feasible through archival computer programs with web access, and currently this is
largely the route that preservationists and archivists have taken, especially national-level
institutions.11 Yet, I would argue that this is not preservation. While archiving the web is important
as a first step toward preserving digital heritage, much of, perhaps most of, what is archived is virtual
garbage.12 The role of the preservationist is to sift through these archives and select the digital objects
of heritage value. Because of the volume of information and the new forms of social interaction and
cultural production opened up by digital heritage, traditional approaches in preservation are not
adequate for the task at hand.13

9
Megan Farokhmanesh, “Why Is This Floppy Disk Joke Still Haunting the Internet?,” The Verge, October 24, 2017,
https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/24/16505912/floppy-disk-3d-print-save-joke-meme.
10
As I will explain more in depth further on in this paper, I prefer the term “actual” as the antonym to “virtual” rather
than “physical,” because the virtual consists of shared digital information which is embedded into physical space on
computer chips. The distinction between virtual and physical is thus not as clear as it might seem at first.
11
Yola de Lusenet, “Tending the Garden or Harvesting the Fields: Digital Preservation and the UNESCO Charter on
the Preservation of the Digital Heritage,” Library Trends 56, no. 1 (2007): 171; Titia van der Werf and Bram van der
Werf, “The Paradox of Selection in the Digital Age,” in IFLA WLIC 2014 (IFLA WLIC 2014 - Lyon - Libraries,
Citizens, Societies: Confluence for Knowledge in Session 138 - UNESCO Open Session, Lyon, France: IFLA, 2014),
16–22, http://library.ifla.org/1042/.
12
van der Werf and van der Werf, “The Paradox of Selection in the Digital Age.”
13
de Jong Annemieke and Vincent Wintermans, “Introduction,” in Preserving the Digital Heritage: Principles and
Policies ; Selected Papers of the International Conference Organized by Netherlands National Commission for
UNESCO, Koninklijke Bibliotheek (National Library of the Netherlands), the Hague, 4-5 November 2005, ed. Yola de
Lusenet and Vincent Wintermans (The Hague: Netherlands National Commission for UNESCO and the European
Commission on Preservation and Access, 2007), 2; Abid Abdelaziz, “Safeguarding Our Digital Heritage: A New
Preservation Paradigm,” in Preserving the Digital Heritage: Principles and Policies ; Selected Papers of the
6
 Addressing the entirety of digital heritage preservation is well beyond the scope of this paper.
I am focusing on one specific form of digital heritage, the internet meme. While academics have
already begun to study internet memes, most such studies are on the cultural influence of memes or
how the memes form. Very few individuals have investigated internet memes as a form of digital
heritage. Ryan M. Milner, author of the book The World Made Meme, which he developed from his
Master’s thesis, has noted the importance of cataloging internet memes in order to preserve them for
future generations. Amanda Brennan formerly worked for the website Know Your Meme and now
functions as a “meme librarian” for the Tumblr website where she classifies and categorizes internet
memes. And Cole Stryker, a blogger who prefers that profession than academia, authored the book
Epic Win for Anonymous: How 4chan's Army Conquered the Web, which details the history of the
website 4chan.14 Justin Caffier from the website Vice asserts that meme historians are an
inevitability.15 While he is almost certainly correct in this assertion, preserving the heritage of internet
memes is an effort which is at present still in its infancy.
The majority of preservation work for internet memes is from independent websites such as
Know Your Meme, which provide encyclopedic entries on internet memes with selected virtual
artifacts.16 Social media sites such as Pinterest and the afore-mentioned Tumblr have also tried to
preserve some of their respective histories by relying on human and computer curatorial efforts to
preserve and highlight trending memes.17 These existing efforts could benefit from heritage
professionals – historians, archivists, digital preservationists, media archaeologists, folklorists,
museum curators, etc. – who could aid these websites with their specialist training. Heritage
professionals would work with digital communities to sift through the constant flow of internet

International Conference Organized by Netherlands National Commission for UNESCO, Koninklijke Bibliotheek
(National Library of the Netherlands), the Hague, 4-5 November 2005, ed. Yola DeLusenet and Vincent Wintermans
(The Hague: Netherlands National Commission for UNESCO and the European Commission on Preservation and
Access, 2007), 12; David Bearman, “Addressing Selection and Digital Preservation as Systemic Problems,” in
Preserving the Digital Heritage: Principles and Policies ; Selected Papers of the International Conference Organized
by Netherlands National Commission for UNESCO, Koninklijke Bibliotheek (National Library of the Netherlands), the
Hague, 4-5 November 2005, ed. Yola DeLusenet and Vincent Wintermans (The Hague: Netherlands National
Commission for UNESCO and the European Commission on Preservation and Access, 2007), 48.
14
Justin Caffier, “Meme Historians Are an Inevitability,” Vice (blog), May 21, 2017,
https://www.vice.com/en_nz/article/ezjmva/meme-historians-are-an-inevitability; Jean Hannah Edelstein, “Memes:
Take a Look at Miaow,” The Independent, September 19, 2011, http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-
tech/features/memes-take-a-look-at-miaow-2356797.html.
15
Caffier, “Meme Historians Are an Inevitability.”
16
Kaitlyn Tiffany, “The Story of the Internet, as Told by Know Your Meme,” The Verge, March 6, 2018,
https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/6/17044344/know-your-meme-10-year-anniversary-brad-kim-interview; Luke
Winkie and Brian McManus, “Memes Have Finally Made It to the Museum,” Vice (blog), September 17, 2018,
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/j54897/memes-have-finally-made-it-to-the-museum.
17
Carina Chocano, “Pinterest, Tumblr and the Trouble With ‘Curation,’” The New York Times, July 20, 2012, sec.
Magazine, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/22/magazine/pinterest-tumblr-and-the-trouble-with-curation.html; Vadim
Lavrusik, “Tumblr Adds Curated Topic Pages For Better Content Discovery,” Mashable, December 20, 2010,
https://mashable.com/2010/12/20/tumblr-adds-curated-topic-pages/.
7
memes and select those of greatest cultural value. Rather than rely on the curator or preservationist
as the sole or primary cultural gatekeeper, the communities themselves can take on the problem of
preserving the internet meme artifacts and the histories of the intangible cultural practices, the memes,
that produced them, and the heritage professionals would aid these communities in the form of
specialist training or knowledge.
This model of preservation would necessitate a participatory community-based approach
spanning across both virtual networks and actual material space. Already in the broader field of
heritage, professionals and professional organizations increasingly view heritage as primarily
oriented toward human community rather than material objects. And many heritage preservation
strategies increasingly seek to involve communities in the heritage preservation and management
processes, if not give managerial authority to the community themselves.18
For about a decade, professionals in the heritage and digital fields have recognized that
participatory community models are indispensable to preserving digital heritage. The specialists
David Bearman, Abid Abdelaziz, and William Urrichio all noted this at the 2005 UNESCO
conference on preserving digital heritage held at the Hague,19 as well as Kate Hennessy in the 2012
UNESCO Memory of the World conference in Vancouver.20 At the same Vancouver convention,
Ravi Katikala, Kurt Madsen, and Gilberto Mincaye Nenquimo Enqueri proposed that participatory
methods could help preserve the digital heritage of indigenous peoples who live at the “edge of the
Internet.”21 Internet memes exemplify the interactive and participatory nature of digital heritage and

18
Australia ICOMOS and International Council on Monuments and Sites, The Burra Charter: The Australia ICOMOS
Charter for Places of Cultural Significance 2013, 5th ed. (Burra: Australia ICOMOS, 2013), 8,
http://australia.icomos.org/wp-content/uploads/The-Burra-Charter-2013-Adopted-31.10.2013.pdf; Council of Europe
Framework Convention on the Value of Cultural Heritage for Society (2005) (Faro, Portugal: Council of Europe, 2005),
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-0465-2_1051; “Promoting People-Centred Approaches to Conservation: Living
Heritage,” ICCROM, accessed November 7, 2017, http://www.iccrom.org/priority-areas/living-heritage/.
19
Bearman, “Addressing Selection and Digital Preservation as Systemic Problems”; Abdelaziz, “Safeguarding Our
Digital Heritage: A New Preservation Paradigm”; William Uricchio, “Moving beyond the Artifact: Lessons from
Participatory Culture,” in Preserving the Digital Heritage: Principles and Policies ; Selected Papers of the
International Conference Organized by Netherlands National Commission for UNESCO, Koninklijke Bibliotheek
(National Library of the Netherlands), the Hague, 4-5 November 2005, ed. Yola DeLusenet and Vincent Wintermans
(The Hague: Netherlands National Commission for UNESCO and the European Commission on Preservation and
Access, 2007), 15–25.
20
Kate Hennessy, “The Intangible and the Digital: Participatory Media Production and Local Cultural Property Rights
Discourse,” in Proceedings of The Memory of the World in the Digital Age: Digitization and Preservation. An
International Conference on Permanent Access to Digital Documentary Heritage, ed. Luciana Duranti and Elizabeth
Shaffer (The Memory of the World in the Digital Age: Digitization and Preservation. An International Conference on
Permanent Access to Digital Documentary Heritage, Vancouver: UNESCO, 2013), 63,
http://1seminariopreservacaopatrimoniodigital.dglab.gov.pt/wp-content/uploads/sites/19/2015/08/recurso_25.pdf.
21
Ravi Katikala, Kurt Madsen, and Gilberto Mincaye Nenquimo Enqueri, “Life at the Edge of the Internet: Preserving
the Digital Heritage of Indigenous Cultures,” in Proceedings of The Memory of the World in the Digital Age:
Digitization and Preservation. An International Conference on Permanent Access to Digital Documentary Heritage, ed.
Luciana Duranti and Elizabeth Shaffer (The Memory of the World in the Digital Age: Digitization and Preservation. An
International Conference on Permanent Access to Digital Documentary Heritage, Vancouver: UNESCO, 2013), 191,
http://1seminariopreservacaopatrimoniodigital.dglab.gov.pt/wp-content/uploads/sites/19/2015/08/recurso_25.pdf.
8
thus benefit from implementing, and offer further opportunities to implement, participatory
community-based preservation strategies. The disciplines of digital preservation and management can
model themselves participatory processes which give rise to internet memes. Such an approach not
only preserves the virtual and visual-actual hybrid artifacts but also the evolutionary processes which
produced and spread those artifacts as an intangible cultural heritage.
An additional consideration is that preservation models for internet memes should not include
merely the digital. As mentioned before, internet memes often cross-over from the virtual world into
the actual. They often comprise a complicated, inter-connected hybrid heritage which weaves virtual
and actual heritage both tangible and intangible. Erik Borglund at the 2012 Vancouver conference
brought attention to the lack of clear dichotomy between the digital and non-digital, that often the
digital and non-digital interact as a hybrid heritage.22 Internet memes illustrate this well, and efforts
to preserve them must account for non-digital artifacts and intangible practices which might constitute
part of the heritage for a specific internet meme. Incorporating such non-digital elements, especially
the intangible practices, would especially rely on participation from the heritage communities.
Personal testimonies, interviews, oral histories, photographs, and various other forms of
documentation would supplement the virtual and actual internet meme artifacts.
I hypothesize that in order to preserve internet memes as heritage, heritage professionals must
understand internet memes not as singular digital artifacts but as interactive processes of which the
artifacts themselves are but a small part. The internet meme artifacts which manifest both in the virtual
world and the actual result from complicated, inter-connected networks of communities and
individuals. Preserving the internet meme entails preserving these networks and interactions as well.
The need for preserving such vast and complicated network landscapes of tangible and intangible
heritage, combined with an ever-growing, essentially limitless quantity of digital and hybrid
digital/non-digital heritage requiring preservation, poses a challenge to traditional models of
preservation, both in management strategies and in technical feasibility. I therefore explore the
potentials of involving the heritage communities themselves in preservation efforts with the heritage
professional providing advice and specialist training.

22
Erik Borglund, “Challenges to Capture the Hybrid Heritage: When Activities Take Place in Both Digital and Non-
Digital Environments,” in Proceedings of The Memory of the World in the Digital Age: Digitization and Preservation.
An International Conference on Permanent Access to Digital Documentary Heritage, ed. Luciana Duranti and Elizabeth
Shaffer (The Memory of the World in the Digital Age: Digitization and Preservation. An International Conference on
Permanent Access to Digital Documentary Heritage, Vancouver: UNESCO, 2013), 814–21,
http://1seminariopreservacaopatrimoniodigital.dglab.gov.pt/wp-content/uploads/sites/19/2015/08/recurso_25.pdf.
9
 Research Methodology

The bulk of my thesis project research involved consulting the relevant academic literature,
identifying research gaps, and proposing areas for future research. My goals were to understand the
following:
1. The concepts, definitions, and academic debates pertaining to the term “meme”
2. How the term “meme” came to be associated with shared digital artifacts
3. The nature of these internet memes and how they facilitate communal formation and
identity
4. What the current efforts are to preserve these internet memes
5. The need and potential for participatory and community-based approaches for preserving
memes
Based on my findings in researching the above, I developed some proposals for consideration.
The bulk of this project was exploratory – I sought to understand the important concepts pertaining
to internet memes, how internet memes function as heritage, the present efforts to preserve these
memes, and the potential ways in which these preservation efforts could be developed. From that
exploration, I outline some recommendations. Further research could then develop these suggestions
and experiment with implementation.

Structure of Research
Part 1: Memetics. This part examines meme theory and set the broader context of the subject
in which internet memes lie. It traces the evolution of the concept of memes and the critiques of and
objections to the theory and the rebuttals to these criticisms.
Part 2: Internet memes as heritage. This part of my research narrows the discussion of
memes and memetics to that of internet memes. In the first chapter of this part, I include some
terminology, definitions, and categorization pertaining to internet memes, and I also describe where
the internet meme deviates from the original conception of meme. It also overviews some examples
of internet memes and briefly describes their history. In the second chapter of this portion of my
thesis, I examine the phenomena of community formation which produces and is produced by internet
memes. This includes the impact which internet memes exercise on the actual world when they
transcend the virtual.
Part 3: Preserving internet memes. This final part examines the problems of internet meme
preservation and potential solutions. In the first chapter of this part, I outline the difficulties posed by
the tremendous volume of potential content to be preserved; difficulties stemming from “out-siders”
attempting to understand the sub-cultures and nuances of many particular memes; problems regarding
10
technical limitations and accessibility; and the lack of preservationist attention to internet memes as
hybrid virtual-actual heritage and why such attention is needed.
The second chapter of Part 3 examines participatory and community-based participatory
involvement in digital and online media. Drawing from my findings in the literature I surveyed, I
propose some participatory community-based strategies for preserving internet memes.

Part 1: Memetics

Chapter 1: Memetics
In order to properly discuss the preservation of internet memes, we first must understand the
concept of memes and memetics and how internet memes fit into that definition. This chapter
examines the origin and evolution of the term “meme” as an academic theory, and the discussions
and critiques of this theory.

Section 1: Origin and Evolution of the Term “Meme”

Richard Dawkins, an ethologist and evolutionary biologist, coined the term “meme” in his
1976 book The Selfish Gene. Dawkins proposed that just as genes replicate themselves over and over,
human cultures do the same. He states that “tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of
making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping
from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping
from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.”23 He postulated
that this cultural transmission follows principles of Darwinian evolution just as genes do, with gradual
evolution introduced over long periods of time. Dawkins called this replicator the “meme”, a
shortening of the Greek word “mimeme” meaning “imitated thing” and which also handily rhymes
with “gene.”24
According to Dawkins, a successful replicator needs fecundity (fertility), longevity (capable
of sustaining itself across generations over time), and copy-fidelity (faithful in copying the original
information accurately). So long as all three conditions are met the replicator will continue to
propagate itself, whether a gene, meme, or some other, yet-to-be-articulated replicator.25 Precedent
for this idea of cultural elements undergoing evolution traces back as far as the era of Darwin. TH
Huxley wrote in 1880 that “The struggle for existence holds as much in the intellectual as in the
physical world. A theory is a species of thinking, and its right to exist is coextensive with its power

23
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 2 edition (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 192,
https://www.amazon.com/Selfish-Gene-Popular-Science/dp/0192860925.
24
Dawkins, 191.
25
Dawkins, 24, 194.
11
of resisting extinction by its rivals.”26 Just shy of a century later, the neurophysiologist Roger Sperry
stated that “ideas cause ideas and help evolve new ideas” and the biologist Jacques Monod claimed
that ideas can “perpetuate their structure and to breed; they too can fuse, recombine, segregate their
content; indeed they too can evolve, and in this evolution selection must surely play an important
role.”27 And even just one year prior to the publication of Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene, F.T. Cloak
submitted the idea of cultural information (“i-culture”) carrying on as instructions in the heads of
humans analogous to genotype and manifesting itself analogous to phenotypes through practices and
technologies (“m-culture”).28
Dawkins’ initial conceptualization of it remained nebulous. In The Selfish Gene, he described
memes as a unit of imitation, yet in The Extended Phenotype he likened them to an informational unit
residing in the brain.29 Apparently, this ambiguity was largely intentional. Dawkins explained
retrospectively that he intended only modest aspirations for the term “meme.” He suggested the idea
of the meme as a rhetorical device meant to illustrate that the point of The Selfish Gene was not the
centrality of the gene as driving evolution but rather the centrality of replicators. Genes, and the DNA
comprising them, are incidental – the replicator is the driver, genes merely a useful carrier. The same
with memes – the human vessel merely serves as a useful carrier to replicate and transmit
information.30
It was the cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter and the philosopher Daniel Dennett who
popularized Dawkins’ “meme” in The Mind’s I (1981) and developed it into a full-fledged meme
theory. Hofstadter and Dennett compiled extracts of Dawkins’ thoughts on the meme into a single
essay and put forward the idea of the meme as a cultural version of the gene. 31 With the ensuing
popularity of their book, it was in this form that the “meme” meme entered popular consciousness.
Hofstadter continued to write about the meme throughout the 1980s in various essays, elaborating on
the idea of the meme as a replicator-kind equivalent to genes, with “selfish” memes competing with

26
TH Huxley, “The Coming of Age of ‘The Origin of Species,’” Science os-1, no. 2 (July 3, 1880): 15–17,
https://doi.org/10.1126/science.os-1.2.15.
27
James Gleick, “What Defines a Meme?,” Smithsonian. Accessed February 23, no. 2019 (May 2011),
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/what-defines-a-meme-1904778/.
28
Susan Blackmore, The Meme Machine (Oxford: OUP Oxford, 2000), 64.
29
Nick Rose, “Controversies in Meme Theory,” Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information
Transmission 2, no. 1 (1998), http://cfpm.org/jom-emit/1998/vol2/rose_n.html; Derek Gatherer, “Why the ‘Thought
Contagion’ Metaphor Is Retarding the Progress of Memetics.,” Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of
Information Transmission 2, no. 2 (1998), http://cfpm.org/jom-emit/1998/vol2/gatherer_d.html.
30
Richard Dawkins, “Foreword,” in The Meme Machine, by Susan Blackmore (Oxford: OUP Oxford, 2000), xvi;
Richard Dawkins, “The Selfish Meme,” Time, April 11, 1999,
http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,22988,00.html; Jeremy Trevelyan Burman, “The
Misunderstanding of Memes: Biography of an Unscientific Object, 1976–1999,” Perspectives on Science 20, no. 1
(May 2012): 77, 80–81, https://doi.org/10.1162/POSC_a_00057.
31
Burman, “The Misunderstanding of Memes,” 81–84.
12
each other and with various mutations of themselves analogous to “selfish” genes.32 The MIT Fellow
and journalist Michael Schrage took these discussions by Hofstadter and popularized them in the
United States during the late-1980s and early-1990s.33 Dennett likewise spread this idea of the meme
in the United Kingdom in the early- and mid-1990s through his books Consciousness Explained
(1991) and Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995).34 In the latter work, Dennett argues that memes undergo
evolutionary selection according to the same principles of Darwinian evolution and descent as do
genes, and that this evolutionary process is algorithmic – it is “a certain sort of formal process that
can be counted on—logically—to yield a certain sort of result whenever it is "run" or instantiated.35
Even Dawkins in his 1993 essay “Viruses of the Mind”, which hypothesizes that religions are
memetic viruses infecting numerous minds, begins his piece with a quote from Consciousness
Explained.36
By the late 1990s, the meme idea became entrenched in academics and the broader populace,
yet with only vague definition. In 1998, the Oxford English Dictionary contained the word “meme,”
which it defined as “An element of a culture that may be considered to be passed on by non-genetic
means, esp. imitation.”37 The philosopher John S. Wilkins, confronted by the vagueness of the term
“meme,” provided a more technical definition: “A meme is the least unit of sociocultural information
relative to a selection process that has favourable or unfavourable selection bias that exceeds its
endogenous tendency to change.”38 Both of these definitions stay close to the understanding of meme
as developed by Dennett. Others, however, took different, sometimes much more expansive views
regarding the meme. Liane Gabora, a psychologist, went so far as to call the meme a “mental
representation” of “anything that can be the subject of an instant of experience,”39 a definition which
could equally apply non-human animals (against the original conception of the meme as uniquely
human) and divorces the meme concept from replication and transmission entirely.40

32
Burman, 87–88.
33
Burman, 89–91.
34
Burman, 91–95.
35
Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (London: Penguin Group, 1995), 50, 335–69, 591, http://www.inf.fu-
berlin.de/lehre/pmo/eng/Dennett-Darwin'sDangerousIdea.pdf.
36
Richard Dawkins, “Viruses of the Mind,” in Dennett and His Critics: Demystifying Mind, ed. Bo Dahlbom
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing, 1995), https://www.inf.fu-berlin.de/lehre/pmo/eng/Dawkins-
MindViruses.pdf; Burman, “The Misunderstanding of Memes,” 94.
37
Susan Blackmore, “Imitation and the Definition of a Meme,” Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of
Information Transmission 2, no. 2 (1998), http://cfpm.org/jom-emit/1998/vol2/blackmore_s.html.
38
John S. Wilkins, “What’s in a Meme?,” Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission 2,
no. 1 (1998), http://cfpm.org/jom-emit/1998/vol2/wilkins_js.html; Blackmore, “Imitation and the Definition of a
Meme.”
39
Liane Gabora, “The Origin and Evolution of Culture and Creativity,” Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of
Information Transmission 1, no. 1 (May 1997), http://cfpm.org/jom-emit/1997/vol1/gabora_l.html.
40
Blackmore, “Imitation and the Definition of a Meme.” As will be seen in Section 2, some scholars argue that even the
more narrow conception of memes as proposed by Dawkins, Dennett, and Susan Blackmore can apply to animals.
13
 Susan Blackmore, a psychologist who ventured into the study of memes, successfully clarified
and defined the meme and memetics amidst the wide variety of meanings for the term circulating in
the late 1990s.41 Her book The Meme Machine accepted Dennett’s interpretation of the meme as an
evolutionary algorithm, but dropped the sense of intentional agency implied by Dennett and tied the
concept back into Dawkins’ emphasis on replication as the universal principle.42 Blackmore contends
that the definition of meme requires imitation.43 A meme is the intangible thing, the information, that
passes from one human to another via imitation.44 In a 2008 TED Talk, Blackmore succinctly
described the meme as “information that we copy from person to person by imitation.”45 This mostly
dovetails with the current definition of meme in the Oxford English Dictionary: “an element of a
culture or system of behaviour passed from one individual to another by imitation or other non-genetic
means.”46 It is this understanding of meme that largely became the accepted definition of the concept
sparked by Dawkins.

Section 2: Controversies and Criticisms in Memetics

Memetics Is Lamarckian
One of the foremost claims made regarding the concept of the meme is that it espouses the
long-derided Lamarckian theory of evolution. The label of “Lamarkian” is often applied to theories
of cultural evolution in general, not just the theory of memetics, and though the term sometimes is
meant derisively, quite often it is applied in a favorable light.47 “Lamarckian” evolution typically
refers to a mechanism of biological evolution proposed by Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck in which traits
(typically physical) acquired by an organism during its life are passed on to its descendants.48 For
instance, a body-builder acquiring great muscle mass which is then inherited by his or her children.
That such a phenomenon has not been reliably observed for over a century and a half is why

41
Burman, “The Misunderstanding of Memes,” 97.
42
Burman, 97; Blackmore, The Meme Machine, 2000, 11–13, 17.
43
Blackmore, “Imitation and the Definition of a Meme”; Blackmore, The Meme Machine, 2000, 4, 43, 47–50, 52.
44
Blackmore, The Meme Machine, 2000, 4, 7, 52.
45
Susan Blackmore, Memes and “Temes” (TED, 2008),
https://www.ted.com/talks/susan_blackmore_on_memes_and_temes.
46
“Meme | Definition of Meme in English by Oxford Dictionaries.”
47
Rose, “Controversies in Meme Theory”; Bill Volk, “Meme,” The Chicago School of Media Theory, 2007,
https://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/mediatheory/keywords/meme/; Maria E. Kronfeldner, “Is Cultural Evolution
Lamarckian?,” Biology & Philosophy 22, no. 4 (September 1, 2007): 493–512, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-006-
9037-7; Susan Blackmore, “Memetics Does Provide a Useful Way of Understanding Cultural Evolution.,” in
Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Biology, ed. Francisco Ayala and Robert Arp (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell,
2010), 265, https://www.susanblackmore.uk/chapters/memetics-does-provide-a-useful-way-of-understanding-cultural-
evolution/; Blackmore, The Meme Machine, 59–62, 215.
48
Volk, “Meme”; Blackmore, The Meme Machine, 2000, 59–60; Kronfeldner, “Is Cultural Evolution Lamarckian?,”
494–96.
14
Lamarck’s theory, at least as commonly understood, is widely ridiculed.49 Therefore, assertions of
Lamarckism are often accusatory and intended to discredit an idea.
The assertion of memetics and cultural evolution to Lamarckian contains several flaws.
Firstly, though even many scholars defend the Lamarckian evolutionary model when applied to
culture, literally such a theory applies to biological evolution only and does not adequately carry over
to theories of cultural transmission. If the comparison is made, is must be in a metaphorical sense.
Culture is not transmitted biologically, and is not limited to heredity. Blackmore provides the
following example: “If I invent a brilliant new recipe for pumpkin soup, I can pass it on to you and
you can pass it on to your granny and she can pass it on to her best friend. Also, this is not inheritance
in the biological sense and the genes are not affected. So it is not Lamarckian.”50 However, this model
is not Darwinian, either, as Darwinian evolution is likewise biological. In either case, the mode of
transmission described here is a different from heredity. Maria E. Kronfelder, a philosopher of
science, explains that, depending on the argument made, the assertion that cultural evolution is
Lamarckian breaks down into absurdity because culture is inherently socially acquired by definition.
“The important point is that in the literal sense of ‘acquired,’ all patterns of behaviors that are found
to be culturally inherited are by definition acquired, i.e. not innate. If they were innate, they would
not count as cultural and would be transmitted by the biological system of inheritance and not the
social one.”51
Now, if used in a metaphorical sense, with “Lamarckianism” meaning that cultural traits
which acquire changes are then inherited by another generation, then the first objection – that
Lamarckianism is a biological theory – does not apply. But do cultural evolution and memes follow
Lamarckianism in this metaphorical sense? Yes and no. Here, the Lamarckian assertion holds some
validity, but applies only in select cases. Blackmore illustrates this with her soup example: If you
learn to make the soup from Blackmore by watching her make it, and then you pass it on to your
grandmother in the same manner, the “inheritance is Lamarckian because if I put in too much salt on
this occasion, or you forget one of my special herbs, or fail to copy the way I shred the garlic, then
you will pass on this new version when your granny watches you, and so the new phenotype will
have acquired the characteristics accordingly.”52 However, if you copied how to make the soup from
instructions given in a recipe and so can correct for any errors introduced by Blackmore or you, then
the transmission of the soup-making cultural item or meme follows Darwinian principles rather than

49
However, there is evidence that biological evolution does include the introduction of Lamarckian-style changes
during an organisms life which then pass down to subsequent generations, but it does so within an overall Darwinian
framework. See Kronfeldner, “Is Cultural Evolution Lamarckian?,” 493–500.
50
Blackmore, The Meme Machine, 2000, 61.
51
Kronfeldner, “Is Cultural Evolution Lamarckian?,” 502.
52
Blackmore, The Meme Machine, 2000, 62.
15
Lamarckian.53 Additionally, Lamarckianism assumes that acquired traits must be transmitted, which
is not the case for culture. Through choice, human beings can decide whether or not to pass on a trait
which the cultural unit acquired, and thus, to quote Kronfelder, they can “decide whether inheritance
is Lamarckian or not.”54 Therefore, while sometimes the assertion that memetics, and cultural
evolution at large, follows Lamarckianism is correct up to a point, it also sometimes is not correct at
all. And even when the assertion is accurate, it should not be automatically assumed to demonstrate
that memetics is false – there are times when metaphorical Lamarckism is correct.

Empirical Support for Memetics

Another common resistance to memetics is an alleged lack of empirical to support their
existence. The political theorist Richard Barbrook opines that a “major error in the Memesis statement
is its use of dodgy biological analogies”55 and that “no one has ever seen a meme. You cannot examine
one under a microscope. You cannot measure its impact on the social world. Lacking any credible
scientific evidence, acceptance of the meme theory can only be a pure act of faith.”56 Onar Aam, a
behavioral scientist and memeticist, acknowledges that memetics lacks coherent scientific backing,
but that this problem lies “in the methodology and support fields rather than in the idea itself.”57
The theologian and intellectual historian Alister McGrath also criticizes memetics for lacking
scientific rigor. Although he initially was intrigued by Dawkins’ meme hypothesis, he has since
concluded that “memes can’t be observed, and the evidence can be explained perfectly well without
them.”58 McGrath accuses Dawkins of talking about memes in the way that believers talk about God
– as “an invisible, unverifiable postulate, which helps explain some things about experience, but
ultimately lies beyond empirical investigation.”59 Robert Aunger, a biological anthropologist,
although he does not reject the concept of memes outright, likewise asserts that “many researchers
blithely discuss features of memes, ignoring the fact that their existence has yet to be proven.”60 In

53
Blackmore, 62.
54
Kronfeldner, “Is Cultural Evolution Lamarckian?,” 503. Alister McGrath also makes this point about intentionality
and human choice, specifically in reference to memes, in Alister E. McGrath, Dawkins’ God: From The Selfish Gene to
The God Delusion (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2015), 123.
55
Richard Barbrook, “Memesis Critique,” in A Memetics Compendium, ed. Robert Finkelstein (Adelphi: Robotic
Technology Inc, 2008), 95, https://semioticon.com/virtuals/memes2/memetics_compendium.pdf.
56
Richard Barbrook, “Never Mind the Cyberbollocks... Part 4: The Fallacies of Memetics,” Hypermedia Research
Centre, n.d., http://www.hrc.wmin.ac.uk/hrc/theory/cyberbollocks/nevermind/t.2.1%5B3%5D.html.
57
Onar Aam, “Critique and Defense of Memesis,” in A Memetics Compendium, ed. Robert Finkelstein (Adelphi:
Robotic Technology Inc, 2008), 58, https://semioticon.com/virtuals/memes2/memetics_compendium.pdf.
58
Alister E. McGrath, “The Spell of the Meme” (University speech, March 13, 2006), 7,
http://www.cis.org.uk/upload/Resources/Atheism/mcgrath_rsa_lecture.pdf.
59
McGrath, Dawkins’ God, 131.
60
Robert Aunger, “Introduction,” in Darwinizing Culture: The Status of Memetics as a Science, ed. Robert Aunger, 1
edition (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 7,
http://researchonline.lshtm.ac.uk/15423/1/Aunger%20Cha%201%20DarwinizingCulture.pdf.
16
response to these criticisms, Blackmore admits that while it may be difficult to pin down just what is
copied, it is clear that cultural transmission means something has been copied. Memes exist, says
Blackmore, because imitation takes place.61 The semioticists and linguists Thomas Sebeok and
Marcel Danesi, who heavily criticize memetics, insist that “there is no empirical way to verify the
reality of memes, as defined by Dawkins; they can only be talked about as if they existed.”62 However,
they then state that “it is possible to study the structure of mind in the structure of models [.]”63

“Thought Contagion”
A third major point of contention is the “thought contagion” or “viruses of the mind”
metaphors which Dennett and Dawkins have colorfully touted. They liken supposedly non-rational
memes, particularly religious memes, to viruses, replicators copying themselves to the detriment of
the host. While science also consists of numerous memes, Dawkins distinguishes it from religion,
arguing that “Scientific ideas, like all memes, are subject to a kind of natural selection, and this might
look superficially virus-like. But the selective forces that scrutinize scientific ideas are not arbitrary
or capricious. They are exacting, well-honed rules, and they do not favour pointless self-serving
behaviour.”64 McGrath counters that this argument is special pleading, that all dogmas must face the
same standard.65 He further contends that religion is demonstrated to have a beneficial effect on the
human experience, an argument with which the reviewer Christopher Hartney concurs.66
The criticisms of the “thought contagion” model extend beyond the alleged double-standards
applied to religion. While the “thought contagion” metaphor borrows from the “social contagion”
model used in sociology and social psychology to describe collective human behavior which spreads
rapidly as if it was infectious, the bioinformaticist Derek Gatherer contends that such a connection is
misplaced because beliefs, unlike behavior, cannot be verifiably confirmed to reliably replicate
themselves, and because the entire concept of meme-host duality (that is, an identifiable division
between a specific meme and the host mind) is highly suspect.67 This latter point is one that is also

61
Blackmore, “Memetics Does Provide a Useful Way of Understanding Cultural Evolution.,” 257.
62
Thomas Albert Sebeok and Marcel Danesi, The Forms of Meaning: Modeling Systems Theory and Semiotic Analysis
(Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2000), 164.
63
Sebeok and Danesi, 164. Though Seboek and Danesi support Dawkins in that memes do not need to be empirically
verifiable as objects but rather can be studied as models, they find the “meme” concept to be redundant because of the
existing field of semiotics. See the sub-section “Memetics from a Semiotic Perspective” further down in this chapter for
more discussion on the subject.
64
Richard Dawkins, A Devil’s Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co,
2003), 145.
65
McGrath, Dawkins’ God, 126; McGrath, “The Spell of the Meme,” 8–9; Christopher Hartney, “Dawkins’ God:
Genes, Memes, and the Meaning of Life by Alister McGrath,” Journal of Religious History 37, no. 4 (2013): 600–601,
https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9809.12128.
66
McGrath, Dawkins’ God, 141; Hartney, “Alister McGrath,” 600.
67
Gatherer, “Why the ‘Thought Contagion’ Metaphor Is Retarding the Progress of Memetics.” Some academics
challenge the social contagion model within sociology, even though it is the predominant model. See Amir Goldberg
17
emphasized by Blackmore and the psychologist Nick Rose, who argue that, despite the assertion by
Dawkins that the self can choose to reject memes, the entire concept of self results from complexes
of innumerable memes and genes.68 However, the psychologist Paul Marsden postulates that
memetics and social contagion theory are complementary and so he advocates for a fusion of the two.
He contends that social contagion theory could benefit from the theoretical framework of memetics,
and memetics would benefit from the body of evidence accumulated by the social contagion theory.69

Meme Genotypes and Phenotypes

Another frequently discussed topic is the comparison of memes and their expression with
genotypes and phenotypes. As mentioned in the previous section, Cloak likened the information in
people’s heads – the i-culture – to the genotype and the behaviors and technologies resulting from
those ideas – the m-culture – to the phenotype. Dawkins and Dennett agree with Cloak (although
Dawkins initially was hesitant) and argue that the meme is Cloak’s i-culture and Cloak’s m-culture
is the memetic phenotype. The neurobiologist Juan Delius concurs, stating that memes are “synaptic
patterns that code cultural traits.”70 He considers the transmission of memes to be the transmission of
information in the form of synaptic patterns in one brain to another, with these patterns then
instructing cultural behavior.71 Gabora likewise treats memes as genotypic mental representations,
with the implementation of the mental representations analogous to phenotype.72
Yet the literary theorist and scholar of cultural evolution William Benzon identifies the
physical expressions of culture – “the pots and knives, the looms and cured hides, the utterances and
written words, the ploughshares and transistors, the songs and painted images, the tents and stone
fortifications, the dances and sculpted figures, all of it” – as the memetic genotype, and the “ideas,
desires, emotions, and attitudes behind these things,” the “mental objects and processes,” as the

and Sarah K. Stein, “Beyond Social Contagion: Associative Diffusion and the Emergence of Cultural Variation,”
American Sociological Review 83, no. 5 (October 1, 2018): 897–932, https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122418797576.
68
Blackmore, The Meme Machine, 2000, 219–34; Rose, “Controversies in Meme Theory.” However, Blackmore,
unlike Gatherer, still retains the “virus of the mind” metaphor as potentially useful, including as a potential distinction
between harmful and useless memes from beneficial memes. Blackmore, The Meme Machine, 2000, 19–22, 110.
69
Paul Marsden, “Memetics and Social Contagion: Two Sides of the Same Coin?,” Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary
Models of Information Transmission 2, no. 2 (1998), http://cfpm.org/jom-emit/1998/vol2/marsden_p.html.
70
Juan Delius, “The Nature of Culture,” in The Tinbergen Legacy, ed. Marian Stamp Dawkins, Richard Dawkins, and
T. R. Halliday (London: Springer Science & Business Media, 1991), 83,
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/226916445_The_nature_of_culture.
71
Juan Delius, “Of Mind Memes and Brain Bugs: A Natural History of Culture.,” in The Nature of Culture:
Proceedings of the International and Interdisciplinary Symposium, October 7-11, 1986 in Bochum, ed. Walter A. Koch
(The Nature of Culture: The International and Interdisciplinary Symposium, October 7-11, 1986 in Bochum, Bochum:
Studienverlag N. Brockmeyer, 1989), 44–45,
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/2fcc/8c9a21976be56e5d36bfa2ebd9bced61a8b4.pdf.
72
Gabora, “The Origin and Evolution of Culture and Creativity.”
18
memetic phenotypes.73 Gatherer echoes Benzon by identifying memes as an observable “behaviour,
artefact or an objective piece of information, which is copied, imitated or learned, and thus may
replicate within a cultural system,” but denies that memetics can apply to ideas at all.74 Gatherer states
that “belief is not transmissible, but is something that happens after the transmission of information.
While we can often observe the communication of information, we can never directly observe
transmission of belief. Information and belief are not the same kind of thing [emphasis in original].”75
Kronfelder makes a more complicated argument – the information is the genotype, the resulting
product the phenotype, and memes are never directly transmitted but rather their phenotypic
expressions.76
Blackmore is non-committal to either proposal – the memetic genotype being the mental
information, or the physical expressions and materials. She opines that “I think none of them really
works because they have not appreciated the difference between the copying-the-product and
copying-the-instructions.”77

Memes as Replicators
Some scholars go further and argue that most cultural transmission is not memetic at all
because it is not truly replicated. The social and cognitive scientist Dan Sperber acknowledges that
although some true memes exist – chain letters being an excellent example –, they are not nearly as
common as Dawkins and others claim.78 Sperber argues “that most cultural items are ‘re-produced’
in the sense that they are produced again and again – with, of course, a causal link between all these
productions –, but are not reproduced in the sense of being copied from one another.”79 Sperber cites
the “Chinese junk” illustration given by Dawkins. Two groups of children are asked to re-create a
Chinese junk. In the first group, a child is shown a picture of the junk and then asked to draw it,
without instruction in the specific strokes needed. The next child must copy the drawing of the first
child, and so on. In the second group, the child is shown an origami junk and instructed in how to re-
create it. They then pass these instructions to the next child, that child to the next, and so on. Dawkins
contends that the resulting products in the latter group will suffer from far less mutation than in the
former, because in the latter group the “ideal” Chinese junk is much more faithfully preserved. If

73
William Benzon, “Culture as an Evolutionary Arena,” Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems 19, no. 4 (January
1, 1996): 322–23, https://doi.org/10.1016/S1061-7361(96)90003-X.
74
Gatherer, “Why the ‘Thought Contagion’ Metaphor Is Retarding the Progress of Memetics.”
75
Gatherer.
76
Kronfeldner, “Is Cultural Evolution Lamarckian?,” 506.
77
Blackmore, The Meme Machine, 2000, 64.
78
Dan Sperber, “An Objection to the Memetic Approach to Culture,” in Darwinizing Culture: The Status of Memetics
as a Science, ed. Robert Aunger, 1st ed. (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 163,
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/245349514_An_objection_to_the_memetic_approach_to_culture.
79
Sperber, 164.
19
minor mistakes are made, the mistakes are not repeated because the children can refer back to the
“ideal” junk.80 Sperber argues that this kind of copying is not truly replication at all, because
“contrary to what Dawkins writes, the instructions are not ‘self-normalising’. It is the process of
attribution of intentions that normalises the implicit instructions that participants infer from what they
observe.”81 What the children are doing in the origami example is supplementing the given
instructions with information they already have.
Kronfelder agrees with Sperber and baldly asserts that “memes are not replicators” because
the transmission of memes differs so greatly and fundamentally from genes. Whereas genes involve
simple template copying, with one string of DNA serving as the template for the text, memes are
more like mental reconstructions, often after repeated encounters. In this, Kronfelder seems to align
with Gabora’s conception of memes as mental representations based on experiences, although less
sweepingly than Gabora. However, unlike Gabora, Kronfelder, citing Sperber, denies that memes are
replicators at all. Argues Kronfelder: “If social transmission always involves the reconstruction of a
meme from observable physical realizations or phenotypic expression of memes, then no particular
memes are transmitted in social transmission. The memes are reconstructed.”82 While these criticisms
by Sperber and Kronfelder still allow for memetic replication, they greatly reduce the prevalence of
such replication, since only information that is directly copied without any inference would qualify
as a meme.
Yet Simon M. Reader, an ethologist, and Kevin N. Laland, an evolutionary biologist, contend
that although Sperber is correct in asserting that most memes are reconstructed rather than directly
copied as are genes, this does not disqualify them from consideration as replicators. The argue that
reconstructed memes can equally follow Darwinian evolutionary principles, that “they too can
replicate and evolve, and to eliminate them on arbitrary grounds at this early stage in the science of
memetics risks eliminating a large number, maybe even the majority, of interesting cases of social
transmission that may benefit from memetic analysis.”83 For Reader and Laland, what matters is not
the specific form in which transmission occurs, but rather the fidelity of that transmission. From this
they conclude, contra Blackmore, that memes do in fact occur in non-human animals.84

Memetics and Semiotics

80
Dawkins, “Foreword,” ix–xii.
81
Sperber, “An Objection to the Memetic Approach to Culture,” 171.
82
Kronfeldner, “Is Cultural Evolution Lamarckian?,” 505.
83
Simon M. Reader and Kevin N. Laland, “Do Animals Have Memes?,” Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of
Information Transmission 3, no. 2 (1998), http://cfpm.org/jom-emit/1999/vol3/reader_sm&laland_kn.html.
84
Reader and Laland.
20
 The final discussion and critique of memes I will examine are those from a semiotic
perspective. Semiotics is the study of sign processing, that is, the study of activities, conducts, and
processes that involve signs, their interpretation, and knowledge production. The semioticists Sebeok
and Danesi argue that a meme “is no more than Dawkins’ own term for what we have called a model
in [general semiotics].”85 Sebeok initially appreciated Dawkins’ replicators or ‘survival machines’
idea, and, in reference to Dawkins’ famous statement that the “gene is just a gene’s way of making
another gene,” he concluded that “all ‘survival machines’ — meaning people, animals, plants,
bacteria, and viruses — are only a sign’s way of making another sign.”86 The sociologist and
semiologist Erkki Kilpinen contends that Sebeok found Dawkins’ initial conception of memes to be
a sound idea precisely because it was Sebeok’s idea. According to Kilpinen, “[Sebeok] had been
talking about universal replication — in signs and models — some ten years before Dawkins.”87
Kilpinen concludes that memetics is largely redundant to semiotics. He states that meme
theorists, in their pursuit of a unifying memetic theory, “have discovered only the tip of the semiotic
iceberg. Their studies have addressed a part of semiotics, one that could be called, after Sebeok, …
anthroposemiotics [emphasis in original]. That field of study is only a subdomain of semiotics in its
entirety, and even within that subdomain the meme theorists have treated only one of its dimensions,
the interpretive dimension.”88 He observes that the disciplines of memetics and semiotics have largely
ignored each other, and so concludes that each must explicitly acknowledge the existence of the other.
Although Kilpinen is highly critical of the need for memetics, since, in his view, “memetics has not
so far revealed any secrets unknown to semiotics,” he nevertheless admits that memetics “should have
the benefit of doubt in view of future possibilities. One such avenue of research might be an approach
to culture by means of social practices instead of linguistic conventions, as has been the prevailing
view in cultural semiotics.”89
Although he does not mention the discipline by name, Michael R. Lissack, a business manager
and cybernetician, links memetics to semiotics in his article “The Redefinition of Memes: Ascribing
Meaning to an Empty Cliché.” He argues that memes should be redefined from being replicators to
being indexicals, the latter a term used within semiotics. Lissack, writing in 2004, contends that
memes, when conceived of as replicators, hold little to no explanatory or causal power. However,
says Lissack, if memes are thought of a “indexical tokens” or “catalytic indexicals,” they prove more

85
Sebeok and Danesi, The Forms of Meaning, 163–64.
86
Sebeok 1989 [1979], The Sign and Its Masters, xxix, quoted in Erkki Kilpinen, “Memes versus Signs: On the Use of
Meaning Concepts about Nature and Culture,” Semiotica 2008, no. 171 (2008): 231,
https://doi.org/10.1515/SEMI.2008.075.
87
Kilpinen, 231.
88
Kilpinen, 230.
89
Kilpinen, 230.
21
useful. Lissack explains indexicals as “words used to stand for a set of other words; that is, they
function like an index on the stock market. The Dow Jones Industrial average, for example, stands
for a basket of particular stocks and stands for many of us as an indicator of the market as a whole.”90
Kilpinen illustrates the indexical concept with the following example:
Think about a child with a high fever and red spots on her face. This suggests the conclusion
that the child has measles. This conclusion is not absolutely sure, but highly probable. The child’s
physiological condition, colloquially known as measles, is the dynamical object that produces those
indexical signs, i.e., red spots, on her face. As soon as she is healed, the red spots vanish; in fact their
absence is a reliable indicator about her getting well. The red spots are indexes of measles, they are
present in all measles cases, but they do not tell anything closer to an untutored person about those
biochemical processes that produce them.91

Lissack argues that the environment is the replicator, not the memes, and that memes are better
seen as carriers of meaning that can help convey changes in the meaning of a particular indexical.
Lissack illustrates the shift or breakage of indexical meaning with the following example: “when
Senator Jim Jeffords of Vermont switched his party affiliation from Republican to Independent (and
thereby altered control of the US Senate)[,] his speech of explanation was a discussion of his
perceived limits to the indexical ‘republican.’”92 The power of a meme is therefore measured not in
its replicating ability – which would, argues Lissack, be the result of environmental factors – but in
its ability to help bridge the meaning between an old context for an indexical and a new one. “The
successful meme is one whose indexical quality can bridge both the old context and the new, such
that the users of the meme token can dialogue about the meanings evoked by that token without
asserting incommensurability. The unsuccessful meme is one whose indexical quality cannot bridge
the gap between contexts and thus cannot make the transition to new context and new situation.”93 In
Lissack’s opinion, then, a meme stands in the transition point of changes in meaning, rather than
simple replication of meaning.
However, Lissack may not correctly understand Dawkins’ original conception of memes. The
communications scholar Bradley E. Wiggins and English scholar G. Bret Bowers argue that memes
as conceived by Dawkins are catalysts for jumps in cultural evolution.94 This would render Lissack’s
argument vain, since he and Dawkins are in agreement. Perhaps the issue is that Dawkins was
intentionally vague and therefore different and competing interpretations are taken of his claims.
Lissack’s definition of memes as indexicals and catalysts might be too limited, and the broader

90
Michael R. Lissack, “The Redefinition of Memes: Ascribing Meaning to an Empty Cliché.,” Journal of Memetics -
Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission 8, no. 1 (2004), http://cfpm.org/jom-emit/2004/vol8/lissack_mr.html.
91
Kilpinen, “Memes versus Signs,” 225.
92
Lissack, “The Redefinition of Memes: Ascribing Meaning to an Empty Cliché.”
93
Lissack.
94
Bradley E Wiggins and G Bret Bowers, “Memes as Genre: A Structurational Analysis of the Memescape,” New
Media & Society 17, no. 11 (December 1, 2015): 1889, https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444814535194.
22
understanding of memes as sign processes, which Sebeok, Danesi, and Kilpinen advocate, might be
more helpful. Nonetheless, Lissack takes a semiotic approach to memes, even if he does not state this
directly. Also noteworthy is Lissack’s contention that an unsuccessful meme is one that breaks
contextual meaning. As will be seen in later chapters, this argument about the centrality of contextual
meanint seems to be born out with how internet memes operate, even if it does not apply to memes
in general.
As my survey in this section of the thesis is intended to provide an overview of major
discussions pertaining to memetics rather than come to specific conclusions (which is beyond the
scope of my study), I do need to draw any definite conclusions to the debate. However, I believe that
the semiotic view of memes as signs and indexicals is useful for understanding the definition of
internet meme, since, as will be seen in the next chapter, that definition often varies from the more
traditional understanding of meme, since fidelity is often intentionally broken. Indeed, as will be seen
in following chapters, several scholars and students have examined internet memes from a semiotic
standpoint.

Conclusions
This first chapter has surveyed the history of memes and some of the major discussions
regarding them. In it, I have shown that memes are understood to be cultural replicators spread
through imitation, although the exact nature of them is highly debated. The dictionary definition,
which is promulgated by one of the foremost memeticists, Susan Blackmore, is that memes are
elements of culture replicated through non-genetic means, specifically replication. Many scholars are
critical of the meme concept for a variety of reasons – some because they believe that memes are
“Lamarckian,” some because memes, unlike genes, have not been empirically demonstrated as
material objects, and some because they find the concept largely unnecessary. Drawing my own
conclusions as to the validity of the respective arguments and what to do about them is beyond the
scope of this thesis. The purpose of this chapter was to ground my research in the conceptual history
of memes and understand how this pertains to the internet meme and to digital heritage more broadly.
I do not need to pick a specific side in the debate to conclude the following: Internet memes, a sub-
set of digital heritage, must be understood as not merely virtual objects. The virtual object is merely
a tangible expression of intangible cultural interactions through networked electronic mediums. Thus,
understanding memes as replicated cultural elements and behaviors will help inform the heritage
professional such as myself in understanding how to preserve internet memes as heritage. It is not
just the virtual tangible object to be preserved, but the information, the meanings, that produced it
through interactions between individuals. The interactions themselves are heritage.

23
 Additionally, the semiotic perspective on memes as signs and sign processes will help in
understanding the internet meme, perhaps more than the more traditional definition. If memes are
viewed as signs of some type – Lissack argues as catalytic indexicals, but perhaps this is too limited
a perspective – and not just replicators, it will account for the instances of deliberate deviation from
faithful copying which, as will be seen in the next chapter, is an essential component to many internet
memes.

Part 2: Internet Memes as Heritage

Chapter 2: The Internet Meme

In this chapter, I explain and define the internet meme, and provide the history of some
examples of various forms of internet memes.

Section 1: The Concept of Internet Meme and Internet Meme Definitions

The concept of internet meme evolved over time to mean something different from I call the
“classic” understanding of memes, although still related to it. The first reference of memes in the
context of internet usage was by Mike Godwin in a 1994 article for Wired, and he used it in the classic
sense of the term to describe his social experiment in memetics that he started in 1990. Godwin had
noticed that, by 1990, online discussion groups such as Usenet, the Well, misc.legal, “and on every
BBS [bulletin board system] that I frequented”, posters frequently accused the ideas expressed by
other poster’s as Hitler-like or Nazi-like.95 Godwin considered this an example of memetics in action,
and because he found most such accusations illogical and offensive, he attempted to create a counter-
meme: “Godwin's Law of Nazi Analogies: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a
comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.”96 He planted this “law” in every newgroup or
topic in which he encountered what he considered a gratuitous Nazi reference. He then noticed that
his “law” became a meme of its own – other users started to cite it, and corollaries were developed
(for example, “Sircar's Corollary: If the Usenet discussion touches on homosexuality or Heinlein,
Nazis or Hitler are mentioned within three days.”)97
Over time, the concept of internet meme a took on a slightly different and much narrower
concept of meme. Oxford English Dictionaries defines this meaning as “an image, video, piece of
text, etc., typically humorous in nature, that is copied and spread rapidly by Internet users, often with

95
Mike Godwin, “Meme, Counter-Meme,” Wired, October 1, 1994, https://www.wired.com/1994/10/godwin-if-2/.
96
Godwin.
97
Godwin.
24
slight variations.”98 Richard Dawkins points out that this version of the meme concept differs in that
it no longer always faithfully attempts to copy – deliberate alteration is often introduced.99 However,
he also asserts that “the meaning is not that far away from the original. It's anything that goes viral…
when anybody talks about something going viral on the internet, that is exactly what a meme is and
it looks as though the word has been appropriated for a subset of that.”100 The communications scholar
Bradley E. Wiggins and English scholar G. Bret Bowers concur with Dawkins that the internet meme
is a distinct entity from the meme as proposed by Dawkins. Rather than simple replicators, internet
memes function more as genres of internet discourse.101
Michele Knobel and Colin Lankshear, specialists in new literacies and new media, categorize
internet memes into two sub-groups: High fidelity static memes, which are memes replicated with
very little variation; and remixed memes, which are memes replicated by evolution, adaptation, or a
transformation of the original meme vehicle.102 For purposes of clarity, within this thesis I use the
term “internet meme” to refer to the second OED definition of meme – digital content, often in the
form of images, video, or short texts, copied and spread on the internet, often with intentional
alteration or variation. At times, I may distinguish between “true” memes – content simply copied
and shared, what Knobel and Lankshear call “high fidelity static memes” – and “alteration” memes
– content which is deliberately altered before sharing, what Knobel and Lankshear call “remixed
memes.”
My above definition of internet meme parallels with that given by Castaño Díaz and Carlos
Mauricio in “Defining and Characterizing the Concept of Internet Meme.” They define the internet
meme as “a unit of information (idea, concept or belief), which replicates by passing on via Internet
(e-mail, chat, forum, social networks, etc.) in the shape of a hyper-link, video, image, or phrase. It
can be passed on as an exact copy or can change and evolve.”103 The mutation to such memes may
be in meaning or structure, and can occur via chance, addition, or parity, and the form of the mutation
is not relevant. By “form” the authors refer to the “background,” characters, or scenery. It may vary
but preserves the meaning and structure of the original meme. The meme might be interactive, such
as a game, and might be related with creatively. The authors also identify criteria for the origin,

98
“Meme | Definition of Meme in English by Oxford Dictionaries,” Oxford Dictionaries | English. Accessed, March 19,
2019, https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/meme.
99
Saatchi & Saatchi, Just for Hits - Richard Dawkins (Canne: Saatchi & Saatchi, 2013),
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFn-ixX9edg; Solon, “Richard Dawkins on the Internet’s Hijacking of the Word
‘Meme.’”
100
Solon, “Richard Dawkins on the Internet’s Hijacking of the Word ‘Meme.’”
101
Wiggins and Bowers, “Memes as Genre,” 1888–90.
102
Michele Knobel and Colin Lankshear, “Memes and Affinities: Cultural Replication and Literacy Education” (Annual
Meeting of the National Reading Conference, Miami, 2005), 13.
103
Castaño Díaz and Carlos Mauricio, “Defining and Characterizing the Concept of Internet Meme,” CES Psicología 6,
no. 2 (December 2013): 97.
25
transmission, and spread of internet memes. In addition to originating through internet interaction,
the meme might be manufactured – for instance, as a marketing campaign – or emerge from an offline
event. The meme requires a carrier and social context, and spreads horizontally like a virus at a fast
and accelerating speed. Its mobility, storage, and reach are web-based, and its “goal” – here the
authors take a teleological approach and view the meme as an intentional entity – is to become popular
enough to be replicate within a group.104
Patrick Davison, a visual communications professor, provides a similar, but more specific
definition: “An Internet meme is a piece of culture, typically a joke, which gains influence through
online transmission.”105 Davison acknowledges that not all internet memes are jokes, but argues that
they spread rapidly in a manner analogous to offline jokes. Even so, I think that this definition is far
too limiting, as it over-emphasizes humor and fails to mention the probability of alteration. Davison
identifies three essential components to a meme: 1) the manifestation, the set of objects created by
the meme and its virtual archaeological record. 2) the behavior of a meme, the actions taken by a
person to service the meme and which produces the manifestations. 3) the ideal, the concept behind
the meme, which dictates the behavior which is then manifested. So long as at least one of these
components is perpetuated, says Davison, the meme lives on, even if adapted and mutated.106
Limor Shifman, a communications scholar, defines internet memes “as units of popular
culture that are circulated, imitated, and transformed by individual Internet users, creating a shared
cultural experience in the process.”107 Rather than looking at internet memes as “single ideas or
formulas that propagated well,” she proposes that they are “groups of content items that were created
with awareness of each other and share common characteristics.”108 Shifman isolates three
dimensions cultural items which can be imitated: content, form, and stance. “Content” refers to “a
specific text, referencing to both the ideas and the ideologies conveyed by it.” The physical
incarnation of the message is the “form,” which is perceived through senses. This includes visual and
audible dimensions specific to particular texts, “as well as more complex genre-related patterns
organizing them (such as lip-synch or animation).” A third dimension, “stance,” is the “information
memes convey about their own communication.”109

104
Díaz and Mauricio, 97–98.
105
Patrick Davison, “The Language of Internet Memes,” in The Social Media Reader, ed. Michael Mandiberg (New
York: New York University Press, 2012), 122, http://spring2016.veryinteractive.net/content/6-library/7-language-of-
internet-memes/language-of-internet-memes_michaelmandiberg.pdf.
106
Davison, 123.
107
Limor Shifman, “Memes in a Digital World: Reconciling with a Conceptual Troublemaker,” Journal of Computer-
Mediated Communication 18, no. 3 (April 1, 2013): 367, https://doi.org/10.1111/jcc4.12013.
108
Shifman, 367.
109
Shifman, 367.
26
 Notably absent from these definitions is an acknowledgement that internet memes do not
always remain confined to the virtual world. As mentioned in my thesis introduction, Erik Borglund
at the 2012 UNESCO Vancouver conference on digital heritage stressed that the dichotomy between
the digital and non-digital is not so clear, as often the digital and non-digital interact as digital/non-
digital heritage hybrids.110 Wiggins and Bower likewise note that “we may see memes, as we have
come to know them, appear in magazines, video games, children’s books, and films […]where we
enact memes or why it is done is susceptible to transformation.”111 The internet meme is a digitally-
entangled artifact rather than purely digital. It transcends virtual space into actual. If the term “virtual”
refers to the space where computers and networks store and share information and through which
users interact via electronics, the antonym “actual” can thus refer to the non-computer space.112 Both
worlds involve physical medium – the virtual world is supported by physical structures of computers,
cables, wiring, and other physical objects, with data etched into physical computer chips, disks, and
drives – and so “virtual” and “actual” more accurately describe the two inter-related worlds better
than “virtual” and “physical.”
I can exemplify how internet memes transcend the virtual with an illustration drawn from my
own personal experience, an experience which help inspire me to pursue this thesis topic in the first
place. One day in 2017 during my studies at Brandenburg University of Technology (alas, I do not
recollect the particular date at all), I was walking through the Altstadt of Cottbus and I observed a
Grumpy Cat sticker on a lamppost (see Grumpy Cat in Section 2 of this chapter). I noticed that this
internet meme transcended beyond the virtual – here was an actual, material manifestation of an
internet meme. Preservation of the Grumpy Cat internet meme would necessitate not merely
preservation of the digital, but preservation of material artifact such as this sticker I saw in Cottbus.
Based on this ability of internet memes to transcend the virtual, I would modify the OED definition
of internet meme to “an image, video, piece of text, etc., typically humorous in nature, that is copied
and spread rapidly by Internet users, often with slight variations, both on the Internet and, often, in
offline media and social interaction.”
Having explored the concept and definition of internet meme vs. “classic” meme, and before
I provide an overview of some notable examples of internet memes, I will provide a glossary of

110
Borglund, “Challenges to Capture the Hybrid Heritage: When Activities Take Place in Both Digital and Non-Digital
Environments.”
111
Wiggins and Bowers, “Memes as Genre,” 1895–96.
112
For more discussion on the definitions of the virtual the real, and the conceptualization of the virtual as an interactive
space, see Rob Shields, The Virtual (London; New York: Psychology Press, 2003) and Edward J. Malecki, “Real
People, Virtual Places, and the Spaces in Between,” Socio-Economic Planning Sciences, Digital Support Tools for
Smart Cities, 58 (June 1, 2017): 3–12, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.seps.2016.10.008.
27
important terms and definitions pertaining to internet memes which will be necessary for clarity going
forward.
A Meme Glossary
• Copypasta: slang for “copy-paste,” copypasta refers to any block of text that gets copied and
pasted over and over again online. It would include, but not be limited to, chain letters spread
online. I would consider copypasta an example of “true” replication as defined by Sperber and
Kronfeldner – the text is not merely reconstructed, but faithfully copied. According to Know
Your Meme, the term copypasta is thought to have originated around 2006 from the Anon
community on the message-board site 4chan. In September 2006, the parody-style wiki
Encyclopedia Dramatica published an entry on “copypasta.”113 Creepypasta is a genre of
copypasta that focuses on horror or unsettling stories and urban legands.114
• Dank memes: these are difficult to define. The term refers to viral media, in-jokes, and other
internet memes that have either become over-used clichés or are intentionally bizarre, and are
in either situation therefore humorous. Usage of the word “dank” originated as a slang term
for high quality marijuana, and the application to internet memes is synonymous with “cool,”
but with ironic or satirical intent.115
• Emoticons: Pictorial versions of facial expressions created through punctuation marks and
letters, the smiley emoticon “:)” the most ubiquitous. Originated as ASCII art, they are
intended to disambiguate the tone of online conversation by indicating emotion.116
• Emoji: The successor to emoticons. Unlike emoticons which are simply representational
marks, emoji are graphical images of facial expressions (like this 😊, compared to the smiley
in the above definition of emoticons), symbols, or objects and intended to convey emotions
or phrases in SMS and instant messaging.117

113
Know Your Meme Contributors, “Copypasta,” Know Your Meme, accessed April 18, 2019,
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/copypasta.
114
Jessica Roy, “Inside Creepypasta, the Internet Trend That Allegedly Spawned a Killer Meme,” Time, June 3, 2014,
http://time.com/2818192/creepypasta-copypasta-slender-man/.
115
Know Your Meme Contributors, “Dank Memes,” Know Your Meme, accessed April 18, 2019,
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/dank-memes; Annaliese Griffin, “‘Dank’ Is the New Umami,” Quartzy, March 9,
2018, https://qz.com/quartzy/1221995/dank-is-the-new-umami/; “Dank Meme - What Does Dank Meme Mean?,”
Everything After Z by Dictionary.Com (blog), accessed April 18, 2019, https://www.dictionary.com/e/slang/dank-
meme/; Ashley Hoffman, “Donald Trump Jr. Just Became a Dank Meme, Literally,” Time, February 2, 2018,
http://time.com/5130384/donald-trump-jr-dankness-tweet/.
116
Know Your Meme Contributors, “Emoticons,” Know Your Meme, accessed April 28, 2019,
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/emoticons; Megan Garber, “Today, the Emoticon Turns 30 :-),” The Atlantic,
September 19, 2012, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/09/today-the-emoticon-turns-30/262571/.
ASCII, a character encoding standard, stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, and ASCII art
is artistic works produced using ASCII symbols and characters.
117
Know Your Meme Contributors, “Emoji,” Know Your Meme, accessed April 28, 2019,
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/emoji; Arielle Pardes, “The Complete History of Emoji,” Wired, February 1, 2018,
https://www.wired.com/story/guide-emoji/.
28
 • GIF or gif: pronounced variously as “jif” or “gif,” a gif is a file format and standard set for
storing color images and short animations. GIF stands for Graphics Interchange Format. It is
used both as a verb and verb.118
• Hashtag: a word, acronym, or unspaced phrase preceded by a hash mark – #, also known as
the number or pound sign. It originated on Twitter in 2007 after it was suggested as a metadata
tag by the open source software advocate Chris Messina.119
• Image Macro: images captioned with a short message or catchphrase. In my experience, both
from observation and my own word usage, image macros are often incorrectly referred to as
“memes.” The term is attributed to the forum Something Awful in 2004, with a definition of
it provided by the user Eclipse on February 12 of that year. 120 Image Macros most often use
the Impact Font – this particular font became a meme (in the classic sense of the term) largely
because of its widespread distribution across word processors and other software in the 1990s
and because it contrasts well with an underlying image regardless of that image’s color
scheme.121 LOLcats are a genre of Image Macro, usually of humorous intent, that consist of
cat photos superimposed with text in English that is broken, misspelled, or both – a dialect
called “lolspeak.”122 Lolspeak also “includes unique verb forms (gotted, can haz), and queer
word reduplication (fastfastfast).”123
• Engrish: internet slang to describe English texts translated from East Asian languages such as
Chinese, Japanese, and Korean that are grammatically broken or esoteric after translation.

118
“Gif,” Dictionary.com, accessed April 18, 2019, https://www.dictionary.com/browse/gif; Alison Flood, “Gif Is
America’s Word of the Year? Now That’s What I Call an Omnishambles,” The Guardian, November 14, 2012, sec.
Books, https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2012/nov/14/gif-america-word-year-omnishambles.
119
“Definition of HASHTAG,” Merriam-Webster, accessed April 28, 2019, https://www.merriam-
webster.com/dictionary/hashtag; Angela Watercutter and Emma Grey Ellis, “Everything You Ever Wanted To Know
About Memes,” Wired, April 1, 2018, https://www.wired.com/story/guide-memes/; Ashley Parker, “Hashtags, a New
Way for Tweets: Cultural Studies,” The New York Times, June 10, 2011, sec. Fashion & Style,
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/12/fashion/hashtags-a-new-way-for-tweets-cultural-studies.html; Chris Messina,
“How Do You Feel about Using # (Pound) for Groups. As in #barcamp [Msg]?,” Tweet, @chrismessina (blog), August
23, 2007, https://twitter.com/chrismessina/status/223115412.
120
Know Your Meme Contributors, “Image Macros,” Know Your Meme, accessed April 18, 2019,
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/image-macros.
121
Phil Edwards, “The Reason Every Meme Uses That One Font,” Vox, July 26, 2015,
https://www.vox.com/2015/7/26/9036993/meme-font-impact.
122
Know Your Meme Contributors, “LOLcats,” Know Your Meme, accessed April 24, 2019,
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/lolcats; Know Your Meme Contributors, “Image Macros”; Aaron Rutkoff, “With
‘LOLcats’ Internet Fad, Anyone Can Get In on the Joke,” Wall Street Journal, August 25, 2007,
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB118798557326508182; Bisera Kostadinovska-Stojchevska and Elena Shalevska,
“Internet Memes and Their Socio-Linguistic Features,” European Journal of Literature, Language and Linguistics
Studies 2, no. 4 (November 20, 2018): 165–66.
123
Kostadinovska-Stojchevska and Shalevska, “Internet Memes and Their Socio-Linguistic Features,” 166.
29
 Although the term originated as Internet humor, it describes texts which are both online and
offline.124
• Memeing (or meming): the term “meme” used as a present participle or gerund. The first
known use was on May 3, 1996, in an online article by Matthew Aaron Taylor.125
• Meme Lord or Meme Master: internet slang term referring to someone with a strong passion
for internet memes. First known use was by the blogger Duffergeek on March 2, 2006.126
• Meme Magic: a hypothesized sorcerous or voodoo power of certain internet memes which
can transcend the virtual world and result in actual world consequences. The earliest uses of
the term in an occult sense, rather than simply to the spreading capacity of internet memes,
are traced to March 2015, when several online communities started identifying parallels
between the crash of Germanwings Flight 9525 and the plane scene in the movie The Dark
Knight Rises.127 This occult power of internet memes may stem from occult memetics, a
hypothesis that memetics can help occultists wield magical power.128
• Single-serving site: websites with a single page and dedicated domain name, with only a single
purpose. The earliest known example was Purple.com, launched in 1994, whose sole content
was a purple background (the website is now owned by a mattress company).129
• Snowclones: These are a type of phrasal template – phrase-long juxtapositions of words with
blank spaces which can be filled in. They typically are quotes from items of pop culture with
one or more words replaced to alter the meaning. For example, the phrase “I’m not a doctor,
but I play one on TV” – a line from numerous commercials in the 1980s – becomes “I'm not

124
Know Your Meme Contributors, “Engrish,” Know Your Meme, accessed April 18, 2019,
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/engrish.
125
Know Your Meme Contributors, “Memeing,” Know Your Meme, accessed April 18, 2019,
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/memeing; Matthew Aaron Taylor, “Fiction, AL, and the Memeing of Life,”
Telepolis, March 5, 1996, https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Fiction-AL-and-the-Memeing-of-Life-3445807.html.
126
Know Your Meme Contributors, “Meme Lord / Meme Master,” Know Your Meme, accessed April 18, 2019,
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/meme-lord-meme-master.
127
Know Your Meme Contributors, “Meme Magic,” Know Your Meme, accessed April 18, 2019,
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/meme-magic; Paul Spencer, “Trump’s Occult Online Supporters Believe ‘Meme
Magic’ Got Him Elected,” Motherboard (blog), November 18, 2016,
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/pgkx7g/trumps-occult-online-supporters-believe-pepe-meme-magic-got-
him-elected.
128
Spencer, “Trump’s Occult Online Supporters Believe ‘Meme Magic’ Got Him Elected”; Tarl Warwick, Occult
Memetics: Reality Manipulation (Scotts Valley: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2016); R. Kirk
Packwood, Memetic Magic: Manipulation of the Root Social Matrix and the Fabric of Reality (Seattle Washington:
Jaguar Temple Press, 2004). I am not sure whether this parallel between the "Meme Magic" term and the occult
memetics hypothesis is intentional or co-incidental. Perhaps it is both.
129
Know Your Meme Contributors, “Single-Serving Site,” Know Your Meme, accessed April 18, 2019,
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sites/single-serving-site.
30
 a(n) [insert profession], but I play one on TV.” The term was coined by the linguist Geoffrey
K. Pullum and economist Glen Whitman in the mid-2000s.130
• Troll and trolling: Trolls and trolling refer to individuals and behavior, typically manifested
online, that are intentionally disruptive, disparaging, inflammatory, antagonistic, or irrelevant,
for the sake of sowing discord or as a form of harassment.131
• Viral video or viral media: Media which metaphorically goes “viral.” This term traces back
to the “thought viruses” idea in memetics and references media, typically a video, that spreads
particularly rapidly on the internet. The exact criteria for determining whether or not content
has become popular enough and fast enough to be considered viral is not clear. However, it
typically infers at least a million views, often several million.132

Section 2: Examples of Internet Memes

Of course, as internet memes likely number in the millions, to provide even a fractional
overview of them is impossible. Rather, in this section, I provide examples of some popular internet
memes, in roughly chronological order, in order to illustrate their cultural impact and thus possible
need for preservation.
Internet memes go back as far as the origins of the internet itself, with many, if not most, of
the earliest versions falling under the classic definition of meme – they were directly imitated. One
of the earliest well-documented and highly popular memes was the use of emoticons, especially the
smiley – “:)” or “:-)” – and sad face – “:(” or “:-(”. Origination of this meme is attributed to a proposal
made by Scott Fahlman on September 19, 1982 at 11:44 am (DST) on a message board for the

130
Know Your Meme Contributors, “Snowclone,” Know Your Meme, accessed April 18, 2019,
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/snowclone; Geoffrey Pullum, “Language Log: Snowclones: Lexicographical
Dating to the Second,” Language Log (blog), January 16, 2004,
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000350.html; Glen Whitman, “Phrases for Lazy Writers in Kit
Form Are the New Clichés,” Agoraphilia: The Center for Blurbs in the Public Interest (blog), December 6, 2005,
http://agoraphilia.blogspot.com/2004/01/phrases-for-lazy-writers-in-kit-form.html; Arnold Zwicky, “Language Log:
Playing One 3,” Language Log (blog), October 16, 2005,
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002550.html; Paul McFedries, “Snowclone Is The New Cliché,”
IEEE Spectrum: Technology, Engineering, and Science News, February 1, 2008, https://spectrum.ieee.org/at-
work/education/snowclone-is-the-new-clich.
131
James Hanson, “Trolls and Their Impact on Social Media,” James Hanson (blog), accessed May 10, 2019,
https://unlcms.unl.edu/engineering/james-hanson/trolls-and-their-impact-social-media; “Troll Definition and Meaning,”
Collins English Dictionary, accessed May 10, 2019, https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/troll;
“Definition of TROLL,” Merriam-Webster, accessed May 10, 2019, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/troll;
“Troll,” Oxford Dictionaries | English, accessed May 10, 2019, https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/troll;
“Trolling,” Cambridge English Dictionary, accessed May 10, 2019,
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/trolling.
132
Solon, “Richard Dawkins on the Internet’s Hijacking of the Word ‘Meme’”; Elise Moreau, “What Does Going Viral
Online Really Mean?,” Lifewire, November 16, 2018, https://www.lifewire.com/what-does-it-mean-to-go-viral-
3486225; Megan O’Neill, “What Makes A Video ‘Viral’?,” May 9, 2011, https://www.adweek.com/digital/what-
makes-a-video-viral/; “What Is a Viral Video? - Definition from Techopedia,” Techopedia.com, accessed April 24,
2019, https://www.techopedia.com/definition/26863/viral-video.
31
Carnegie Mellon computer science department. These then were developed by internet users into
numerous other expressive forms, such as the wink face – “;)” or “;-)” – and, very crudely, the penis
– “8=D”.133 While the ASCII form suggested by Scott Fahlman in 1982 dominates the historical
narrative, the computer system PLATO had developed the use of emoticons nearly a decade prior.134
A little over a decade later, another early, massively popular meme came about: The Dancing
Baby, or Baby Cha-Cha-Cha. This manifested as a either a video or GIF of a 3-D baby doing the cha-
cha. The computer animators Michael Girard and Robert Lurye, employees of Autodesk, created a
short video of a 3-D baby doing cha-cha moves in order to demonstrate the potential of animation
technology of the time. Autodesk then sent the animation to other development and animation
companies. When the video arrived at LucasArts, Ron Lussier edited the original file and then sent it
to his coworkers. From there, it spread rapidly, and in late 1996 John Woodell, a web developer,
created a GIF version of the video (see figure 1). The meme soon took on various permutations and
adaptations. It eventually showed up in advertisements, on merchandise, and on television episodes.

Figure 1: A still image of the Dancing Baby, taken from a GIF version
of the meme as curated by Know Your Meme

In 2006, a decade after its original creation, the video was uploaded to YouTube, and in this version
a clip of the song “Hooked On a Feeling”, by the band Blue Swede, played in the background as the
baby danced. Over the course of 11 years, the video generated 3.3 million views and 1,300 comments.
Girard attributes the popularity to the animation’s unsettling nature. The baby looks almost human,

133
Garber, “Today, the Emoticon Turns 30”; Know Your Meme Contributors, “Emoticons”; Davison, “The Language
of Internet Memes,” 124; Erhan Aslan, “The Surprising Academic Origins of Memes,” The Conversation, February 12,
2018, http://theconversation.com/the-surprising-academic-origins-of-memes-90607; Linda Kata Börzsei, “Makes a
Meme Instead: A Concise History of Internet Memes” (Research paper, Utrecht University, 2012), 5–7,
https://www.scribd.com/document/116127875/Makes-a-Meme-Instead-A-Concise-History-of-Internet-Memes; “What
Does 8=D Mean?,” Everything After Z by Dictionary.Com (blog), accessed April 30, 2019,
https://www.dictionary.com/e/emoji/8d/.
134
Brian Dear, “PLATO History: PLATO Emoticons, Revisited,” September 19, 2012,
http://www.platohistory.org/blog/2012/09/plato-emoticons-revisited.html. The smiley as popularized by Fahlman was
in ASCII, whereas PLATO used a different encoding standard.
32
but is clearly not, thus eliciting revulsion from the viewer, a phenomenon known as the “uncanny
valley.”135
The late 1990s and early 2000s are a milestone in the development of internet memes, and
could be seen as the definitive emergence of internet memes as distinct from the broader concept of
memes and memetics. In 1998, internet users started sharing a GIF of the opening sequence to the
1992 port136 of the 1989 game Zero Wing. The GIF features the Engrish catchphrase “all your base
are belong to us” (a poor translation of “all your bases are now under our control”) and was shared
because of its unintended humor. Remixes, videos, and images evoking the phrase began to circulate
in various messaging forums and video hosting sites. In November 2000, a Photoshop thread began
on the forum Something Awful, where users uploaded various images – such as of street signs or T-
shirts - which were edited to contain the phrase, and from there the meme went even more viral.137
Another iconic and viral meme from this period was the Hamster Dance. In 1998, the
Canadian art student Deidre Lacarte, in a competition with a friend to see who could create a website
that would generate the most traffic, created a single-serving website through the then-popular
webhost GeoCities. The site consisted of a single-webpage that contained GIFs of cartoon hamsters
dancing to a nine-second audio clip (a sped-up version of the song “Whistle Stop” from the Disney
cartoon film Robin Hood). By the end of January 1999, the site had only eight hundred total views.
But then, inexplicably, Hamster Dance began to go viral, receiving up to 15,000 views a day. By the
end of June 1999, the site generated some 17 million views. In April, the band The Cuban Boys
sampled the audio clip from the site in their song "Cognoscenti vs. Intelligentsia" and released the
track as a single that December, attracting even more attention to the meme. Over the next ten years,
Hamster Dance was featured on numerous internet culture blogs. Unfortunately, with the collapse of
GeoCities as a webhost, the original site is no longer extant, but archived and mirror versions of the
site are accessible (this illustrates a way in which internet memes can be lost, and also how they can
be preserved).138

135
Know Your Meme Contributors, “Dancing Baby,” accessed April 30, 2019,
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/dancing-baby; Amy Hamer, “What Was the First Internet Meme?,” Curiosity.com,
November 11, 2017, https://curiosity.com/topics/what-was-the-first-internet-meme-curiosity/; Johanna Mayer, “The
Origin Of The Word ‘Meme,’” Science Friday (blog), September 25, 2018, https://www.sciencefriday.com/articles/the-
origin-of-the-word-meme/.
136
A “port” of a game is a conversion of a game from one platform to another, in this case an arcade game converted
for video game console.
137
Know Your Meme Contributors, “All Your Base Are Belong to Us,” Know Your Meme, accessed April 18, 2019,
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/all-your-base-are-belong-to-us; Börzsei, “Makes a Meme Instead,” 9–10.
138
Davison, “The Language of Internet Memes,” 125–26; Know Your Meme Contributors, “Hampster Dance,” Know
Your Meme, accessed April 18, 2019, https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/hampster-dance; Aslan, “The Surprising
Academic Origins of Memes.”
33
 A final exemplar of internet memes which began in the late 1990s are emojis, although the
emergence of these as a meme was much more gradual. In 1998, the Japanese artist Shigetaka Kurita
created 176 emojis for the 1999 release of the i-mode platform of the mobile carrier NTT DoCoMo,
in order to facilitate simple and succinct conversation. Kurita initially focused more on symbols rather
than faces, because the intent of DoCoMo was to convey information in new ways. By the mid-2000s,
the subscribers to i-mode reached over 40 million, and emoji use became equally widespread. Other
mobile carriers copied the idea, and emoji use exploded across Japan. In 2008, Apple took up the
meme and introduced emoji to the international market with the November 2008 release of the iPhone
firmware 2.2.
In 2010, Unicode accepted a proposal to include emoji in its encoding standard. From there,
the range of emojis continues to grow. Socio-political concerns such as which national flags are
included and excluded, which cuisines are featured and which are omitted, and which genders and
religions are represented continue to generate increasing number and diversity of emojis. There are
now shades of skin tone, gender-neutral emojis, emojis of disabled people, and emojis wearing
turbans or hijab. Emoji now are on the way to becoming a full digital language, if they are not already.
The original 176 emoji are now displayed in a permanent collection at the New York Museum of
Modern Art.139
Thus far, the timeline I have outlined from examples of specific memes has shown the gradual
development of the internet meme as a distinct concept. The mid-2000s loosely demarcate the point
at which the internet meme definition crystallized. Particularly, the mid-2000s saw the image macro
surge in popularity and come dominate popular understanding of the meme. As mentioned in the
previous section, I have often personally seen and heard the term “meme” used to describe the image
macro. I would contend that it is this particular format that the majority of the populace understand
the term “meme” to refer to.140
One of the first image macros to gain viral popularity was the One Does Not Simply
snowclone. The phrasal template for One Does Not Simply is taken from a line spoken by the
character Boromir in the 2001 film The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. The film
contains a scene in which a council debates what to do with the One Ring of the Dark Lord Sauron.
When Boromir hears a proposal from Elrond, the elven ruler of Rivendell (where the council takes
place), that the Ring must be destroyed in Mount Doom in Mordor, which is in the heart of Sauron’s
territory, he declares the following:

Pardes, “The Complete History of Emoji”; Know Your Meme Contributors, “Emoji.”
139

Perhaps some of this conflation is due to “meme” creation websites such as the Meme Generator or Make a Meme
140

websites, where users can create their own image macros.

34
 One does not simply walk into Mordor. Its black gates are guarded by more than just orcs.
There is evil there that does not sleep. The great eye is ever watchful. It is a barren wasteland, riddled
with fire, ash, and dust. The very air you breathe is a poisonous fume. Not with ten thousand men
could you do this. It is folly.

The first line is then used as a template to describe seemingly other impossible tasks – for
example, the title to my thesis declares that “one does not simply preserve internet memes”. The first
documented usage of the meme dates to January 16, 2004, when the user Linguica posted an image
macro in which the film character Boromir was edited into the driver’s seat of a car, with the text
reading “one does not simply drive into Mordor” (see figure 2). 141 Over a decade later, The
Independent declared the One Does Not Simply meme “one of the most popular going,” which it
attributed in a large part to internet meme creation sites. Indeed, so popular has the meme become
that Sean Bean, the actor who portrayed Boromir, has stated that it will “probably be my unintended
legacy.”142

Figure 2: The first documented instance of the One Does Not Simply internet meme

In 2006, another series of highly popular image macros began, those of Advice Dog and the
spin-off memes Advice Animals. These feature various animals, including people, used as stock

141
Know Your Meme Contributors, “One Does Not Simply Walk into Mordor,” Know Your Meme, accessed April 18,
2019, https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/one-does-not-simply-walk-into-mordor. Notably, this instance dates the
meme to at least nearly a full month before the first documented usage of the term “image macro,” since the latter term
is dated to February 12, 2004 (see the entry on image macros in the previous section to this chapter).
142
Christopher Hooton, “Sean Bean Acknowledges That ‘one Does Not Simply’ Meme Is His Legacy,” The
Independent, November 5, 2015, http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/sean-bean-acknowledges-
that-one-does-not-simply-meme-is-his-legacy-a6722251.html.
35
characters to give out the advice that comprises the caption text. The origins are traced to a forum
thread “Guide to Kissing” on The Mushroom Kingdom, a fan-site dedicated to the video game series
Mario. On September 7, 2006, as a follow-up to his advice of “Just do it, man.” that was posted on
September 4, the user TEM posted a picture of his dog’s face with a color-wheel as a background.
This photo soon generated captioned versions doling out advice, and the meme became known as
Advice Dog (see figure 3). On March 18, 2009, the website Memegenerator.com was launched, which
allowed anyone with access to the site the ability to custom-create image macros. Advice Dog memes
started to be produced en-masse, and this then spawned a broader category of meme, Advice Animals.
These memes peaked in the year 2010, although still continue to generate interest from internet
users.143

Figure 3: Example of an Advice Dog image macro, the meme which

spawned a larger category of meme, Advice Animals

Perhaps the most prolific and definitive viral internet memes are LOLcats. The origins of
LOLcats have not been satisfactorily determined. They are generally attributed to have come about
around the year 2005 or 2006, possibly through PHP and vBulletin message boards. They started to

143
Börzsei, “Makes a Meme Instead,” 15–17; Davison, “The Language of Internet Memes,” 127–30; Know Your Meme
Contributors, “Advice Dog,” Know Your Meme, accessed May 9, 2019, https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/advice-
dog; Know Your Meme Contributors, “Advice Animals,” Know Your Meme, accessed May 9, 2019,
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/advice-animals; “Guide to Kissing,” The Mushroom Kingdom, accessed May 9,
2019,
https://themushroomkingdom.net/board/index.php?PHPSESSID=vbnngi2781pjn53bhhdfr5jrq4&topic=9725.0;all.
36
become popular on the message board site 4chan, particularly through weekly Caturday posts. On
June 14, 2006, the domain name LOLcats.com was registered.144
However, a competing narrative argues that the cat memes which spawned LOLcats arose
slightly earlier, in 2003. In that year, a photo of a British shorthair cat, later known as Happy Cat due
to its supposedly happy expression, was used by a Russian cat food company. According to the
website Encyclopedia Dramatica and Oh Internet, which dedicate themselves to internet culture, this
photo was then shared in the same year on the Something Awful forums by a user known as FancyCat.
However, at the time of this writing, the researchers at Know Your Meme have not been able to
determine the accuracy of this claim. The earliest documented appearance of the cat on Something
Awful is dated to May 12, 2004, in an article by Reid “Frolixo” Paskiewicz.145
The photo of Happy Cat went viral after the blogger Eric Nakagawa, on January 11, 2007,
made a LOLcat of the image with the caption “I Can Has Cheezburger?” (see figure 4) and posted it
on a website, whose title quoted the LOLcat caption, that he and his girlfriend, Kari Unebasami, had
created. Each month, traffic to the I Can Has Cheezburger website doubled until it hit a peak in May
2007 with 1.5 million views a day. Nakagawa allowed users to view galleries of LOLcat images,
submit their own, and vote on their favorites. Subsequent Nakagawa’s creation of the site, the interest
in and popularity of LOLcats surged. On July 12, 2007, Time published an article on popularity of
the LOLcats, Business Week followed suit with a similar article a day later, and The Wall Street
Journal published an article on the subject on August 25, 2007. At that point, Nakagawa had quit his
previous job to manage the website full time, earning income through ad revenue. His site was then
generating some 500,000 views a day and receiving 500 daily LOLcat submissions. Nakagawa then
sold the website to Ben Huh, who built it into the multi-million-dollar media company Cheezburger
Network, later Cheezburger, Inc. Cheezburger then acquired other internet properties including FAIL
blog, Know Your Meme, and Memebase. In 2016, the company was sold to an undisclosed buyer,
who was subsequently announced to be Jacob Nizri, who incorporated the property into his newly
formed company Literally Media.146

144
Know Your Meme Contributors, “LOLcats”; Börzsei, “Makes a Meme Instead,” 16–17.
145
Know Your Meme Contributors, “Happy Cat,” Know Your Meme, accessed May 9, 2019,
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/happy-cat; Reid “Frolixo” Paskiewicz, “The Grocery Gauntlet,” Blog post,
Something Awful, May 12, 2004, http://www.somethingawful.com/news/the-grocery-gauntlet/.
146
Know Your Meme Contributors, “LOLcats”; Know Your Meme Contributors, “Happy Cat”; Know Your Meme
Contributors, “Cheezburger,” Know Your Meme, accessed May 9, 2019,
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sites/cheezburger; John Tozzi, “Bloggers Bring in the Big Bucks,” Business Week,
February 15, 2008,
https://web.archive.org/web/20080215230339/http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/jul2007/sb20070713_20
2390.htm; Rutkoff, “With ‘LOLcats’ Internet Fad, Anyone Can Get In on the Joke”; Lev Grossman, “Creating a Cute
Cat Frenzy,” Time, July 12, 2007, http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1642897,00.html; Börzsei,
“Makes a Meme Instead,” 17; Kathleen Davis, “20 Questions With Ben Huh, Founder of Cheezburger,” Entrepreneur,
August 20, 2013, https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/227945; Brad McCarty, “Ben Huh Talks Entrepreneurship and
37
 Figure 4: The most iconic LOLcat, "I Can Has
Cheezburger?"

The LOLcat phenomenon then spawned a second, more specific meme: Grumpy Cat. On
September 22, 2012, Bryan Bundesen, user name Cataliades, uploaded a photo of a picture of his
sister Tabatha Bundesen’s snowshoe cat, named Tardar Sauce, to Imgur and shared the photo on
Reddit. Due to feline dwarfism, the cat seemed to have a permanently grumpy expression. On the
Imgur, it received over 1 million views in 48 hours. On Reddit, users soon started to created edit
versions of the photo. Two more photos were uploaded the next day, and three video clips uploaded
to YouTube. On September 23, 2012, the Reddit user tjpainge (account now deleted) uploaded an
image macro of the cat, with the caption reading “I had fun once. It was awful” (see figure 5). From
there, Grumpy Cat rapidly became a LOLcat and internet celebrity. Unlike other internet memes
which might be confined strictly to the virtual world, the Grumpy Cat meme crossed over into the
actual. Her likeness is featured in art projects, a film, books, product endorsements, and various
merchandise (for instance, the Grumpy Cat sticker I saw on a lamppost in Cottbus). At the cat’s first

5 Minutes of Happiness,” The Next Web, May 13, 2011, https://thenextweb.com/media/2011/05/13/cheezburgers-ben-

huh-on-education-entrepreneurship-and-5-minutes-of-happiness/; Todd Bishop, “Cheezburger Joins Forces with Online
Comedy Rival EBaum’s World in Acquisition by Israeli Media Firm,” GeekWire, April 21, 2016,
https://www.geekwire.com/2016/cheezburger-joins-forces-with-comedy-rival-ebaums-world-in-acquisition-by-israeli-
company/; John Cook, “Cheezburger Online Comedy Sites Sold to Unnamed Buyer in Acquisition of Startup That
Made Funny Cat Pictures Famous,” GeekWire, February 22, 2016, https://www.geekwire.com/2016/internet-cat-
picture-site-cheezburger-sold-to/; Brier Dudley, “Cheezburger’s First Venture Financing Raises $30 Million,” The
Seattle Times, January 18, 2011, http://old.seattletimes.com/html/businesstechnology/2013971233_brier19.html.
38
public appearance, at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, in 2013, visitors came from
as far as Australia to catch a glimpse of the famous Grumpy Cat.147 On March 14, 2019, Tardar Sauce
died at age 7 from complications from a urinary tract infection. News of her death made international
headlines.148

Figure 5: The first documented LOLcat of

Grumpy Cat

Another meme which originated in the mid-2000s is Rickrolling. The meme is a practical joke
and consists of a bait-and-switch, typically manifested as a disguised weblink which directs the user
to Rick Astley performing his 1987 hit song “Never Gonna Give You Up.” Other variants that I have
personally witnessed include attempts to trick the user into reading the title of the song, or even, in
an example of an internet meme transcending the virtual world into the actual, playing a song through
speakers and then switching the playback to “Never Gonna Give You Up.” The origins of this meme
are as a development off of a previous bait-and-switch meme on the 4chan message boards. The
earlier meme was known as a “duckroll,” and consisted of an external link with a sensational title but
that in actuality directs the user to an image of a duck with rollers. Around May 2007, a user on /v/,

147
Know Your Meme Contributors, “Grumpy Cat,” Know Your Meme, accessed May 9, 2019,
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/grumpy-cat; Cataliades, “Meet Grumpy Cat,” Reddit, September 22, 2012,
https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/10bu17/meet_grumpy_cat/; Lisa Kocay, “Meet the Most Influential Pets:
Grumpy Cat, Doug the Pug and More,” Forbes, July 31, 2017,
https://www.forbes.com/sites/lisakocay/2017/07/31/meet-the-most-influential-pets-grumpy-cat-doug-the-pug-and-
more/; Brandon Griggs, “The Unlikely Star of SXSW: Grumpy Cat,” CNN, March 11, 2013,
https://www.cnn.com/2013/03/10/tech/web/grumpy-cat-sxsw/index.html; Alyson Shontell, “This 29-Year-Old Was A
Waitress — Then She Got A Cat With Dwarfism, Quit Her Job, And Became A Multi-Millionaire,” Business Insider,
December 8, 2014, https://www.businessinsider.com/meet-grumpy-cats-owner-tabetha-bundesen-2014-12.
148
Angela Watercutter, “Grumpy Cat’s Death Marks the End of the Joyful Internet,” Wired, May 17, 2019,
https://www.wired.com/story/grumpy-cat-obit/; “Internet Legend Grumpy Cat Dies,” May 17, 2019, sec. US & Canada,
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-48308638; Daniel Victor, “Grumpy Cat, Internet Celebrity With a
Piercing Look of Contempt, Is Dead at 7,” The New York Times, May 20, 2019, sec. Business,
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/17/business/media/grumpy-cat-dead.html.
39
a board dedicated to video games, posted a link to Rick Astley’s music video disguised as a sneak
preview to the then-highly anticipated game Grand Theft Auto IV. On May 15, 2007, a video entitled
“RickRoll’D” was uploaded to YouTube.149 The joke spread rapidly, and eventually Astley himself
joined in. During the Macy’s Parade in November 2008, Astley surprised viewers when he ran in
front of the Cartoon Network float and performed the song. 150 In 2011, the official Twitter account
for the United States White House, in response to criticisms that the correspondence briefing from
that day was not as entertaining as the previous day’s, posted a link to the song. 151 By 2014, the
“RickRoll’D” video had acquired over 70 million views, and as of the time of this writing, May 2019,
the official music video from VEVO, uploaded on October 24, 2009, has over 558 million views.152
Moving into the 2010s, one especially prolific meme is the viral video “Gangnam Style”, by
the K-pop musician Psy. The video features numerous absurd, unexpected, and ridiculous scenes and
dance sequences. Of particular appeal is the “horse-riding dance,” a dance invented by Psy which
combine shuffle-dancing and hand movements and resembles a horse-back rider’s posture (see figure
6). Unlike the previous example of Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up,” which went viral due
to it being the punchline of a joke, “Gangnam Style” went viral on YouTube due its own
characteristics. The video was uploaded on July 15, 2012, the same date as the accompanying single
was released. The song immediately charted within South Korea, and by the third week of July the
music video went viral internationally. By December 21, 2012, the video reached 1 billion views, a
first for any YouTube video. On May 31, 2014, the video became the first to reach 2 billion views.
On December 1, 2014, the view-count exceeded the memory allotted by YouTube for view-counts,
requiring a fix from the site. The video also spawned numerous image macros, remixes, reaction
videos, and other memes, and United States President Barack Obama referenced the video in his 2013
remarks during a joint press conference held with South Korean President Park Geun-hye.153

149
Know Your Meme Contributors, “Rickroll,” Know Your Meme, accessed May 9, 2019,
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/rickroll; “What Does Rickrolling Mean?,” Everything After Z by Dictionary.Com
(blog), accessed May 9, 2019, https://www.dictionary.com/e/slang/rickrolling/; “What Is Rickrolling?,”
Techopedia.com, accessed May 9, 2019, https://www.techopedia.com/definition/13185/rickrolling.
150
Matthew Moore, “Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade: Rick Astley Performs His Own Rickroll,” The Telegraph,
November 28, 2008, sec. News, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/3534073/Macys-
Thanksgiving-Day-parade-Rick-Astley-performs-his-own-Rickroll.html.
151
“What Does Rickrolling Mean?”
152
Marc Schneider, “YouTube Blocks Original RickRoll Video,” Billboard, July 18, 2014,
https://www.billboard.com/articles/business/digital-and-mobile/6165313/youtube-blocks-original-rickroll-video; Simon
West, Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up, 1987, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ; Dante
D’Orazio, “The ‘original’ Rickroll Video Has Disappeared from YouTube,” The Verge, July 19, 2014,
https://www.theverge.com/2014/7/19/5918645/the-original-rickroll-video-has-disappeared-from-youtube.
153
Know Your Meme Contributors, “Gangnam Style,” Know Your Meme, accessed May 10, 2019,
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/gangnam-style; William Gruger, “PSY’s ‘Gangnam Style’ Video Hits 1 Billion
Views, Unprecedented Milestone,” Billboard, December 21, 2012,
https://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/news/1483733/psys-gangnam-style-video-hits-1-billion-views-unprecedented-
milestone; Office of the Press Secretary, “Remarks by President Obama and President Park of South Korea in a Joint
40
 Figure 6: Still image from "Gangnam Style," featuring the
massively popular "horse-riding dance"

A final example of a highly popular meme, before I conclude this chapter, is “Distracted
Boyfriend,” which emerged in 2017. This particular meme exemplifies the Object Labeling trend that
is popular for memes in the late 2010s. Object Labeling or Label Memes involve(s) image macros
that label the subjects of a specific image in such a way as to generate humorous interpretations of
the picture.154 This particular meme is based on a stock photo by the Spanish photographer Antonio
Guillem which depicts a man walking down the street with a women who is presumably his significant
other but with his head swiveled back to ogle a woman walking in the other direction. The presumed
significant other bears a shocked and offended expression. While many media reports attributed the
first instance of the meme to a February 23, 2017 Instagram post by user @_dekhbai, with the caption
“Tag That Friend / Who Falls in Love Every Month”, the earliest documented instance of “Distracted
Boyfriend” is a January 30, 2017, Facebook post by the Facebook page Prog Düşmanlarına Verilen
Müthiş Cevaplar, and identifies “Phil Collins” ogling “pop” to the exasperation of “prog.” However,
the creator of this meme claims inspiration from a post made earlier the same day on the political
Facebook page “Siyasettin.” An especially influential version of “Distracted Boyfriend” was an
August 19, 2017, post on Twitter by user @n1m161, which depicts “The Youth” longing for
“Socialism” to the chagrin of “Capitalism” (see figure 7). 155 The “Distracted Boyfriend” meme has

Press Conference,” The White House, May 7, 2013, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-

office/2013/05/07/remarks-president-obama-and-president-park-south-korea-joint-press-confe.
154
Heather Schwedel, “Thanks to the Distracted Boyfriend, We’re Living in a Golden Age of ‘Object Labeling’
Memes,” Slate Magazine, March 22, 2018, https://slate.com/technology/2018/03/memes-are-object-labeled-now.html;
Know Your Meme Contributors, “Object Labeling,” Know Your Meme, accessed May 10, 2019,
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/object-labeling.
155
Know Your Meme Contributors, “Distracted Boyfriend,” Know Your Meme, accessed May 10, 2019,
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/distracted-boyfriend; Omar Essam, “Pic.Twitter.Com/UeIeiQnFrt,” Tweet,
@OmarEssamLHC (blog), August 19, 2017,
41
also transcended the virtual into the actual in various ways. For instance, in political protests, as can
be seen in figure 8.156

Figure 7: An example of the "Distracted Boyfriend" meme

Figure 8: The "Distracted Boyfriend" meme used during a political protest in the actual world

Conclusions
The first section of this chapter examined the emergence and definition of the internet meme
and defined terms pertaining to internet memes that will be used in this thesis. In the second section,
I highlighted some particular memes of note. Again, the memes discussed are only an extremely small
sample of the total memes. Their inclusion was to demonstrate the mass popularity of internet memes,

https://twitter.com/OmarEssamLHC/status/898878505672466432/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweet
embed%7Ctwterm%5E898878505672466432&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vox.com%2Fculture%2F2017%2F8%
2F25%2F16200526%2Fdistracted-boyfriend-other-woman-stock-photo-meme; Schwedel, “Thanks to the Distracted
Boyfriend, We’re Living in a Golden Age of ‘Object Labeling’ Memes”; “On the Origins of the Man Checking out
Another Woman Meme; or, Please Stop Saying It Originates from That Instagram Post,” Meme Documentation (blog),
August 25, 2017, https://memedocumentation.tumblr.com/post/164625266690/on-the-origins-of-the-man-checking-out-
another; Brett Molina, “The ‘disloyal Man’ Meme, Explained,” USA TODAY, August 25, 2017,
https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2017/08/25/disloyal-man-meme-explained/600822001/; Know Your
Meme Contributors, “Object Labeling”; Essam, “Pic.Twitter.Com/UeIeiQnFrt”; Brian Barrett, “The ‘Distracted
Boyfriend’ Meme’s Photographer Explains All,” Wired, August 28, 2017, https://www.wired.com/story/distracted-
boyfriend-meme-photographer-interview/.
156
Rachel Handler, “Great Sign My Little Sister Sent Me from Today’s
#nationalschoolwalkoutpic.Twitter.Com/I0WqRMdaDF,” Tweet, @rachel_handler (blog), March 14, 2018,
https://twitter.com/rachel_handler/status/973950091974324224.
42
how quickly they can rise to fame and influence, and how they often spawn further memes, as well
as illustrate some of the categories of memes and the eras in which they have flourished. They can
wield significant social impact. They can define the legacy of an actor, as with Sean Bean and the
One Does Not Simply meme. They can popularize the work of an artist, as in the case of Rickrolling,
or result from the creative success of an artist, as was the case for “Gangnam Style” by Psy. They can
result in financial success, even media empires, as with Grumpy Cat and “I Can Has Cheezburger?,”
respectively. They can even evolve into a language, as with emojis. Internet memes define much of
the life of 21st century citizens. The following chapter will explore how digital communities form
through and around internet memes, and the cultural influence that this exerts on human society.

Chapter 3: Internet Meme Communities

The previous chapter defined, and explored the emergence of, the concept of internet memes.
It then illustrated that concept with a small sampling of some particularly notable internet memes. A
central contention to my thesis is that internet memes such as those given are a form of digital
heritage. This chapter investigates how internet memes form community and provide group identity,
as well as how these communities wield memes as tools for social and political negotiations both in
the virtual and actual world. It also provides some examples of memes which have produced digital
cultures that have transcended the virtual into the actual world, fostering community identity and
affecting powerful societal change.

Section 1: Examples of Communal Formation Through Internet Memes

In this section, I examine a few internet memes and meme-based communities in order to
illustrate their social and political power. The literature scholars Jérémie Pelletier-Gagnon and Axel
Pérez Trujillo Diniz state that “since the beginning of the 21st century, Internet memes have shifted
from being exclusively dedicated to absurd and comical content, to commenting on political events.
Often disregarded as nonsensical imagery by mainstream media, we cannot deny their role as
foundational blocks of Internet culture.”157 The communities which form around memes can cross
traditional geographic boundaries and even language barriers, but they consist primarily of particular
age group. The linguists Bisera Kostadinovska-Stojchevska and Elena Shalevska explain that
“Numerous studies conducted in recent years show that memes are generally used by one specific
age-group: teenagers to 20-something millennials.”158 That this age group predominates is attributed
to their having grown up with access to the internet and thus deep familiarity with digitally networked

157
Jérémie Pelletier-Gagnon and Axel Pérez Trujillo Diniz, “Colonizing Pepe: Internet Memes as Cyberplaces,” Space
and Culture, June 14, 2018, 1206331218776188, https://doi.org/10.1177/1206331218776188.
158
Kostadinovska-Stojchevska and Shalevska, “Internet Memes and Their Socio-Linguistic Features,” 162.
43
social interaction.159 This has resulted in a world-wide, transnational shared experience among
members of this age demographic. “The youth worldwide shares interests, hobbies, problems,
everyday-life similarities etc. They, in a way, speak the same language. They generally listen to a
certain type of music, watch the same popular TV-shows, reality shows and movies, read much of
the same types of books, and follow similar artists, politicians, photographers, Instagram influencers
and celebrities. Thus, they understand each other and they understand each other’s memes.”160
Internet memes constitute inextricable patterns to the social experience of the world’s youth. They
contribute to the heritage of these generations, and future memories of the now-recent and -present
generations must account for the import of internet memes to these generations’ social relations,
identity, and memories.
The first example of community formation through and around internet memes is the case of
ROFLCon. ROFLCon was a biennial internet culture convention that took place in 2008, 2010, and
2012. The convention featured various internet celebrities, industry figures, and academics. The
convention was founded in 2008 by the Harvard University undergraduate students Christina Xu and
Tim Hwang. The name “ROFLCon” was taken from the web acronym ROFL, which stands for
Rolling On the Floor Laughing. Topics were diverse. Some panels discussed amusing and
lighthearted topics such as asking the actor from the Old Spice Guy commercials which scent he uses,
but others tackled serious socio-political issues such as internet censorship, intellectual property, and
the use of memes in the Syrian revolution.161 A piece in The New York Times noted how Hwang
discovered that convention allowed people to bond over shared yet obscure internet experiences.
“There was something curiously powerful about hundreds of strangers gathering in physical space to
bond over a shared Internet obsession that most people had never heard of. ‘Wow, this is a culture in
a real sense,’ he recalls thinking. ‘It’s not just people fooling around online.’”162
The capacity of internet memes to form community and effect social change goes far beyond
the mere bringing together of internet culture enthusiasts at a convention. One example of the potency
of internet memes is the community formation and social transformation wrought by the #MeToo

159
Kostadinovska-Stojchevska and Shalevska, 162–63.
160
Kostadinovska-Stojchevska and Shalevska, 163.
161
Know Your Meme Contributors, “ROFLCon,” accessed May 9, 2019,
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/roflcon; Kenny Soto, “Internet Memes Invade MIT: ROFLCon 2012,” The
Next Great Generation (blog), May 7, 2012,
http://archive.boston.com/lifestyle/blogs/thenextgreatgeneration/2012/05/internet_memes_invade_mit_rofl.html; Kasia
Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg, “Memes Are People Too: Meet the Viral-Video Stars of ROFLCon,” The Atlantic,
accessed May 9, 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/05/memes-are-people-too-meet-the-viral-
video-stars-of-roflcon/467877/; Jenna Wortham, “ROFLCon: It’s Not Easy Being Memes,” Wired, April 25, 2008,
https://www.wired.com/2008/04/its-hard-out-he/.
162
Rob Walker, “Taking Web Humor Seriously, Sort Of,” The New York Times, July 16, 2010, sec. Magazine,
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/18/magazine/18ROFL-t.html.
44
hashtag. On October 15th, 2017, in the wake of the sexual assault allegations against the film producer
Harvey Weinstein, the actress Alyssa Milano posted a note on Twitter asking her followers to reply
to her Tweet with the phrase “Me Too” if they had been sexually assaulted.163 Her intent was to draw
attention to the prevalence of sexual assault. Milano received 32,000 replies in 24 hours, and “Me
Too” quickly took on the form of the hashtag #MeToo. This came to symbolize fourth wave
feminism’s effort to address sexual assault.164 The “Me Too” movement itself was started over a
decade earlier than Milano’s tweet, in 2006 by the activist Tarana Burke, a black woman who started
the movement to address the concerns of black women in particular. That Milano, a white woman,
came to the forefront of a movement started by a black woman primarily for black women without
credit ignited a conversation about white dominance of feminism to the detriment of black voices.165
Milano herself followed up her initial “Me Too” tweet the following day with an acknowledgement
of the earlier efforts started by Burke.166
#MeToo led to other feminist hashtags, such as #YesAllWomen (which emerged after a
deadly shooting by the Elliot Rodger, who had expressed online hateful sentiment against women for
years prior the shooting), #BringBackOurGirls (in response to Boko Haram kidnapping over 300 girls
in Nigeria), and #IDidThat and #HowIWillChange (admissions by men of past sexual misconduct
against women).167 This usage of Twitter hashtags has become known as its movement within
feminism – hashtag feminism. Unfortunately, this and other forms of internet activism also has often
met with trolling.168 #MeToo crossed international boundaries: It linked the feminist movements in

163
Know Your Meme Contributors, “#MeToo,” Know Your Meme, accessed May 13, 2019,
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/metoo; Alyssa Milano, “If You’ve Been Sexually Harassed or Assaulted Write ‘Me
Too’ as a Reply to This Tweet.,” Tweet, @alyssa_milano (blog), October 15, 2017,
https://twitter.com/alyssa_milano/status/919659438700670976?lang=en.
164
Know Your Meme Contributors, “#MeToo”; Nadia Khomami, “#MeToo: How a Hashtag Became a Rallying Cry
against Sexual Harassment,” The Guardian, October 20, 2017, sec. World news,
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/20/women-worldwide-use-hashtag-metoo-against-sexual-harassment;
Audrey Carlsen et al., “#MeToo Brought Down 201 Powerful Men. Nearly Half of Their Replacements Are Women.,”
The New York Times, October 23, 2018, sec. U.S., https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/23/us/metoo-
replacements.html; Zacharek Stephanie, Dockterman Eliana, and Haley Sweetland Edwards, “TIME Person of the Year
2017: The Silence Breakers,” Time, 2017, http://time.com/time-person-of-the-year-2017-silence-breakers/; Edward
Felsenthal, “Why the Silence Breakers Are TIME’s Person of the Year 2017,” Time, 2017, http://time.com/time-person-
of-the-year-2017-silence-breakers-choice/; The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Feminism: The Fourth Wave,”
Britannica Presents 100 Women Trailblazers, accessed May 16, 2019, https://www.britannica.com/topic/feminism.
165
Zahara Hill, “A Black Woman Created the ‘Me Too’ Campaign Against Sexual Assault 10 Years Ago,” Ebony,
October 18, 2017, https://www.ebony.com/news/black-woman-me-too-movement-tarana-burke-alyssa-milano/; Jackie
Strause, “Tarana Burke Responds to Asia Argento Report: ‘There Is No Model Survivor,’” The Hollywood Reporter,
August 20, 2018, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/me-founder-tarana-burke-responds-asia-argento-report-
1135904; Khomami, “#MeToo”; Know Your Meme Contributors, “#MeToo.”
166
Alyssa Milano, “I Was Just Made Aware of an Earlier #MeToo Movement, and the Origin Story Is Equal Parts
Heartbreaking and Inspiring,” Tweet, @Alyssa_Milano (blog), October 16, 2017,
https://twitter.com/Alyssa_Milano/status/920067975016624128?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctw
gr%5Etweet.
167
Kitsy Dixon, “Feminist Online Identity: Analyzing the Presence of Hashtag Feminism,” Journal of Arts and
Humanities 3, no. 7 (August 3, 2014): 35, https://doi.org/10.18533/journal.v3i7.509; Khomami, “#MeToo.”
168
Dixon, “Feminist Online Identity.”
45
India and China into a global effort, and has been used over millions of times in at least 85
countries.169 A year after Milano’s tweet, The New York Times reviewed the impact that the efforts
against sexual assault that #MeToo has come to represent had wrought. Since the publication of
allegations against Weinstein was published on October 5, 2017, until the publication of the New
York Times report updated on October 29, 2018, 201 high-profile men lost their jobs due to public
allegations of sexual assault. Of the 124 replacement individuals, 54 were women, nearly half of the
positions filled.170 #MeToo not only brought together victims of sexual assault into shared
community, it wielded great transformative social power and affected change in the actual world.
A second example of the role that internet memes can play in communal formation and social
change is the use of internet memes in the Arab Spring. On December 17, 2010, the Tunisian street
vendor Tarek al-Tayeb Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in protest of harassment by government
authorities.171 This sparked unrest and revolution first in Tunisia and then throughout the Arab World
in what became known as the Arab Spring. Key to the protests and demonstrations was the use of
social media to organize and communicate. Although Internet access varied from country to country,
and many governments started shutting down internet access to try and disrupt the protests and
revolutionary elements, social media and memes still contributed greatly to the upheaval. Hashtags
allowed users to organize and foment resistance, as well as provide commentary. Various image
macros also provided commentary on the national and regional socio-political turmoil.172 Some
memes were humorous, such as #SalafistMovies (a pan-Arab hashtag which satirized Salafi political
factions), “The Guy Behind Omar Suleiman” (an Egyptian referring to the anonymous and stern-
faced man standing behind Omar Suleiman during a television appearance, see figure 9), or
#EpicLibyanMan (a Libyan hashtag based on a photo of the Gaddafi supporter Musa Ibrahim holding

169
Policy Forum, “China’s Fourth Wave of Feminism: Despite Censorship, #MeToo Perseveres,” The News Lens
International Edition, January 18, 2019, https://international.thenewslens.com/article/112272; Alka Kurian, “#MeToo
Campaign Brings the Rise of ‘Fourth-Wave’ Feminism in India,” The Wire, February 2, 2018,
https://thewire.in/gender/metoo-campaign-brings-the-rise-of-fourth-wave-feminism-in-india; Felsenthal, “Why the
Silence Breakers Are TIME’s Person of the Year 2017.”
170
Carlsen et al., “#MeToo Brought Down 201 Powerful Men. Nearly Half of Their Replacements Are Women.”
171
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica and Noah Tesch, “Mohamed Bouazizi | Tunisian Street Vendor and
Protester,” Encyclopedia Britannica, accessed May 20, 2019, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Mohamed-
Bouazizi.
172
Know Your Meme Contributors, “The Arab Spring,” Know Your Meme, accessed April 30, 2019,
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/the-arab-spring; Carol Huang, “Facebook and Twitter Key to Arab Spring
Uprisings: Report,” The National, June 6, 2011, https://www.thenational.ae/uae/facebook-and-twitter-key-to-arab-
spring-uprisings-report-1.428773; Emanuelle Degli Esposti, “The New Memes of the Egyptian Revolution,” The Arab
Review (blog), July 3, 2013, https://www.thearabreview.org/egyptian-revolution-30-jun/; Jessi Hempel, “Social Media
Made the Arab Spring, But Couldn’t Save It,” Wired, January 26, 2016, https://www.wired.com/2016/01/social-media-
made-the-arab-spring-but-couldnt-save-it/; Wafa Abu Hatab, “The Arab Spring: A New Era of Humor Consumption
and Production,” International Journal of English Linguistics 6, no. 3 (May 26, 2016): p70,
https://doi.org/10.5539/ijel.v6n3p70; Ekaterina Stepanova, “The Role of Information Communication Technologies in
the ‘Arab Spring,’” PONARS Eurasia, PONARS Eurasia Policy Memo, no. 159 (May 2011): 6.
46
an AK47, see figure 10). Some took a more serious turn, such as #WhenAssadFalls (used by Syrian
opposition members and their supporters to discuss their hopes and fears about what would come
after should the Assad regime be deposed).173 While the outcomes of the Arab Spring and long-term
consequences for the countries, governments, and populace involved vary dramatically, what is clear
is the importance of memes as part of the formation of social factions and communities.

Figure 9: A version of "The Guy Behind Omar Suleiman" meme

Figure 10: Example of the #EpicLibyanMan meme

173
Jillian C. York, “Middle East Memes: A Guide,” The Guardian, April 20, 2012, sec. Opinion,
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/apr/20/middle-east-memes-guide.
47
 Another example of internet memes effecting political and social change is the usage of
memes by right, alt-right, and far-right agitators in the 2016 United States presidential election. This
is considered a turning point in the usage of internet memes and how they are viewed. Prior to the
election, internet memes were mostly viewed as harmless, at least in the United States and Western
society. The victory of Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton is attributed in part to widespread
memeing by Trump supporters. Opponents of Trump thus view the outcome as negative (both because
of his victory and because of what it symbolizes, as will be discussed below), and regardless of
whether one opposed or supported Trump, that memeing influenced the outcome of the United States
election indicated that users can wield internet memes to powerful effect. They are not simply digital
toys.
While internet users of a wide variety of political persuasions used memes to support their
favored candidates, the memeing which drew the most attention, and arguably proved most effective
at achieving the victory of the desired candidate, was the memeing by the alt-right, “alt-light,” and
associated political factions and Trump supporters. While the alt-right encompasses a wide variety of
sometime quite disparate right-wing views, it is considered, including by many adherents, to be a
resurgence of white supremacist, white nationalist, fascist, neo-Nazi, neo-Confederate, and other
related far-right political movements. The term “alt-light” is applied to similar right-wing proponents
who sometimes argue against alt-righters. They allegedly reject the overt racist and white nationalist
statements by the alt-right and prefer nationalism over an ethno-state. Both movements
overwhelmingly favored Donald Trump for the United States presidency.174
What brought together the alt-right, alt-light, and many similarly aligned Trump supporters
was use of social media platforms, particularly 4chan, Reddit, and Twitter, to communicate. They
even developed their own online dialects.175 In the 2016 election (campaigning for which started in
2015), Trump supporters relied on heavily on trolling and memeing in order to disrupt political
opposition and steer online public discourse in favor of Donald Trump. Many of the memes featured
racist, misogynist, and inflammatory messages. Of the great multitude of memes created and shared,

174
“Explained: Alt-Right, Alt-Light and Militias in the US,” Al Jazeera, October 13, 2017,
https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2017/09/explained-alt-alt-light-militias-170924084455057.html; J. M.
Berger, “Trump Is the Glue That Binds the Far Right,” The Atlantic, October 29, 2018,
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/trump-alt-right-twitter/574219/; Nikhil Sonnad and Tim Squirrell,
“The Alt-Right Is Creating Its Own Dialect. Here’s the Dictionary,” Quartz, October 30, 2017,
https://qz.com/1092037/the-alt-right-is-creating-its-own-dialect-heres-a-complete-guide/.
175
Berger, “Trump Is the Glue That Binds the Far Right”; Sonnad and Squirrell, “The Alt-Right Is Creating Its Own
Dialect. Here’s the Dictionary”; Ryan M. Milner, “FCJ-156 Hacking the Social: Internet Memes, Identity Antagonism,
and the Logic of Lulz,” ed. Jason Wilson, Glen Fuller, and Christian McCrea, The Fibreculture Journal, no. 22 (2013):
62–92.
48
the one which came to symbolize support for Trump as well as sympathy or allegiance to the alt-right
and alt-light was Pepe the Frog.
Pepe the Frog was a character created in 2005 by Matt Furie for his web-comic Boy’s Club.
Memes based on Pepe soon became popular on 4chan, 8chan, Reddit, Tumblr, and Twitter (see figure
11), and after ten years, Pepe became the most popular meme on Tumblr. 176 Pepe by this point was
even “featured on consumable items such as clothes, shoes, and fashion accessories, as well as
becoming a fashionable tattoo design.”177 And in that same year, he was co-opted by Trump
supporters and the alt-right. On July 22, 2015, the Malaysian artist Maldraw posted an image on 4chan
depicting then-candidate Trump as “Smug Pepe” overlooking a US-Mexico border fence holding
back sad Mexicans (figure 12). Associations between Pepe and Trump flourished on 4chan and
Reddit, along with associations of Pepe with white nationalist and white supremacist imagery. An alt-
right Twitter user, @JaredTSwift, subsequently revealed that this was by design. There was “an actual
campaign to reclaim Pepe from normies” in which users “basically mixed Pepe in with Nazi
propaganda, etc. We built that association.”178 Some users participated as a joke, but most were
sincere, and disingenuous posting is typical of the alt-right. On October 13, 2015, Trump himself
tweeted an image of him as Pepe, cementing his association with the character and the far-right
characterizations of it. Alt-right Pepe memes continued to proliferate and spread, and on September
27, 2016, the Anti-Defamation League added Pepe the Frog to its database of hate symbols. The ADL
and Furie started a campaign #SavePepe to try and reclaim the character from its racist and anti-
Semitic connotations, but to not much success.179

176
Know Your Meme Contributors, “Pepe the Frog,” Know Your Meme, accessed April 18, 2019,
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/pepe-the-frog; Pelletier-Gagnon and Pérez Trujillo Diniz, “Colonizing Pepe,” 6–7;
Olivia Nuzzi, “How Pepe the Frog Became a Nazi Trump Supporter and Alt-Right Symbol,” The Daily Beast, May 26,
2016, https://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/05/26/how-pepe-the-frog-became-a-nazi-trump-supporter-and-alt-
right-symbol.
177
Pelletier-Gagnon and Pérez Trujillo Diniz, “Colonizing Pepe,” 7.
178
Nuzzi, “How Pepe the Frog Became a Nazi Trump Supporter and Alt-Right Symbol.”
179
Nuzzi; Know Your Meme Contributors, “Pepe the Frog”; “Pepe the Frog,” Anti-Defamation League, accessed April
18, 2019, https://www.adl.org/education/references/hate-symbols/pepe-the-frog; “ADL Adds ‘Pepe the Frog’ Meme,
Used by Anti-Semites and Racists, to Online Hate Symbols Database,” Anti-Defamation League, September 27, 2016,
https://www.adl.org/news/press-releases/adl-adds-pepe-the-frog-meme-used-by-anti-semites-and-racists-to-online-hate;
Pelletier-Gagnon and Pérez Trujillo Diniz, “Colonizing Pepe,” 7–9.
49
 Figure 11: A Pepe the Frog meme shared on Twitter by the pop artist Katy Perry

Figure 12: The first documented meme depicting Donald Trump as Pepe

The Pepe memes spawned another cluster of alt-right memes, The Cult of Kek, also known
as the Church of Kek. The term KEK is a meme originating from two unrelated sources, the massive
multi-player online role-paying game World of Warcraft and from the Turkish snack food Topkek.
In World of Warcraft, players who chose the Horde faction see their messages automatically
translated by the game, and “LOL” translated into KEK. The acronym subsequently became internet
slang in discussions about World of Warcraft. The Turkish food brand became a meme in 2013 when
modified photographs of the product started being shared on the 4chan thread /s4s/. After a screenshot
of one of these memes was shared on Reddit, users also posted World of Warcraft-related KEK

50
memes, uniting the two originally unrelated memes.180 On September 27, 2015, an anonymous 4chan
user posted a picture and some historical information about the Ancient Egyptian deity Kek, who was
often depicted with a frog head and belonged to the Ogdoad, eight primordial deities worshiped at
Hermopolis. Users immediately noted the name “Kek” as being the same as the popular internet
memes. On March 11th, 2016, the Reddit user river_of_karma posted an image macro making a
connection between Pepe the Frog, the god Kek, Donald Trump, and R. Kirk Packwood’s occult work
“Memetic Magic.” From this, a satirical religion was developed, The Cult of Kek. The meme sees
Pepe as the latest iteration of Kek, wielding Kek’s powers of darkness and chaos, and developed a
system of occult numerology. Many users believed that Pepe memes were magically influencing the
outcome of the 2016 presidential election, and that Trump ultimately won the election was seen as
validation that the far-right Pepe memes indeed held magical properties.181
While I am highly skeptical that far-right Pepe the Frog memes are imbued with occult power,
I do believe that Pepe the Frog did allow internet users separated by space and with often quite varied
ideas to unite together under a shared dialect and combine their ideologies into a distinct movement,
with significant political repercussions. Donald Trump certainly attempted to align himself with this
political faction, as both he and his son shared Pepe memes.182 While the alt-right and similarly
aligned users might not compose the majority of the United States electorate, they do wield political
influence, and the Pepe the Frog memes allowed them to communicate, spread, and normalize their
ideas in an era in which internet memes are an integral part of the lives of millions. @JaredTSwift
proclaimed that “Trump’s online support has been crucial to his success, I believe, and the fact is that
his biggest and most devoted online supporters are white nationalists. Now, we’ve pushed the Overton
window. People have adopted our rhetoric, sometimes without even realizing it.”183 While most,
including myself, would strongly repudiate the ideologies espoused by this internet meme
community, the alt-right Pepe the Frog memes do illustrate the potential of internet memes for social
formation and political influence, albeit a dangerous and harmful influence.

Section 2: Internet Memes as Artifacts of Participatory Digital Communities

The above section highlighted community formation through and around internet memes.
Internet access allows users the world-over to participate in communication across national

180
Know Your Meme Contributors, “Kek,” Know Your Meme, accessed May 20, 2019,
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/kek.
181
Know Your Meme Contributors, “Cult of Kek,” Know Your Meme, accessed May 20, 2019,
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cult-of-kek; Spencer, “Trump’s Occult Online Supporters Believe ‘Meme Magic’
Got Him Elected”; Know Your Meme Contributors, “Kek.”
182
Know Your Meme Contributors, “Pepe the Frog.”
183
Nuzzi, “How Pepe the Frog Became a Nazi Trump Supporter and Alt-Right Symbol.”
51
boundaries, and has resulted in shared experiences and common digital languages. As seen in the
above section, this allows for transformative social and political movements with actual world
repercussions as well as shared transnational community. Communications and internet media scholar
Ryan M. Milner writes “while gatekeepers and hierarchies still exist, there’s now less room to
differentiate between those producing media and those consuming them.”184 In this new environment,
different voices compete for narrative power. Pelletier-Gagnon and Diniz argue that “that memes are
cyberspaces, or virtual places, insofar as they display a struggle for meaning, a constant effacing and
repurposing that signals the polemics between different ideologies. Not unlike colonial projects,
Internet memes can manifest the intersection of values that enact a semantic tug-of-war among
netizens in specific Internet imageboards such as 4chan and Reddit.”185
A primary catalyst in this formation of communal identity is the participatory nature of such
memes. By definition, they require users to participate in their spread, re-creation, and remixing. This
process of producing internet memes is itself a meme. Rules and resources are spread between digital
users. As was discussed in the first chapter of this thesis, the understanding of meme as process is
synonymous with the concept of semiosis – sign processes – specifically, anthroposemiosis – human
sign processes. In this case, the process is specific to the digital world. The computer scientist Sara
Cannizzaro explicitly applies the semiotic framework to understanding internet memes. She contends
that developments in semiotics consider memes (in the classic sense) to be relational rather than
discrete entities. If this theory is applied to internet memes, “internet memes can only be studied in
relation to their numerous adaptations and versions across a period of time,” and thus “it follows that
an internet meme cannot be defined as a single image or video or catchphrase (as per the ill-defined
conceptions outlined above) or, in other words, as isolated information; instead, internet memes must
be defined at the very least as systems.”186
Wiggins and Bowers concur with this systems viewpoint in their statement that “Internet
memes exist as artifacts of participatory digital culture [emphasis original].”187 Milner also defines
internet memes as objects of participation. “Countless participants create, circulate, and transform
memes on amateur networks of mediated cultural participation. With each new remix, memes are
reappropriated in order to produce new iterations and variations of broader ideas, mostly without
signature or citation. In this way, the internet meme could be a quintessential participatory artifact:

184
Ryan M. Milner, “The World Made Meme: Discourse and Identity in Participatory Media” (PhD Dissertation, The
University of Kansas, 2012), 2, https://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/handle/1808/10256.
185
Pelletier-Gagnon and Pérez Trujillo Diniz, “Colonizing Pepe,” 2.
186
Sara Cannizzaro, “Internet Memes as Internet Signs: A Semiotic View of Digital Culture,” Sign Systems Studies 44,
no. 4 (December 31, 2016): 572, https://doi.org/10.12697/SSS.2016.44.4.05.
187
Wiggins and Bowers, “Memes as Genre,” 1891.
52
open, collaborative, and adaptable.”188 What defines participatory culture? In the paper “Confronting
the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century,” Henry Jenkins et al.
write: “Participatory culture is a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic
engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations, and some type of informal
mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices. A
participatory culture is also one in which members believe their contributions matter, and feel some
degree of social connection with one another (at the least they care what other people think about
what they have created).”189
On his blog, Jenkins proposes that internet memes and viral media be emphasized as
“spreadable media” rather than simply replicated content. He contends that “a spreadable model
assumes that the repurposing and transformation of media content adds value, allowing media content
to be localized to diverse contexts of use. This notion of spreadability is intended as a contrast to
older models of stickiness which emphasize centralized control over distribution and attempts to
maintain 'purity' of message.”190
Likewise, Wiggins and Bowers, rather than viewing memes as replicators metaphorically
analogous to genes, “argue the perspective that Internet memes are messages transmitted by
consumers–producers for discursive purposes. Specifically, the term ‘discursive’ asserts repetition of
subject or thematic matter from within an established meme.”191 Wiggins and Bowers narrow
Jenkins’ definition of “spreadable media” to strictly original messages, such as movie trailers,
political speeches, interviews, motivational posters, etc., “which are not parodied or remixed versions
of earlier messages.”192 They also demarcate internet memes from “viral videos”, the latter of which
would fall under “spreadable media” definition. Unlike internet memes, they argue, viral videos enjoy
popularity more briefly because they are not as readily remixed. Image macros, contend Wiggins and
Bowers, persist for longer as popular memes because they are very easy to remix.193
While I contend that viral videos can experience longevity of popularity far longer than
Wiggins and Bowers imply (for instance, The Dancing Baby video spread for years and was remixed),
and many wildly popular image macros disappear from popular consciousness as quickly as they
appeared, this distinction does hold some merit: Viral videos spread largely intact, as their appeal is
in their original iteration, whereas image macros and other such internet memes are inherently subject

188
Milner, “The World Made Meme,” 12.
189
Jenkins et al., “Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century,” 3.
190
Henry Jenkins, “If It Doesn’t Spread, It’s Dead (Part One): Media Viruses and Memes,” Confessions of an ACA-Fan
(blog), February 11, 2009, http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2009/02/if_it_doesnt_spread_its_dead_p.html.
191
Wiggins and Bowers, “Memes as Genre,” 1892.
192
Wiggins and Bowers, 1903.
193
Wiggins and Bowers, 1892.
53
to remix, and propensity to remixing will ensure greater likelihood of an internet meme’s success.
This is supported by the findings of Michele Coscia’s study “Competition and Success in the Meme
Pool: a Case Study on Quickmeme.com.” It discovered that “competition is anti-correlated with the
odds of being successful if a meme also happen to have experienced popularity peaks.”194 In lay-
person’s terms, this means that if a meme experiences peaks in popularity, it is threatened by
competition. However, if the meme did not experience popularity peaks, “it is a good thing only if
the meme is part of a meme organism or at least it can count on many collaborations with other
memes. Being a collaborative meme correlates with success.”195 Coscia defines a “meme organism”
as a cluster of correlated memes.196 Therefore, the distinction between the merely viral (a media
artifact experiencing a sudden peak in popularity) and the collaboratively remixed (a media artifact
that is correlated with other artifacts and subject to collaborative participation) is warranted. Internet
memes fare better when shared and remixed over time rather than from “going viral.”197
The above analyses indicate that internet memes are a process. The goal is not for users to
maintain copy-fidelity to the specific content of a particular artifact they encounter, but to localize
that artifact to their social context by means of remixing or reworking the content, albeit by certain
rules that anchor the artifact to its source meaning and context. For instance, the “One Does Not
Simply” snowclone can be endlessly reworked to a specific social or political context, yet it retains
its origins as a Lord of the Rings reference. Internet memes spread and are reworked (or subverted)
according to certain social rules understood by the users, and then spread again in a reworked frame.
Wiggins and Bowers explain that “in practical terms, the memetic social system is reconstituted when
members of participatory digital culture use rules and resources of meme creation in the reproduction
of further iterations of a given meme.”198
They conceive of internet memes as a genre, that is, “activities that guide and alter the
dynamics of human culture.” If the meme is viewed as a genre, it “is not simply a formula followed
by humans to communicate, but is a complex system of social motivations and cultural activity that
is both a result of communication and impetus for that communication.”199 Members of a participatory
digital culture do not simply want to replicate and spread content, they “want their revisions of

194
Michele Coscia, “Competition and Success in the Meme Pool: A Case Study on Quickmeme.Com,” in Proceedings
of the Seventh International Conference of Weblogs and Social Media (The 7th International AAAI Conference on
Weblogs and Social Media, Cambridge, Massachusetts: AAAI Press, 2013), 108, http://arxiv.org/abs/1304.1712.
195
Coscia, 108.
196
Coscia, 105.
197
Coscia, 108; Christopher Mims, “Why You’ll Share This Story: The New Science of Memes,” Quartz, June 28,
2013, https://qz.com/98677/why-youll-share-this-story-the-new-science-of-memes/.
198
Wiggins and Bowers, “Memes as Genre,” 1891.
199
Wiggins and Bowers, 1893.
54
memetic content to be remixed, iterated, and distributed further as memes.”200 Internet memes
function as a conversation “between members of participatory digital culture, and contain the rules
and resources necessary for further remix.”201
Kostadinovska-Stojchevska and Shalevska note how understanding internet memes requires
significant knowledge, since internet memes “contain references from the popular culture, political
and religious references, references specific to a region or a country and references to do with certain
profession or field. Decoding and understanding said references both in the written part of the meme,
as well as in the image used as a basis, is crucial in understanding and later, re-creating memes.”202
These dormant rules and resources can then be called into use by digital users localizing a meme into
a particular interactive context.203
Wiggins and Bowers outline the process the following way: “Once agents in the participatory
digital culture alter spreadable media, the genre develops further into what we call an emergent meme.
Finally, after remix and imitation[,] and rapid diffusion [across] social networks or other online spaces
for quotidian expression, the emergent meme becomes a meme, in the current parlance of online
communication [all italics original].”204 The traits of the emergent meme include viral spread and a
modicum of popularity in the participatory digital culture. However, the emergent meme is not yet an
internet meme as commonly understood. While emergent memes “are altered spreadable media” they
are not yet “iterated and remixed further as separate contributions.”205
Alteration lies at the core of an emergent meme, due to “a participatory quality in spreadable
media that invites members of digital culture to alter spreadable media into emergent memes.”
Wiggins and Bower conclude that, therefore, “emergent memes exist as a direct consequence of
agency within the digital culture. This progression from spreadable media to memes is a symptom of
the dynamic interaction between agency and structure[.]”206 To become an internet meme, the
participatory digital culture must imitate, remix, and further iterate the emergent meme. The resulting
internet memes then rapidly spread online, especially through online social networks.207 Shifman
describes the process similarly:
First, memes may best be understood as cultural information that passes along from person to
person, yet gradually scales into a shared social phenomenon [emphasis original]. Although they

200
Wiggins and Bowers, 1895.
201
Wiggins and Bowers, 1902.
202
Kostadinovska-Stojchevska and Shalevska, “Internet Memes and Their Socio-Linguistic Features,” 159.
203
Wiggins and Bowers, “Memes as Genre,” 1902.
204
Wiggins and Bowers, 1896–97.
205
Wiggins and Bowers, 1897.
206
Wiggins and Bowers, 1899.
207
Wiggins and Bowers, 1899.
55
 spread on a micro basis, memes’ impact is on the macro: They shape the mindsets, forms of behavior,
and actions of social groups.208

Knobel and Lankshear concur that “memes are thoroughly social,” because they “require
networked human ‘hosts’ in order to survive.” They argue that this necessitates a social understanding
of internet memes rather than simply analyzing the “reading and production processes at the level of
static, fixed-in time texts.”209 The internet allows these social processes to transcend traditional
borders and even language. Knobel and Lankshear assert that
…everyday life is often amplified through the participation of and interaction with people one
may never meet and, moreover, that in online spaces this interaction and participation may occur in
ways never before possible. The Lost Frog meme isn’t simply about generating humorous images
concerning the search for or the whereabouts of a child’s lost frog. It plays out as a distributed
collaboration that crosses national borders and languages (e.g., not all the lost frog images make use
of English) and brings together people who may not know each other, but who value each other’s
contribution nonetheless.210

The above quote illustrates how internet memes contain shared rules understood by users
across national, ethnic, and linguistic lines yet can be localized to more specific cultural or social
contexts. Kostadinovska-Stojchevska and Shalevska note that “memes in Macedonian, for the most
part, share the linguistic and sociological skills as the memes originally created in English, though
they contain other language features characteristic for the Macedonian language only.”211 Still,
English predominates in internet memes, even among users whose first language is not English.
“Memes in English are created by a huge number of internet users that come from many English-
speaking and not-English-speaking countries around the world. In their day-to-day communication,
these users use informal, everyday English; a dialect of it; language filled with neologisms, obscene
words, abbreviations, slang etc. Their everyday language is reflected in the memes they create.”212
While Kostadinovska-Stojchevska and Shalevska view this in a positive light because it allows non-
English speakers to learn the English language, I would contend (albeit as a white, Anglo-German
American with no North Macedonian connection) that this proliferation of English also has
potentially major problems of neo-colonialist entanglement and threatens the loss of endangered and
other not-so-prolific languages and accompanying intangible heritage. Indeed, the case of how Pepe
the Frog came to be co-opted by the alt-right and the original ownership of the character marginalized
illustrates that the problematic potential for internet memes to be used as colonial tools.

208
Shifman, “Memes in a Digital World,” 364–65.
209
Michele Knobel and Colin Lankshear, “Online Memes, Affinities, and Cultural Production,” in A New Literacies
Sampler, ed. Michele Knobel and Colin Lankshear, vol. 29 (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), 219,
https://researchonline.jcu.edu.au/3008/.
210
Knobel and Lankshear, 220.
211
Kostadinovska-Stojchevska and Shalevska, “Internet Memes and Their Socio-Linguistic Features,” 159.
212
Kostadinovska-Stojchevska and Shalevska, 166.
56
 Internet memes not only draw participants together through shared social rules, but re-
configure social spaces by re-working those rules. Noam Gal, Limor Shifman, and Zohar Kampf take
note of this: “The memetic practice is not merely an expression of existing social cultural norms, it is
also a social tool for negotiating them. The relationship between memes and norms is thus twofold:
memes both reflect norms and constitute a central practice in their formation.”213 Internet memes
therefore are not merely shared languages by “performative acts”. While “each selective choice
reflects a specific attitude of the meme creator, [it] also contributes to the ongoing negotiation over
norms. In this process, obedience to the norm strengthens collective boundaries and enhances their
transparency as ‘natural.’ Deviation, on the other hand, exposes the normative infrastructure of a
community and may thus weaken the norms’ constraining power or position an individual or a group
outside the collective.”214 The resulting negotiations and power shifts can result in powerful social
and political action, as has been seen. In the case of Pepe the Frog, the character and its internet
memetic iterations were “cast in the middle of a territorial war opposing different publics that are
each aware of the different interpretation of the meme and actively campaign to colonize its space by
filling it with texts that support their interpretation.”215 However, as Knobel and Lankshear conclude,
meming can be a “fruitful practice for educators to focus on when thinking about new forms of social
participation and civic action in the wake of widespread access to the internet and involvement in
increasingly dispersed social networks.”216
Heidi E. Huntington, a business communications specialist, stresses that the participatory
nature of internet memes allows them to function as subversive communication, which contributes to
their appeal. “Part of memes’ appeal …is their subversive nature,” she writes, because “through the
appropriation and transformation of cultural texts,” meme creators can wield popular culture as a
political tool. 217 Conversely, Gal, Shifman, and Kampf emphasize, per the research of Milner, that
“in many cases, memes tend to reflect the sociodemographic background of meme creators (typically
White, privileged young men), commonly replicating well-entrenched hegemonic stereotypes.”218
However, Milner demonstrates that memes are also used subversively, resulting in polyvocal
discourse, that is, a space where various ideological standpoints can be expressed.219 Gal, Shifman,
and Kampf “suggest that one way to measure the extent to which a specific meme has indeed created

213
Noam Gal, Limor Shifman, and Zohar Kampf, “‘It Gets Better’: Internet Memes and the Construction of Collective
Identity,” New Media & Society 18, no. 8 (September 2016): 1701, https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444814568784.
214
Gal, Shifman, and Kampf, 1701.
215
Pelletier-Gagnon and Pérez Trujillo Diniz, “Colonizing Pepe,” 9.
216
Knobel and Lankshear, “Online Memes, Affinities, and Cultural Production,” 222.
217
Heidi E. Huntington, “Subversive Memes: Internet Memes as a Form of Visual Rhetoric,” AoIR Selected Papers of
Internet Research 14 (2013): 1, https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/spir/article/view/8886.
218
Gal, Shifman, and Kampf, “‘It Gets Better,’” 1702.
219
Gal, Shifman, and Kampf, 1702; Milner, “The World Made Meme,” 50–60, 123–24, 212–64, 283, 297–307.
57
such a polyvocal discourse is variability: when the multiple versions created by numerous users
significantly differ from each other, the potential for polyvocal discourse increases.”220
Because the socially normative practices – the rules – governing the structure of the
participatory culture of internet memes can be reconstituted and subverted, why memes are enacted
and where is subject to change. Therefore, observe Wiggins and Bowers, “we may see memes, as we
have come to know them, appear in magazines, video games, children’s books, and films.”221 The
sociologist and social media theorist Nathan Jurgenson explains that internet memes transcend the
digital-physical divide and fundamentally change how social interaction and political conservations
take place:
Today, people are not passively consuming dissent, but are more actively involved with
creating it. The producers and consumers of revolutionary messages are increasingly the same people.
Most of the protestors can snap photos, shoot videos, organize on Facebook and tweet to the world.
This is participatory, prosumer, dissent [emphasis original]. […We therefore] live in an augmented
reality that is the product of a massive implosion of atoms and bits, opposed to the ‘digital dualist’
assumption that views the digital and physical as separate.”222

In this “augmented reality” that Jurgenson describes, some “internet” memes inextricably
combine both the virtual and actual. David Banks, a social scientist and geography professor has
noted a category of these types of meme, the “performative meme.” One such meme is planking, in
which “individuals are photographed intentionally laying face-down in strange places,” which then
spawned other performances such as “owling, Batmanning, and stocking.”223 The Ice Bucket
Challenge would fall under this category as well. In that meme, an individual or group would video
themselves dumping a bucket of ice water on their head and then challenge others to do so.
Accompanying this performance would be a charitable donation to the ALS Association for fund
research into Lou Gehrig’s disease. That performative meme and charitable campaign raised some
$115 million USD, which allowed for research that discovered a gene which contributes to the
disease.224 The key feature which differentiates these memes from simple internet memes which
transcend the virtual is that they “are about performing a certain embodied act, not producing an

220
Gal, Shifman, and Kampf, “‘It Gets Better,’” 1702.
221
Wiggins and Bowers, “Memes as Genre,” 1895–96.
222
Nathan Jurgenson, “Social Media and Our Atmosphere of Augmented Dissent,” Cyborgology (blog), October 5,
2011, https://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2011/10/05/social-media-and-our-atmosphere-of-augmented-dissent/.
The term “prosumer” is another name for the “producer-consumer” or “consumer-producer” hybrid mentioned here by
Jurgenson and earlier in this section by Wiggins and Bowers.
223
David Banks, “On Performative Internet Memes: Planking, Owling, & Stocking,” Cyborgology (blog), September
21, 2011, https://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2011/09/21/on-performative-internet-memes-planking-owling-
stocking/.
224
Katie Rogers, “The ‘Ice Bucket Challenge’ Helped Scientists Discover a New Gene Tied to A.L.S.,” The New York
Times, December 21, 2017, sec. Health, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/28/health/the-ice-bucket-challenge-helped-
scientists-discover-a-new-gene-tied-to-als.html; Alexandria Sifferlin, “Here’s How the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge
Actually Started,” Time, August 18, 2014, http://time.com/3136507/als-ice-bucket-challenge-started/.
58
image for visual consumption.”225 Banks continues: “By participating in performative memes we
show others that we are a part of the same international community. By engaging in performative
memes, participants constitute a social imaginary that gives meaning and context to the actions
of subsequent and existing participants [emphasis original].”226
Internet memes therefore can function as speech acts, and are not confined to the digital.
However, for a meme to be a successful speech act, “the context of the meme …must be interpreted
within the context of the larger communication. Even if memes are not used as comments on already
existing statements, they still have to be interpreted in a larger context in order to make sense.”227
“Just as one would address a letter to one or more than one person or ask a question to one person or
a group, a meme can be directed to one person or it can be directed to all internet users. As in all
speech acts, the context and the intent of the creator also plays an important role in the understanding
of memes.”228
Branislav Buchel, in their 2008 Master’s Thesis, provides an excellent illustration of the
importance of context for memes to properly serve as speech acts. In 2011, at a high school football
game in Painesville, Ohio, a supporter of one of the teams held up a sign that declared “YOU MAD
BRO?” This phrase originates from online trolling and is intended to further enrage an already
enraged person. However, the use of the word “bro” combined with the fact that the majority of the
opposition team were black players, the opposing coach, several players, and a NAACP
representative who was present at the game all perceived the sign as racial intimidation. The incident
was reported made news reports and brought consternation and amazement to many online
communities who could imagine how the phrase was perceived as racist.229 Buchel concludes that
“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.”230

225
Banks, “On Performative Internet Memes.”
226
Banks.
227
L. Grundlingh, “Memes as Speech Acts,” Social Semiotics 28, no. 2 (March 15, 2018): 159,
https://doi.org/10.1080/10350330.2017.1303020.
228
Grundlingh, 11.
229
Branislav Buchel, “Internet Memes as Means of Communication” (Master’s thesis, Masaryk University, 2008), 63,
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:uE2ToT9OheEJ:https://is.muni.cz/th/384995/fss_m/Buchel_t
hesis.docx+&cd=8&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=eg; Max Read, “High Schoolers’ ‘You Mad Bro’ Sign Called ‘Racial
Intimidation,’” Gawker, September 5, 2011, http://gawker.com/5837350/high-schoolers-you-mad-bro-sign-called-
racial-intimidation.
230
Buchel, “Internet Memes as Means of Communication,” 63.
59
 So, to summarize this discussion: Internet memes are a form of participatory digital culture.
This culture has also led to the evolutionary emergence of a hybrid participatory virtual-actual culture.
That is, a culture which incorporates both the virtual world created by digital storage and exchange
and non-digital actions and environments. These participatory cultures, the virtual and the virtual-
actual, allow for social formation bounded by rules and linguistic meanings that cross traditional
national, ethnic, and language barriers, and with such formation, performative, social, and political
action and organization. Memes are localized to particular social, geographic, and political contexts.
The participatory nature of meming also allows social rules to be adapted and subverted. While the
rules governing the communal formation might be exclusionary, they can always be reconstituted
with resulting reformation, fragmentation, or emergence of new communities. In either case, the
context of memes is essential to understanding their meaning. When that context is broken, the
meaning is usually lost.

Conclusions
This chapter looked at internet memes as agents in community formation and socio-political
influencers that transcend the virtual into the actual. Internet meme communities are often hybrid
virtual-actual heritage. While the content shared is an artifact, behind that artifact lies deep social
context. If that context is lost, the meaning of that artifact is broken, as was seen in the final paragraphs
of the second section of this chapter. This is extremely important to note if a digital heritage specialist
seeks to preserve internet memes. While certainly the artifacts need to be curated, selected, and
preserved as digital objects, it is not the objects themselves that bear heritage value and meaning. It
is the communities which formed around and through the objects that lent the objects heritage value,
and if the heritage value is to be preserved, that communal context of participatory digital interactions
must be preserved as well. And preservation efforts must transcend the digital, just as the internet
memes do. If the heritage specialist desires to preserve memes pertaining to #MeToo, they must
account for political rallies, posters and signage made on paper, and other actual world artifacts and
events, not just the Twitter posts. And internet memes such as planking and the Ice Bucket Challenge
were by design performative actions in actual world which were then shared online, and to preserve
these memes would inherently necessitate a hybrid approach to preservation.

Part 3: Preserving Internet Memes

Chapter 4: The Current State of Internet Meme Preservation

The previous chapters have outlined the concept of memetics, the definition of internet meme,
and shown how internet memes are artifacts of participatory digitally-entangled social interactions.

60
Internet memes replicate as participants interact with them. Now, if internet memes replicate and
multiply, why bother preserving them? Because internet memes are not static, and they, just like other
cultural practices and artifacts, are only preserved so long as they persist in the mediums which carry
them – both technological devices and human actions and memory. The fast-paced, and seemingly
ever accelerating, rate of technological change along with the inevitable shifting and evolution of
human interaction, of human culture, poses significant risk to the longevity of any particular internet
meme. This chapter surveys the problem of preserving internet memes. It addresses some of the major
technological and management challenges the heritage specialist encounters when preserving internet
memes, and provides an overview of existing preservation efforts being taken.

Section 1: Difficulties in Preserving Internet Memes

Internet memes are especially volatile – they spread and mutate rapidly, and then equally
disappear from public memory and view. Jasen Bacon notes in their Master’s thesis “The Digital
Folklore Project” that “Patterns [emerge], and with digital folk groups they tend to emerge and
become perpetuated at very rapid speeds. They can also be abandoned just as quickly as the group
replaces the older forms with newer created ones.”231 With internet memes, “a new meme can
develop, spread, and sometimes even fall out of use within the span of hours or days. Only some of
the more adaptable memes will achieve viral status and remain in use for long periods of time.” 232
Therefore, preserving internet memes involves temporal urgency – actions must be taken before a
particular internet meme disappears from memory.
Internet users generate countless internet memes. The numbers ever increase. The Library of
Congress encountered a problem of this kind when it set out to archive the entirety of Twitter. In
2010, when it announced the effort, users tweeted 55 million times a day. This grew to 140 million in
2011, and then nearly 500 million in 2012. And tweets are often linked as threads or to video, adding
additional metadata for storage. The volume of data has overwhelmed the project.233 However,
preserving everything on the internet is technically feasible through archival computer programs with
web access so long as they have adequate storage space. Currently, this is largely the route that
preservationists and archivists have taken, especially national-level institutions.234

231
Jasen Bacon, “The Digital Folklore Project: Tracking the Oral Tradition on the World Wide Web.,” Electronic
Theses and Dissertations, Electronic Theses and Dissertations, no. 1398 (December 17, 2011): 12,
https://dc.etsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2589&context=etd.
232
Bacon, 13.
233
Andrew McGill, “Can Twitter Fit Inside the Library of Congress?,” The Atlantic, August 4, 2016,
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/08/can-twitter-fit-inside-the-library-of-congress/494339/.
234
de Lusenet, “Tending the Garden or Harvesting the Fields,” 171; van der Werf and van der Werf, “The Paradox of
Selection in the Digital Age,” 16–22.
61
 Archiving the entirety of the internet is not preservation though. While this archival work the
needed first step in preserving digital heritage, much, probably most, of the content archived is
irrelevant junk.235 The subsequent steps for digital preservationists are then to sift through these
archives and select the content of heritage value. Such a task is beyond the traditional approaches in
preservation, as it deals with forms of media, technology, and social interaction for which the
traditional approaches were not designed.236 Although my research focuses on preserving internet
memes and not all digital heritage, the problem is still the same: The next step in preservation after
archiving as much content as possible is to filter out from the virtual garbage the items of heritage
value for indefinite storage and preservation.
One of the enormous problems to be tackled in order to accomplish this task, and for which
there do not seem to be any clear and feasible solutions, is the problem of preserving the context of
internet interactions surrounding internet memes. As explained in the previous chapter, internet
memes are artifacts with context. Divorcing them from the context in which they were created
destroys much, if not all, of the meaning and heritage value that they possess or possessed. The digital
humanities specialist Jim McGrath explains that
instead of image macros, many users have taken to remediating content from other platforms
like text message conversations, Twitter exchanges, and Facebook comment threads. These new
iterations of memes create new challenges for archivists, given that screenshots are frequently lower-
quality versions of media that had already been compressed in the first place. Users distributing these
memes beyond spaces that encourage the use of tags to improve visibility and accessibility frequently
care little about citation or best practices for linking content to contextual information, and ‘content
farms’ devoted to the economics of memes will frequently (and often willfully) obscure details in their
campaigns for attention.237

To correctly preserve an internet meme, not only the artifact itself must be preserved but also
the context of the social interactions, the culture, that made it. To again quote McGrath, “Scholars
interested in the present state of memes can learn a lot from excavating the digital objects and
networks of the recent past, as well as their attendant contextual and material dimensions [emphasis
mine].”238 This is easier said than done. Alex C. Madrigal, in an article in The Atlantic, writes
regarding the need to preserve context for a heritage artifact, and the present difficulties of
accomplishing this:
If you want to understand how WordPerfect, an old word processor, functioned, then you just
need that software and some way of running it. But if you want to document the experience of using
Facebook five years ago or even two weeks ago ... how do you do it? The truth is, right now, you can’t.

235
de Lusenet, “Tending the Garden or Harvesting the Fields.”
236
Annemieke and Wintermans, “Introduction,” 2; Abdelaziz, “Safeguarding Our Digital Heritage: A New Preservation
Paradigm,” 12; Bearman, “Addressing Selection and Digital Preservation as Systemic Problems,” 48.
237
Jim McGrath, “Memes,” in The SAGE Handbook of Web History, ed. Niels Brügger and Ian Milligan (Newbury
Park: SAGE, 2018).
238
McGrath.
62
 No one (outside Facebook, at least) has preserved the functioning of the application. And worse, there
is no thing that can be squirreled away for future historians to figure out.239

Clifford Lynch, an information specialist and computer scientist, notes that in literature
devoted to the question of how organizations devoted to stewardship of memory and heritage can
preserve dynamic and personalized content, Twitter seems to the major focus, probably because
researchers studying public Twitter streams can access, through various mechanisms, archives and
real-time samples of streams. Lynch states that he does not “know of any other social media platforms
that offer similar access,” and that this situation must change. According to Lynch, “the existing
models and conceptual frameworks of preserving some kind of ‘canonical’ digital artifacts are
increasingly inapplicable in a world of pervasive, unique, personalized, non-repeatable performances.
As stewards and stewardship organizations, we cannot continue to simply complain about the
intractability of the problems or speak idealistically of fundamentally impossible ‘solutions.’”240
Lynch posits that if the understanding of the traditional sense of archiving as capturing
artifacts is abandoned, which he asserts is necessary, the purpose of archiving is then “to capture the
multiplicity of ways in which a given system behaves over the range of actual or potential users.” 241
Rather than artifacts, the archivist is seeking to capture social algorithms, what Blackmore equates to
memes (in the classic sense).242 As the anthropologist Nick Seaver explains: “Algorithms aren’t
artifacts, they are collections of human practices that are in interaction with each other. One thing you
can do is replace the word ‘algorithm’ with the word ‘society. It has always been hard to document
the present [functioning of a society] for the future.”243 The problem which then presents itself is who
are these “users” in a given system, and how many of them are there? How are they characterized,
and how is system behavior characterized? Lynch contends that while “these challenges are largely
alien to the archivists and digital preservationists that have tended to dominate much of the
stewardship discussion in the digital age,” they are “deeply rooted in historical methods of
anthropology, sociology, political science, ethnography and related humanistic and social science
disciplines that seek to document behaviors that are essentially not captured in artifacts, and indeed
to create such documentary artifacts.”244

239
Alexis C. Madrigal, “Future Historians Probably Won’t Understand Our Internet, and That’s Okay,” The Atlantic,
December 6, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/12/it-might-be-impossible-for-future-
historians-to-understand-our-internet/547463/.
240
Clifford Lynch, “Stewardship in the ‘Age of Algorithms,’” First Monday 22, no. 12 (December 2, 2017),
https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v22i12.8097.
241
Lynch.
242
Blackmore, The Meme Machine, 2000, 14; Blackmore, Memes and “Temes.”
243
Madrigal, “Future Historians Probably Won’t Understand Our Internet, and That’s Okay.”
244
Lynch, “Stewardship in the ‘Age of Algorithms.’”
63
 Lynch highlights an additional problem, that of accessibility to a software for researchers.
“The software is proprietary and the owners won’t give it to you. The data that accompanies the
software is even more proprietary and the owners or system operators won’t share it.” And, even if
researchers could manage this, “you cannot obtain access to a computational platform or storage
capacity of the scale necessary even if all the other conditions were satisfied.”245 This would point to
a need for users themselves to be involved in preservation efforts. Only the users have full access to
the system.
To even further complicate that matter, much of the digital experience is uniquely tailored to
each user. Facebook, Google, Bing, and many, many more digital offerings will continuously adjust
user experience based on the previous actions and interactions of each user. The digital experience is
thus highly personalized and individualized. Says Seaver: “Given that personalization algorithms by
definition alter one’s experience according to interactions with the system, it is very difficult, if not
impossible, for a lone researcher to abandon the subject position of ‘user’ and get an unfiltered
perspective. In the case of many recommender systems… all interactions with the system are tailored
to specific user accounts.”246 For example, during any particularly visit to Bing, the user partakes in
approximately ten different experiments. The performances of these modifications are then evaluated
according to various metrics, such as clicks, subsequent searches, and so on, and if successful by
those metrics they are incorporated into the system. Therefore, as “a result of these experiments, there
is no one “Bing” to speak of. At any moment, there are as many as ten million different permutations
of Bing, varying from interface design to all sorts of algorithmic detail.”247
The online landscape thus moves incredibly quickly, and beyond the ability of even
technically skilled computer scientists and engineers to understand. Seaver explains that
in assuming that engineers have complete understanding of the systems they create, we make
a mistake: first, these systems are works of collective authorship, made, maintained, and revised by
many people with different goals at different times; second, once these systems reach a certain level
of complexity, their outputs can be difficult to predict precisely, even for those with technical know-
how. Simply making the system transparent does not resolve this basic knowledge problem, which
afflicts even “insiders.” A determined focus on revealing the operations of algorithms risks taking for
granted that they operate clearly in the first place.248

This ties into the claim by Blackmore that a new kind of replicator, the “technological meme”
or “teme,” is on the cusp of emergence, if it has not already emerged. She posits that perhaps computer

245
Lynch.
246
Nick Seaver, “Knowing Algorithms,” in Media in Transition 8 (Media in Transition 8: Public Media, Private Media,
Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2014), 5,
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/55eb004ee4b0518639d59d9b/t/55ece1bfe4b030b2e8302e1e/1441587647177/seav
erMiT8.pdf.
247
Seaver, 5–6.
248
Seaver, 8.
64
programs will soon become, if not they are not yet already, their own replicators, and can persist,
generation over generation, without reliance on humans as a vehicle.249 Seaver takes a different
perspective, arguing that the algorithms used by various digital systems are a form of cultural
interaction, that the technical is inseparable from the cultural. “My point is that when our object of
interest is the algorithmic system, ‘cultural’ details are technical details — the tendencies of an
engineering team are as significant as the tendencies of a sorting algorithm. This is not so much an
attempt to add the cultural back onto the technical as it is a refusal of the cultural/ technical distinction
as a ground for analysis.”250
Because of the immense complexity and volume of contextual information to be preserved,
the loss of some, probably most, of the cultural context for digital artifacts is inevitable. It is therefore
essential for heritage specialists to act quickly to preserve as much of what requires preserving as
possible. McGrath writes that “The instability of [social media networks] suggests that archivists may
need to act sooner rather than later to document and preserve internet memes and important contextual
materials that might help future generations understand their popularity and perceived value to earlier
generations of the web.”251 The situation might not be so bleak as it appears. There are existing means
of preserving cultural interactions. The digital archivist Leslie Johnston believes that “social media is
not unlike a personal diary. It’s more expansive. It is a public diary that has a graph of relationships
built into it. But there is a continuity of archival practice.”252
In particular, attempts to preserve internet memes can draw from existing techniques of
intangible cultural heritage preservation and public tagging. The archivists Trevor Owens and Trevor
J. Blank stress that digital heritage is “folkloric” and that preservation of it is chiefly archival.253
Others have treated digital heritage in the same manner. Utah State University operates a Digital
Folklore Project, and the editors Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied compiled a book entitled
Digital Folklore and which looks nostalgically at Internet culture.254 Due to developments and

249
Blackmore, Memes and “Temes”; Susan Blackmore, “Temes: An Emerging Third Replicator,” On the Human, a
project of the National Humanities Center, August 23, 2010, http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/on-the-
human/2010/08/temes-an-emerging-third-replicator/.
250
Seaver, “Knowing Algorithms,” 10.
251
McGrath, “Memes.”
252
Madrigal, “Future Historians Probably Won’t Understand Our Internet, and That’s Okay.”
253
Trevor Owens, The Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation, 1st Edition edition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2018), 17–20, 51; Julia Fernandez, “Understanding Folk Culture in the Digital Age: An Interview
with Folklorist Trevor J. Blank, Pt. 1,” Blog, The Signal (blog), June 30, 2014,
https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/2014/06/understanding-folk-culture-in-the-digital-age-an-interview-with-folklorist-
trevor-j-blank-pt-1/; Julia Fernandez, “Preserving Folk Cultures of the Digital Age: An Interview with Folklorist Trevor
J. Blank, Pt. 2,” Blog, The Signal (blog), July 1, 2014, https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/2014/07/preserving-folk-cultures-
of-the-digital-age-an-interview-with-folklorist-trevor-j-blank-pt-2/.
254
Utah State University, “The Digital Folklore Project,” Department of English, December 14, 2017,
https://english.usu.edu/dfp/the-digital-folklore-project; Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied, eds., Digital Folklore
(Stuttgart: Merz & Solitude, 2009); Stefania Bercu, “Book Review- Digital Folklore Reader,” Masters of Media,
September 20, 2010, https://mastersofmedia.hum.uva.nl/blog/2010/09/20/book-review-digital-folklore-reader/.
65
decisions within the heritage field that have adopted the term “intangible cultural heritage” in instead
of the terms “folk,” “folklore,” and “folklife,”255 I use the former term over the latter terms, excepting
for direct references to a source that uses the latter terminology.
Owens explains that “approaches to documentation that [illustrate variation] are part of the
core preservation approach, but at the same time, cultural or biological ecosystems themselves serve
as preservation systems, carrying forward the information that is most useful to their contemporary
needs.”256 This point by Owens is echoed succinctly in the motto of the annually meeting Northeast
Fiddlers’ Convention, which preserves American fiddle music: “participation is preservation.”257 And
Prodan in her PhD thesis “The Digital ‘Memory of the World’: An Exploration of Documentary
Practices in the Age of Digital Technology” submits a proposal of “preservation as participation.”258
Bacon concurs that “When the researcher can observe the transmission of a piece of folklore, s/he
understand that the group is a folk group. When the researcher can observe that a piece of folklore
resembles a previously created work, then s/he can deduce that the folklore has been perpetuated;
then the researcher can tell that the transmission has not only happened but it became formalized.”259
Intangible heritage traditions are thus preserved when individuals participate in learning and sharing
those traditions. Writes Owens:
Archivists have been dealing with complex hierarchical relationships, aggregations of records,
and massive scales for a long time. As a result, the archival frame of mind is often the best fit from the
cultural heritage professions (libraries, archives, museums, conservation, folklore, history, archeology,
literature, records management, anthropology, among others) to work in digital preservation.260

Prodan suggests folksonomy, or public tagging, as a model for increasing participants’

access.261 “Folksonomy,” a portmanteau of “folk” and “taxonomy,” describes user-generated, public
classification tags attached to content to help sort it. Unlike a formal classification system such as the
Dewey or Library of Congress systems, public tagging classifies content based on categories created

255
Michelle Stefano, “Folklife at the International Level: The Roots of Intangible Cultural Heritage Part I,” Folklife
Today (blog), June 1, 2018, https://blogs.loc.gov/folklife/2018/06/folklife-at-the-international-level-the-roots-of-
intangible-cultural-heritage-part-i/; Kristin Kuutma, “From Folklore to Intangible Heritage,” in A Companion to
Heritage Studies, ed. William Logan, Máiréad Nic Craith, and Ullrich Kockel (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc,
2015), 41–54, https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118486634.ch3; Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, Croatia,
Marijana Hameršak, and Iva Pleše, “Heritage on Demand: UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage Initiative in Croatian
Context,” Folklore: Electronic Journal of Folklore 74 (December 2018): 130–34,
https://doi.org/10.7592/FEJF2018.74.croatia. Also mentioned by Anca Prodan in my personal correspondence with her
during my thesis writing process.
256
Owens, The Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation, 24–25.
257
“2nd Annual Northeast Fiddlers’ Convention” (Old Tone Music Festival and Hancock Shaker Village, n.d.).
258
Anca Prodan, “The Digital ‘Memory of the World’: An Exploration of Documentary Practices in the Age of Digital
Technology” (PhD thesis, Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus-Senftenberg, 2014), 217–22,
https://opus4.kobv.de/opus4-btu/frontdoor/deliver/index/docId/3013/file/Prodan_AncaClaudia.pdf.
259
Bacon, “The Digital Folklore Project,” 10.
260
Owens, The Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation, 51.
261
Prodan, “The Digital ‘Memory of the World’: An Exploration of Documentary Practices in the Age of Digital
Technology,” 156–57.
66
by subcultures, small communities, or individuals, in a manner useful for them. Social media hashtags
constitute a form of this public tagging.262 Prodan also recommends other forms of participatory
access. These include “crowdsourcing,” in which a function is given to an undefined, but typically
large, network of users; “commons-based peer production,” which features communal, usually large-
scale, collaboration to produce information, knowledge, or items of culture; and “citizen science,” in
which involves individuals and communities in scientific processes such as data collection or
monitoring.263
Some additional methods for contextual archiving of the digital are proposed by Lynch. One
option is using “robotic witnesses” or “sock puppets:” The basic idea is of this, explains Lynch, is
“to create a (probably large) population of software robots (agents) which the system in question
believes are actual human users, and hence assigns various attributes and demographics as a profile
and then offer continuing interactions consistent with those attributes and demographics; the robots
will capture the results of these streams of interaction.”264 This option comes with some technical
difficulty. Specifically, the bot must be accepted within the system to be documented. And then once
accepted, the bot must maintain a particular pattern of interaction. Basically, the bot must
continuously appear to be an authentic member of the documented system. In addition to these
technical problems, some major ethical problems might arise from this approach, since it involves
deception and unknowing – therefore perhaps unwilling – participation in the documentary project.265
A second option is “crowd-sourced audit” or what Lynch calls “New Nielson families”
(named after the famous Nielsen Families used for establishing television ratings beginning in 1950).
In this approach, “rather than creating synthetic robot users, you recruit actual people and then look
over their shoulders, recording their interactions.” The difficulty with this approach is determining
which users, and how many, to recruit, and how strictly their interactions be guided by the project.266
Of these two options, the latter involves true participation. Users gather information which is
then sent to the specialist attempting to preserve the digital heritage in question. While the first option
involves artificial user participation, arguably it is not participatory because outsiders are inserted into

262
Prodan, 157; Elyse Graham, “Folksonomies: How to Do Things with Words on Social Media,” OxfordWords (blog),
October 30, 2018, https://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2018/10/30/folksonomies-things-words-social-media/; Marziah
Karch, “What Is Folksonomy?,” Lifewire, June 3, 2019, https://www.lifewire.com/what-is-folksonomy-1616321;
Daniel H. Pink, “Folksonomy,” The New York Times, December 11, 2005, sec. Magazine,
https://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/11/magazine/folksonomy.html; Thomas Vander Wal, “Folksonomy,”
Vanderwal.net, February 2, 2007, http://www.vanderwal.net/folksonomy.html; Adam Mathes, “Folksonomies -
Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata,” Adam Mathes, December 2004,
https://adammathes.com/academic/computer-mediated-communication/folksonomies.html.
263
Prodan, “The Digital ‘Memory of the World’: An Exploration of Documentary Practices in the Age of Digital
Technology,” 164–66.
264
Lynch, “Stewardship in the ‘Age of Algorithms.’”
265
Lynch.
266
Lynch.
67
the community, rather than the community itself involved in the participation. Certainly, it does not
involve the practitioners of intangible digital heritage. While there might be times where insertion of
participants from outside the community is warranted, I suggest that seeking within the communities
and understanding their interactions as intangible heritage, and engaging community members
themselves in the preservation process, is a more robust approach. The communities already have
mechanisms in place for transmitting information and maintaining collective memory. The
preservationist would take advantage of that.
With strategy of inclusive and participatory preservation comes the issue of preserving
polyvocality: How to avoid the erasure of many diverse digital communal voices when preserving
digital heritage. In this context, internet memes. As discussed at length above, archiving digital
artifacts separates them from the community context in which they were produced. Doing so mutes
or even erases the distinct voice of that heritage item. Prodan notes that by “digitising the documentary
heritage, bringing it in a digital environment and placing it in databases, we separate it from a context
and embody it in a different one. Intended as tool for universal access, this new digital context is
based on a world view that may not match others.”267 Therefore, digital access “is never culturally or
politically neutral, and thus in order to achieve universal access it might be more appropriate to focus
on culturally meaningful access and by so doing decide which media is appropriate in different
cultural contexts, as opposed to opting for the instrumental worldwide use of digital technology.”268
Ravi Katikala, Kurt Madsen, and Gilberto Mincaye Nenquimo Enqueri make a similar point
in their conference paper “Life at the Edge of the Internet: Preserving the Digital Heritage of
Indigenous Cultures.” They find that if indigenous people find their own way in the digital
environment, “there is potential for the Internet and all commercial interests that come with it to dilute
indigenous cultures.”269 Katikala et al. therefore suggest that NGOs or other specialists whose
interests align with those of the indigenous community provide guidance. However, with this option
comes a danger of paternalism. Namely, it suggests that indigenous people cannot use the digital
world on their own, they must have help from a more powerful institution who knows better than they
do how to proceed. Therefore, I would caution that partnerships between indigenous people or other
heritage group and a heritage institution must be a true partnership, and that power given to the
heritage group. The assumption should be that the heritage group knows best how to preserve their
heritage. They should be the primary stakeholder regarding the management of their heritage.

267
Prodan, “The Digital ‘Memory of the World’: An Exploration of Documentary Practices in the Age of Digital
Technology,” 216–17.
268
Prodan, 217.
269
Katikala, Madsen, and Enqueri, “Life at the Edge of the Internet: Preserving the Digital Heritage of Indigenous
Cultures,” 191.
68
 A difficulty which can arise from this is that there are situations in which the heritage
community promotes ideologies that are morally objectionable to the preservationist and broader
society. The archaeologist Sonya Atalay posits the “Nazi scenario” – should community-based
participatory research of Nazi sites work with neo-Nazis and try to meet the needs of that heritage
community? Or should the researcher only partner with the victims of Nazi ideology or with members
of the local community at the heritage site? 270 Applying this to the issue of internet memes, should
digital preservationists grant stake-holding power to the alt-right community that produce neo-Nazi
internet memes during the 2016 US presidential election? I would contend no – partnerships must
include some moral judgment regarding the heritage to be preserved, as problematic as this might
sometimes be to navigate.
An additional core problem in the preservation of internet memes is privacy and copyright
protection. McGrath notes how it can become “concerning if (or when) you wake up one morning
and find that you or something you’ve created has become a meme. Some subjects of memes have
leveraged their visibility into endorsement deals and other employment opportunities… Others have
taken steps to have images removed or digital distributors of memes legally punished.”271 Individuals
have found themselves trust into the public spotlight after their likeness becomes part of a popular
internet meme.272 And individuals or corporations which hold rights to a piece of media have
sometimes taken legal action against individuals or websites that have shared that media without
permission as an internet meme. For instance, the Awkward Penguin meme was based on an image
from National Geographic and for which Getty Images holds the copyright, and Getty started pursuing
legal action against sites which shared the photo as part of the Awkward Penguin meme.273 And Know
Your Meme includes a frequently updated list of content which was ordered to be taken down due to
copyright violation.274 These enormous legal issues deserve a full treatment which goes well beyond
the size and scope of this thesis. Therefore, I leave this particular problem set for future research, and
will keep this thesis directed to the problem of how to include social context when selecting internet
memes for preservation.

270
Sonya Atalay, Community-Based Archaeology: Research with, by, and for Indigenous and Local Communities
(Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2012), 120.
271
McGrath, “Memes.”
272
Jasmine Garsd, “Internet Memes And ‘The Right To Be Forgotten,’” NPR.org, March 3, 2015,
https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/03/03/390463119/internet-memes-and-the-right-to-be-forgotten.
273
Caitlin Dewey, “How Copyright Is Killing Your Favorite Memes,” Washington Post, September 8, 2015, sec.
Internet Culture, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/09/08/how-copyright-is-killing-your-
favorite-memes/.
274
“KYM Office of Cease & Desist Records | Q & A Discussion,” Know Your Meme, accessed May 21, 2019,
https://knowyourmeme.com/forums/q-a/topics/15676-kym-office-of-cease-and-desist-records.
69
 Section 2: Current Efforts to Preserve Internet Memes
Already, sites such as Know Your Meme try to preserve the history of internet memes and
include selected virtual artifacts.275 And social media sites such as Pinterest and Tumblr rely on human
and computer curatorial efforts to preserve and highlight trending memes.276 There is debate as to the
legitimacy of using the term “curation” for the efforts of many sites. Johnston notes how the term
“curation” is now applied to social media story compilations, music festivals, and brands.277
Christopher Borrelli in an article in The Chicago Tribune explains that “Depending on your
dictionary, a curator can be ‘one who has the care of souls,’ a thoughtful preservationist, or simply
that person who selects a few items out of many possibilities.”278 There is even a Tumblr blog entitled
“Curate Meme” which describes itself as “Where Curators Curate Memes about Curation. Where will
the absurdity of our use of the term Curation go next?”279 Traditionally, as a discipline, digital curation
consists of acquisition, exhibition, and preservation.280 It also maintains, preserves, and adds value to
the lifecycle of digital research data.281 Curation in this sense is not simply collecting for personal
interest, it is an effort to preserve existing knowledge and then make that knowledge available to
present and future generations to further their own knowledge production and codification of memory.
The American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress archives websites that “document
elements of the various digital vernaculars enabled through networked and computer-mediated
communication.”282 The project is intentionally dynamic: “The Web Cultures Web Archive offers a
representative sampling of the collective cultural creation and self-documentation characterizing
vernacular spaces on the World Wide Web, and, like many of those spaces, is in process. The
American Folklife Center will continue to add to these collections, developing archival holdings that

275
Kaitlyn Tiffany, “The Story of the Internet, as Told by Know Your Meme,” The Verge, March 6, 2018,
https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/6/17044344/know-your-meme-10-year-anniversary-brad-kim-interview; Luke
Winkie and Brian McManus, “Memes Have Finally Made It to the Museum,” Vice (blog), September 17, 2018,
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/j54897/memes-have-finally-made-it-to-the-museum.
276
Carina Chocano, “Pinterest, Tumblr and the Trouble With ‘Curation,’” The New York Times, July 20, 2012, sec.
Magazine, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/22/magazine/pinterest-tumblr-and-the-trouble-with-curation.html; Leslie
Johnston, “What Could Curation Possibly Mean?,” The Signal (blog), March 25, 2014,
//blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/2014/03/what-could-curation-possibly-mean/; Vadim Lavrusik, “Tumblr Adds Curated Topic
Pages For Better Content Discovery,” Mashable, December 20, 2010, https://mashable.com/2010/12/20/tumblr-adds-
curated-topic-pages/.
277
Johnston, “What Could Curation Possibly Mean?”
278
Christopher Borrelli, “Everybody’s a Curator,” Chicago Tribune, October 4, 2013,
https://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/ct-xpm-2013-10-04-ct-ae-1006-borrelli-curation-20131004-story.html.
279
“Curate Meme:,” Tumblr (blog), accessed May 22, 2019, https://curatememe.tumblr.com/?og=1.
280
Johnston, “What Could Curation Possibly Mean?”; Doug Reside, “What Is a Digital Curator?,” The New York
Public Library, April 4, 2011, https://www.nypl.org/blog/2011/04/04/what-digital-curator.
281
“What Is Digital Curation?,” Digital Curation Center, accessed May 22, 2019, http://www.dcc.ac.uk/digital-
curation/what-digital-curation.
282
“Web Cultures Web Archive,” Digital Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 20540 USA, accessed
May 21, 2019, https://www.loc.gov/collections/web-cultures-web-archive/about-this-collection/.
70
reflect the dynamic nature of the web itself.”283 To aid in the vast workload inherent in capturing the
cultures and vernacular of the web, The Web Cultures Web Archive received help from scholars and
practitioners of intangible heritage who nominated sites for the inaugural collection.284 Abigail
Grotke, the team leader for web archiving at the Library of Congress is often asked why, if the Internet
Archive tries to archive the entire web, do other institutions archive the web as well? She replies that
No one institution can collect an archival replica of the whole web at the frequency and depth
needed to reflect the true evolution of society, government, and culture online. A hybrid approach is
needed to ensure that a representative sample of the web is preserved, including the complimentary
approaches of broad crawls such as the Internet Archive does, paired with deep, curated collections by
theme or by site, tackled by other cultural heritage organizations.285

The afore mentioned efforts, apart from Know Your Meme and some actions by Twitter and
Pinterest, are toward digital heritage in general. But what of internet memes in particular? While
internet memes are now a topic of academic study, very few individuals or institutions have
investigated internet memes as a form of digital heritage. Ryan M. Milner, author of the book The
World Made Meme, which he developed from his Master’s thesis, has noted the importance of
cataloging internet memes in order to preserve them for future generations. Amanda Brennan
formerly worked for the website Know Your Meme and now functions as a “meme librarian” for the
Tumblr website where she classifies and categorizes internet memes. And Cole Stryker, a blogger
who prefers that profession than academia, authored the book Epic Win for Anonymous: How 4chan's
Army Conquered the Web, which details the history of the website 4chan.286 While Justin Caffier from
the website Vice is almost certainly correct in his assertion that meme historians are an inevitability,
preserving the heritage of internet memes is an effort which is at present still in its infancy.
The majority of preservation work for internet memes is from independent websites such as
the afore mentioned Know Your Meme, which provides encyclopedic entries on internet memes and
“meme museums” with selected virtual artifacts, and Encyclopedia Dramatica, which provides highly
satirical and facetious commentary on internet culture. Both websites allow any user to create an
account and create and edit entries. At Know Your Meme, these entries are then investigated by staff
editors who will then confirm or invalidate the provided information. The Know Your Meme staff
also conduct interviews and Q&As with individuals significant to internet meme cultures.287 There
also is Danqex, a project intended to function as an index of internet meme popularity. The Danqex

283
“Web Cultures Web Archive.”
284
Nicole Saylor, “Getting Serious about Collecting and Preserving Digital Culture,” webpage, Folklife Today (blog),
June 5, 2014, //blogs.loc.gov/folklife/2014/06/getting-serious-about-collecting-and-preserving-digital-culture/.
285
Abbie Grotke, “Web Archiving at the Library of Congress,” Computers in Libraries, December 2011,
http://www.infotoday.com/cilmag/dec11/Grotke.shtml.
286
Caffier, “Meme Historians Are an Inevitability”; Edelstein, “Memes.”
287
“About,” Know Your Meme, accessed May 28, 2019, https://knowyourmeme.com/about.
71
CEO and data head Kyle Stratis describes it as “a stock exchange for memes, with prices determined
not by buying and selling, but by the popularity of a meme on social media.”288 Stratis states that
“Internet memes, and memes in general, are already an area of study today [known as memetics], and
one of the things we are trying to do with Danqex is quantify the different dimensions of memes, with
the first being popularity.”289 Stratis also moderates the Reddit thread r/MemeEconomy, where he
and the rest of the Danqex team first met. r/MemeEconomy also inspired the creation of Meme Insider,
an online magazine dedicated to internet memes and internet culture and with which Danqex
collaborates.290
Even with these existing actions, a key dimension to the required preservation work is missing:
Inclusion of the actual world, not just the virtual. I reiterate my point that to adequately preserve
internet memes, they must be viewed as digitally-entangled artifacts rather than merely digital.
Borglund explains the problem well:
If you apply the current approach to manage records in a hybrid environment you realize that
the records that are captured are only representing the activities in one of the “worlds” either the
physical world or either the digital world. This means that the records captured are not fully
representing all the activities that produce them or they refer to. For example to fully understand how
we as teachers interact with both the campus students and the online students in the blended learning
environment is very complicated if the records captured are not covering the two environments.291

Despite this being a known problem, I have yet to find any major efforts to link the ephemera
of internet memes in the actual world. While there are museum exhibits and art galleries featuring art
based on internet memes, these are artworks created for the displays rather than archaeological
artifacts testifying to past interactions. Archival and documentary preservation work must include the
actual world. Know Your Meme tracks digital history - it does not track history in the actual world.

Conclusion
In this chapter, I looked at some major problems that a heritage specialist must address if they
are trying to preserve internet memes, and then surveyed the existing efforts being made. A central
problem to preserving internet memes is the problem of maintaining cultural context. Allowing the
meaning of the artifact to be retained. Internet memes, like other digital heritage objects, are the result
of cultural interactions through digital technologies. Retaining some semblance of meaning requires
preserving the context of interactions that produced the internet meme in addition to the meme itself.
This is highly difficult – traditional archiving approaches are inadequate, and this is compounded by

288
Spencer Parlier, “Preserving Today’s Marker Of Modern Culture: A Sit Down With a Meme Expert,” Spire
Magazine (blog), March 25, 2018, https://spiremagazine.com/2018/03/25/sit-down-with-a-meme-expert-danqex/.
289
Parlier.
290
Parlier.
291
Borglund, “Challenges to Capture the Hybrid Heritage: When Activities Take Place in Both Digital and Non-Digital
Environments,” 821.
72
the difficulty of accessing digital systems and the impossibility of fully replicating the individualized
experience of digital users. Participatory approaches suggest the way forward.
Currently, few institutions have taken on the task of preserving internet memes specifically.
The majority of such preservation efforts are by independent, private website properties. Some social
media companies, such as Tumblr, Twitter, and Pinterest, also try to preserve some of their trending
memes and other digital content themselves. And I have not found any significant preservation efforts,
even by these companies, which include the actual world in addition to virtual heritage. And including
the actual world is vital to retaining highly important heritage context for many internet memes which
are entangled in both the virtual and actual world.

Chapter 5: Participatory Strategies for Preserving Internet Memes

The previous chapter reviewed the current state of internet meme preservation efforts, some
of the problems those efforts face, and areas where current preservation efforts are lacking. In
particular, the interactive contexts in which internet meme artifacts are produced are often
exceedingly difficult to preserve, and current stewardship and preservationist methods and strategies
are insufficient for this task. Additionally, I have found hardly any effort to preserve actual-world
artifacts pertaining to internet memes, even though it is demonstrable that internet memes are not
confined solely to the virtual. I suggest that participatory strategies for preservation of internet memes
will go a long way in resolving these difficulties.

Section 1: Participatory Strategies and Methods

In the broader field of heritage, professionals and professional organizations increasingly view
heritage as communal identity rather than merely material objects. The material objects are
representation of community values and human identity. Therefore, many heritage preservation
conventions, initiatives, and strategies increasingly seek to involve communities in the heritage
preservation and management processes, if not give managerial authority to the community
themselves. For instance, The Burra Charter from ICOMOS, the Council of Europe’s Framework
Convention on the Value of Cultural Heritage for Society, and ICCROM’s “Promoting People-
Centred Approaches to Conservation: Living Heritage.”292
The virtual world, composed of typically vast networks of people via computers and electronic
transmissions, exemplifies the interactive and participatory nature of heritage. Digital heritage, in this
case, Internet memes, is therefore especially appropriate for experimenting with and implementing

292
Australia ICOMOS and International Council on Monuments and Sites, The Burra Charter, 8; Council of Europe
Framework Convention on the Value of Cultural Heritage for Society (2005); “Promoting People-Centred Approaches
to Conservation.”
73
participatory community models. The very processes of digital preservation and heritage management
can emulate the very participatory processes from which internet memes emerge. This approach not
only preserves the digitally-entangled artifacts themselves but also the participatory processes of
intangible virtual-actual hybrid heritage. In fact, for roughly a decade, the above has been highlighted
by professionals in the digital heritage field. The 2005 UNESCO conference on preserving digital
heritage held at the Hague emphasized the participatory nature of digital heritage and that
preservation efforts would benefit from models which reflect that participation. David Bearman
proposed at that “In a future model of digital selection, the users, rather than cultural heritage
institutions, would select what they wanted to read, view or listen to, and the library, archives or
museums would help provide access, context and interpretation.”293 Abid Abdelaziz noted that
traditional models and hierarchies for preservation and archiving are being called into question and
new, more participatory models arising to take their place.294 William Uricchio developed these ideas
further and proposed that digital heritage is interactive and participatory rather than object-oriented.
He concluded that “by embracing bottom-up dynamics, [archival practices] will better reflect a wide
range of social values, not just the ruling elite. By addressing cultural production that takes place
outside of confines of corporate media, they will assume a much wider range of social granularity.
And by taking advantage of the new affordances of digitally networked culture, they will encourage
widespread participation.”295
Several years later, in 2012 at the UNESCO Memory of the World conference in Vancouver
on the preservation of digital heritage, Kate Hennessy stated that “the complexities of safeguarding
intangible cultural heritage in the digital age are not adequately reflected in current policy documents,
even though the need for stakeholder participation and attention to digital heritage access are
acknowledged.”296 Also at this convention, Ravi Katikala, Kurt Madsen, and Gilberto Mincaye
Nenquimo Enqueri concerned themselves with the preserving the digital heritage of indigenous
people. They proposed “a hybrid approach in which a community receives guidance with digitization
and preservation, generally from non-profit non-governmental organizations (NGOs) whose mission
and values are aligned with the best interest of the indigenous community.”297 The heritage profession
is thus becoming aware of the opportunity that participatory and community-based methods afford
digital preservation efforts, and the potential for experimenting with such models that interactive

293
Bearman, “Addressing Selection and Digital Preservation as Systemic Problems,” 35.
294
Abdelaziz, “Safeguarding Our Digital Heritage: A New Preservation Paradigm,” 12.
295
Uricchio, “Moving beyond the Artifact: Lessons from Participatory Culture,” 24.
296
Hennessy, “The Intangible and the Digital: Participatory Media Production and Local Cultural Property Rights
Discourse,” 63.
297
Katikala, Madsen, and Enqueri, “Life at the Edge of the Internet: Preserving the Digital Heritage of Indigenous
Cultures,” 191.
74
networks afford heritage professionals. The next step is to implement these ideas in daily practice and
integrate them into existing internet meme preservation efforts.
Before I continue further, however, I should first define the terms “participatory” and
community-based.” In Chapter 3, Section 2, I quote Jenkins et al.’s definition of participatory culture,
which I repeat here: “a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement,
strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations, and some type of informal mentorship
whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices. A participatory culture
is also one in which members believe their contributions matter, and feel some degree of social
connection with one another (at the least they care what other people think about what they have
created).”298
This participatory culture takes different forms, which Jenkins et al. categorize:
Affiliations — memberships, both formal and informal, in online communities
centered around various forms of media.
Expressions — production of new creative forms, such as digital sampling, skinning
and modding, fan videomaking, fan fiction writing, zines, mash-ups, etc.
Collaborative Problem-solving — working together in teams, whether formal or
informal, to complete tasks and produce and develop knowledge.
Circulations — Shaping the flow of media299
Since Internet memes are artistic and literary works, they would be categorized as expressions.
They typically are produced through affiliations, primarily informal affiliations on social media and
message board sites. Circulations often then spread internet memes as they emerge. Participatory
preservation efforts would clearly fall under the category of collaborative problem solving. I would
contend that membership in affiliations will greatly aid such efforts.
Sara Radice, a visual and exhibition designer, has described several progressive stages of
social engagement in designs intended to incorporate participatory experiences among visitors.
Although Radice’s model applies to museum or gallery visitors, it can be adapted and applied to
heritage producing communities. In the first stage, indirect social engagement, individuals engage
indirectly with others through the exhibition contents. While the users can see contributions left by
other people, they cannot reply themselves. The second stage is mediated social engagement, in which
individuals seek mediation from other people or from tools designed for the scope of their desired
activity. Users not only can see others contributions but also add their own. At the final stage, direct

298
Jenkins et al., “Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century,” 3.
299
Jenkins et al., 3.
75
social engagement, individuals socialize with each other during their visitation or the cultural
institution’s proposed activities. There is dialogue between users both online and onsite.300
The goal of heritage professionals engaged in participatory preservation would be for their
work to progress into the mediated and direct stages of engagement. “Their” work would no longer
be merely theirs. Radice explains that “when dealing with participation […] professionals should act
more as enablers and facilitators rather than authority figures”301
“Community-based” preservation would be a form of this final stage of direct social
engagement. In Community-Based Archaeology, Sonya Atalay defines community-based
participatory research as community partnerships which are fully participatory and community
driven.302 Community-based research requires a fundamental shift in how research is conducted, and
“necessitates a redistribution of power to disrupt and redirect the way knowledge flows.”303
A consequence of engaging in such community-based participatory approaches to digital
heritage is to center the community rather than the digital technologies. In this approach, the digital
is merely the tool, the heritage value is how communities utilize that tool. Hilary Hughes et al. write
that “in the informal learning setting of a social living lab, technology becomes an enabler rather than
the focus of attention. Digital technologies and social media become the means for communication,
participation and learning rather than objects for testing.”304 By focusing on the community, cultural
and heritage institutions can gain valuable insight into the meaning attached to the artifacts in the care
of the institutions. These meanings could differ from those attached by institution. Radice writes that
“extending the traditional functionalities of virtual exhibitions by letting users contribute in online
collections, for example through public tagging, may disclose public attitudes about the significance
of particular artifacts, which may be dissonant with the meaning attributed by the cultural institution
holding the collection.”305 The participating users therefore are of great help to the heritage
professional. By centering on the community rather than the technology, the professional can better
understand the heritage value of the artifacts under discussion.
If historical documentation and historical narrative are involved, the heritage professional
should “try to balance multivocal content with a comprehensive narrative,” validating and moderating
contributions yet maintaining intelligible and enjoyable narrative threads. They must also be willing

300
Sara Radice, “Design and Participatory Practices Enhancing the Visitor Experience of Heritage,” ICOFOM Study
Series 43, no. a (2015): 254.
301
Radice, 261.
302
Atalay, Community-Based Archaeology, fig. 1.
303
Atalay, 51.
304
Hilary Hughes et al., “Fostering Digital Participation and Communication through Social Living Labs: A Qualitative
Case Study from Regional Australia,” Communication Research and Practice 4, no. 2 (April 3, 2018): 201,
https://doi.org/10.1080/22041451.2017.1287032.
305
Radice, “Design and Participatory Practices Enhancing the Visitor Experience of Heritage,” 256.
76
to deal with contemporary social issues and facilitate dialogue on controversial topics.306 Atalay
stresses that community-based participatory research includes political and socially activist foci.307.
An illustration of the potential for participatory heritage management and the possibility of
bridging the digital-actual divide is provided by the projects The Dark Forest and A Conversation
Between Trees which were facilitated by Rachel Jacobs and Silvia Leal. These projects investigated
the potential of integrated digital participation into school exchanges and public workshops in both
the United Kingdom and Brazil. In The Dark Forest, British school children explored Sherwood
Forest and Brazilian children the Mata Atlântica, where they collected scientific data along with their
physical sensory experiences. This information was then exchanged over the internet between the
students from the respective countries.308 In the next stage, various contemporary art movements were
discussed and how they can help visualize objects and concepts. 309 In the final stage, the Brazilian
students, with contributions from their British project-mates, developed stop motion animations to
help explain the information and experiences that they gathered.310 A Conversation Between the Trees
worked similarly. Students in both countries gathered data with scientific sensors, and then were
asked to gather data from their own human senses. This data was then compared with the scientific
data, and then the students visualized the information with “data maps” constructed out of felt material
provided by artists.311 Concurrent with this project was a touring public exhibition in England with
which visitors could interact.312
In these particular projects, the goal was education in science, technology and the environment
at both local and global scales.313 However, these projects could serve as a model for participatory
approaches toward preserving internet memes, especially to help bridge the virtual-actual gap present
in current digital preservation strategies. Jacobs and Leal emphasized the “human side of the human-
computer relationship, advocating a practice that focuses on people, places, social relations and the
environments we share locally and globally, considered through the lens of a new technical
culture.”314 They note that traditionally, human computer interaction and digital participation “has
focused on the relationship of the users to closed technical objects and interfaces” and helped

306
Radice, 257.
307
Atalay, Community-Based Archaeology, 51.
308
Rachel Jacobs and Silvia Leal, “Chapter 3 - Digital Participation Through Artistic Interventions,” in Digital
Participation through Social Living Labs, ed. Michael Dezuanni et al., Chandos Information Professional Series
(Oxford; Cambridge, Massachusetts: Chandos Publishing, 2018), 40, https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-102059-
3.00003-4.
309
Jacobs and Leal, 43.
310
Jacobs and Leal, 44.
311
Jacobs and Leal, 45.
312
Jacobs and Leal, 46–49.
313
Jacobs and Leal, 40.
314
Jacobs and Leal, 52.
77
participants develop the necessary technical skills to access the requisite technologies. In contrast to
that, Jacobs and Neal sought to return "to the body, our senses and the natural environment, using
technology to help us navigate our emotional and sensory experience of the world,” and accordingly
placed this human experience at the center of the technological development.315 By “bringing together
analogue and digital processes as a physical and embodied sense of scientific data,” Jacobs and Leal
“enabled the children to engage directly and emotionally with the technology, developing ‘human
scale’ experiences of how the technology worked.”316

Section 2: Obstacles to Participation

If the digital preservationist wants to begin facilitating participatory community-based
preservation, several obstacles must be acknowledged and strategies developed to counter them. As
mentioned in the previous chapter, when preserving or publishing user-generated content as cultural
heritage, proper handling of ownership issues is critical.317 However, as I also mentioned, ownership
and copyright law is worthy of an entire paper in its own right, and I will devote no further attention
to this particular issue. For the purposes of this paper, I will presume that all copyright laws and
ownership claims have been met satisfactorily.
One obstacle is the establishment of workable evaluation standards. Radice points out that
“the lack of good evaluation is probably the greatest contributing factor to slow acceptance and use
of participatory projects in the […] field.”318 Fortunately, participatory projects do not necessitate any
fundamentally different evaluation techniques, although they require utilization of more than just
traditional methods that concentrate on outputs rather than impact. While traditional product-focused
and quantitative evaluation methods are still useful, a participatory approach relies more on process-
focused and qualitative methods. These latter methods measure if the project succeeded for all
involved, participants and non-participants alike as well as visitors and institutional staff members.
Particular emphasis is placed on the participants’ behavior and the impact of the participatory actions
taken. It measures what participants did and describes what happened as a result of participation.319
Another obstacle which must be considered is breakdowns in the participation process.
Miriana Salgado, at the 7th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, states that

315
Jacobs and Leal, 52.
316
Jacobs and Leal, 46.
317
Mariana Salgado, “Breakdowns in Participation. A Case Study in the Museum,” in Proceedings of the 7th Nordic
Conference on Human-Computer Interaction: Making Sense Through Design Copenhagen, Denmark, vol. Workshop
Proceedings (7th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction: Making Sense Through Design Copenhagen,
Denmark, New York: Association for Computing Machinery, 2012), 4,
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/234162706_Breakdowns_in_Participation_A_Case_Study_in_the_Museum.
318
Radice, “Design and Participatory Practices Enhancing the Visitor Experience of Heritage,” 260.
319
Radice, 260–61.
78
“Participation breakdowns were often observed when the museum community as a whole was not
being considered in the planning, production and final exhibition.”320 When this occurs, a chain-
reaction of effects often follow, which affects not just those marginalize during the preparation and
showing process of the exhibition. A common example of this is when museum exhibition or
custodial personnel, or both, and external partners (in the form of exhibition planners and designers)
become disconnected. Exhibition personal then find it difficult to properly explain exhibitions to, and
connect with and inspire, visitors of these exhibits.321 Also, educational activities held in the museum,
such as workshops, in most instances did not boost interaction with pieces in the museum. The content
created in the workshops remained separate from the interactive pieces.322 Yet another major
challenge was providing accessible interfaces to a diverse range of museum visitors.323 Finally, it was
difficult to inspire visitors to submit content not already seen on the internet. “Visitors,” observed
Salgado, “do not consider themselves as potentially important exhibition contributors, and assume a
passive receiver role.”324
Salgado concluded that to overcome these breakdowns in participation, the museum must
collaborate with the “community as a whole, involving external partners, co-designing with them,
allowing new formats, changing passive attitudes, and aiming for transparent participation terms.”325
Radice likewise noticed that there is a “need for a greater understanding of the relationships and
possible synergies between the different emerging digital technologies to meet visitors’ expectations
of experiencing heritage in an active way thanks to the integrated use of diverse media in a continuum
of actual and virtual spaces.”326 I submit that a community-based approach to participatory digital
heritage preservation will go a long way at meeting these goals.
As has been already noted, a community-based participatory approach necessitates social
activism, power sharing, and polyvocality. Unfortunately, the cultures of digital interaction and the
internet often resist inclusivity and democratic social structures. Matthew Hindman in The Myth of
Digital Democracy explains that despite claims that the digital interaction and internet are
democratizing societies and institutions,
the Internet diverges from much of what political scientists have grown to expect from the
literature on political behavior. In many avenues of political participation, scholars have noted that
once initial barriers to participation are overcome, citizen’s voices get considered relatively equally…
Direct political speech on the Internet… does not follow these relatively egalitarian patterns. If we
look at citizens’ voices in terms of the readership [emphasis original] their postings receive, political

320
Salgado, “Breakdowns in Participation. A Case Study in the Museum,” 3.
321
Salgado, 3.
322
Salgado, 4.
323
Salgado, 4.
324
Salgado, 4.
325
Salgado, 4.
326
Radice, “Design and Participatory Practices Enhancing the Visitor Experience of Heritage,” 253.
79
 expression online is orders of magnitude more unequal than the disparities we are used to in voting,
volunteer work, and even political fund-raising.327

During a 2006 e-seminar, the social anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen noted that in
online interaction, “Symbols matter, meanings travel fast, and complexity tends to be reduced in
global cyberspace. Nuances also disappear in Internet-based communication about nationhood.”328
This results in the flattening of complex issues and loss of diverse voices. “The fast electronic media,
perhaps especially the Internet, are eminently suitable for that reduction of complexity which is
commonly associated with nationalist ideology and other forms of identity politics. Debates can easily
be hijacked by extremists presenting themselves as ‘typical’ or ‘the voice of the common people’.”329
While “Complex identites [sic] are often difficult to defend in entrenched nationalist public spaces,”
the internet, particularly the World Wide Web, “easily accommodates them, not the least because it
is deterritorialised.”330 A prime example of this is the case presented in Chapter 3 of the alt-right co-
opting Pepe the Frog into a white nationalist and white supremacist symbol and the actual world
political influence that this effected. Pepe became “a host for alternative right-wing ideology,
traveling much more widely and affecting a much larger Internet and mainstream media demographic
than it could ever had through traditional methods.”331 The “Nazi” scenario posited by Atalay is thus
not merely hypothetical when dealing with virtual heritage. It is a very real problem, both with literal
Nazis and white supremacists and more broadly with extremism in general. An internet meme
preservationist must take an activist stance to ensure that polyvocality, diversity, and power sharing
in both the management strategies and historical narratives are accomplished. They also must exercise
moral judgment and exclude voices which would seek to do harm to the project or to individuals or
communities in broader society.

Section 3: Proposals
Based on the exploratory research above, I can formulate some proposals for internet meme
preservation efforts to consider. In particular, I focus on the problem of selecting memes for
preservation. As discussed in Chapter 4, raw archives are the necessary first step in the preservation
process. The next step is decision making processes to sift through ever-increasing digital content and

327
Matthew Hindman, The Myth of Digital Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 17.
328
Thomas Hylland Eriksen, “Response to Mirca Madianou,” May 23, 2006. In “E-Seminar on Thomas H. Eriksen’s
Working Paper ‘Nations in Cyberspace’” (EASA Media Anthropology Network e-Seminar Series, 2006), 6,
http://www.media-anthropology.net/eriksen_eseminar.pdf.
329
Eriksen, “Response to Mirca Madianou.” In “E-Seminar on Thomas H. Eriksen’s Working Paper ‘Nations in
Cyberspace,’” 6.
330
Eriksen, “Response to Mirca Madianou.” In “E-Seminar on Thomas H. Eriksen’s Working Paper ‘Nations in
Cyberspace,’” 7.
331
Pelletier-Gagnon and Pérez Trujillo Diniz, “Colonizing Pepe,” 13.
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select which artifacts and contextual material to remember and which to allow to be forgotten. It is
on this stage that my proposals concentrate. These proposals are not meant to be stand-alone, but as
combined tools. Any one recommendation may be more or less relevant to the task at hand than
another.
Proposal 1: Public tagging or “folksonomy.” This was mentioned in the previous chapter as
a recommendation by Prodan. Referencing Adam Mathes, she explains that “an important aspect of
a folksonomy is that the terms are placed in a flat namespace, without hierarchy or directly specified
relationships between the terms.”332 They are dynamic and change as popular interests change. When
applied to internet memes, these types of metadata tags can aid in determining the popularity of
particular memes and have them accessed for heritage value. They can also guide understanding of
how the internet memes are valued – how are they tagged? What is deemed significant? Lastly, these
tags can inform how internet memes are categorized and accessed within an archive or other form of
record. The dynamic nature of public allows for a continuous participatory process and constant re-
evaluation of the heritage in question. The different stages and eras of valuation are recorded and
preserved. Particular periods of time can be record, and these archival slices of a particular time
evaluated against each other and against the latest iteration of the ongoing process. This information
can then be discussed among participants and consensus reached regarding which internet memes to
select for longer-term preservation.
Proposal 2: Social living labs. The definitions of living labs and social living labs are
numerous, although they all describe as similar concept. Seppo Leminen in an article in Technology
Innovation Management Review identifies some twelve definitions. The one which I find most useful
is the following: “Physical regions or virtual realities, or interaction spaces, in which stakeholders
form public-private-people partnerships (4Ps) of companies, public agencies, universities, users, and
other stakeholders, all collaborating for creation, prototyping, validating, and testing of new
technologies, services, products, and systems in real-life contexts.”333 With this definition, living labs
have seven characteristics. 1. They take place in a real-life environment. 2. Participation takes place
as public-private-people partnerships. 3. Users, especially citizens and consumers, are emphasized.
4. They are not testbeds, field trials, or pilot projects. They involve experiential learning and creative
input of a more mature nature than might be gained from in-house experiments in research and

332
Prodan, “The Digital ‘Memory of the World’: An Exploration of Documentary Practices in the Age of Digital
Technology,” 157.
333
Mika Westerlund and Seppo Leminen, “Managing the Challenges of Becoming an Open Innovation Company:
Experiences from Living Labs,” Technology Innovation Management Review 1, no. 1 (2011): 20; Seppo Leminen,
“Q&A. What Are Living Labs?,” Technology Innovation Management Review 5, no. 9 (2015): 29; Pieter Ballon, Jo
Pierson, and Simon Delaere, “Test and Experimentation Platforms for Broadband Innovation: Examining European
Practice,” SSRN Scholarly Paper (Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network, September 4, 2005), 15–17,
https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=1331557.
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development, but less mature than would be found after a pilot project. 5. They involve multiple
stakeholders. 6. The stakeholders involved take on multiple roles. 7. Living labs are collaborations
between stakeholders. They are committed to open innovation.334
As was mentioned in both of the previous sections of this chapter, to successfully understand
and preserve the social contexts which produce internet memes, preservationist strategies must allow
for a multitude of voices from, and form partnerships between, heritage stakeholders. Bearman,
Abdelaziz, and Urrichio over ten years ago stressed the necessity of bottom-up, user-centered
approaches to digital preservation, recommendations which should be implemented in internet meme
preservation efforts. Indeed, independent preservationist efforts such as those by Know Your Meme
rely heavily on user participation. A danger to be confronted, which Hindman and Eriksen have noted,
is that online interaction is particularly susceptible to extremism and the privileging of only a few
voices out of many. Social living labs would help address both issues. They would facilitate
discussions between the heritage professionals, institutions, heritage communities, and possibly
visitors to a potential heritage exhibition or museum, and thus help shift preservationist approaches
to user-generated. Development would consider all stakeholders, not just those of the institution or
heritage professionals, and therefore help break-down hierarchical relationships that would hinder
participation. By including voices from different communities and segments within communities, the
tendencies toward extremism, loss of nuance, and lack of diversity in digital interaction can be
mitigated.
Proposal 3: Continuous professionally facilitated dialogue between heritage community
members, professionals, along with dialogue between communities. Unlike a one-time living lab,
discussions are continuous and ongoing. An example of how this can take place is the Creative
Community Committee at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History. This is “a large, diverse group
that meets bi-monthly or quarterly for a highly specific brainstorming session, inviting people to
cross-pollinate and share ideas.”335 Radice considers it “a model for museums that need practical tools
to identify the needs of their communities and better understand who is and is not represented in the
museum.”336 The discussions envisioned by my proposal implement the bottom-up, user-oriented
recommendations discussed in Section 1 of this chapter, and also help with the concerns mentioned
in Section 2 regarding the need to ensure polyvocality and diversity.
Proposal 4: Collection of multi-media and actual world artifacts. Chapters 2 and 3 illustrated
that internet memes frequently transcend the digital. This should not be surprising, since Borglund,

334
Leminen, “Q&A. What Are Living Labs?,” 29–30.
335
Radice, “Design and Participatory Practices Enhancing the Visitor Experience of Heritage,” 258–59.
336
Radice, 259.
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Banks, and Jurgenson demonstrate that often the “digital” is a hybrid of digital and non-digital
interaction. Because internet memes are not confined to the virtual, preservation efforts must include
the additional forms of media and objects that the meme occurs in. Material such as t-shirts, posters
and signage, stickers, and other paraphernalia must be included, along with video, audio, or other
recorded media should be considered. The search for and collection and assessment of these materials
would take place through participatory methods such as crowdsourcing, citizen science, and social
living labs.
Proposal 5: Documentation of oral histories and testimonies. Oral histories and personal
testimonies would capture important contextual information of internet memes and supplement
digital and archaeological documentation. It would preserve samplings of individual experiences with
internet memes, the sensations and emotions accompanying personal interactions with memes. This
would be of particular advantage with what Banks calls “performative memes” such as planking,
dancing the “Gangnam Style” dance, or the ALS Ice-bucket challenge, which were mentioned in
Chapters 2 and 3. While photographic and video evidence can document how these memes were often
performed, they do not relate the emotional and sensory experience of those memes. And references
to internet memes in jokes or conversations shared between friends, co-workers, or colleagues would
require oral histories and testimonies in order to document. Chapter 4 noted that many heritage
professionals view digital heritage as intangible cultural heritage. Existing methods for preserving
the memories, stories, and practices of intangible heritage traditions can be carried over to internet
meme preservation.
Proposal 6: Participatory heritage planning and management. In Section 1 of this chapter, I
provide Atalay’s definition of a community-based participatory approach: community partnerships
which are fully participatory and community driven. Salgado, whom I quote in Section 2, observes
observed that breakdowns in participation frequently take place if the whole museum community is
not involved in the planning and production stages of an exhibit, not just the exhibition stage.
Therefore, the participatory process should not be confined merely to the search for heritage items
and assessing their value. The entire process – for instance, strategic planning, archival strategies,
workshop design, the structuring of the discussions – should consist of community-based
participation. At every point of the management cycle, the heritage professional is a facilitator of
community discussion.
Proposal 7: Participant-driven recruitment. This proposal is similar to that of Proposal 6. As
noted in that above proposal, a fully participatory community-based approach would center the
heritage communities in the entire preservationist and management processes. This would include the
cycles of recruitment and enrollment of additional participants in the preservation project. While

83
heritage professionals might need to take the initiative in encouraging and recruiting community
members to participate in the heritage preservation processes, ideally, once the projects have begun,
the participants will drive future recruitment and enrollment. They will seek out additional
community members and facilitate further discussion.
Proposal 8: Participant-driven education, learning, and training. Heritage preservation
requires numerous skill and knowledge sets. Participants will need to learn the requisite skills needed
to accomplish their goals, as well as to be able to set goals in the first place. In Section 2 of Chapter
3, I quote Jenkins et al.’s definitions and descriptions of participatory culture. Notably, they explain
that a participatory culture includes “some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by
the most experienced is passed along to novices.”337 Educational roles – albeit an informal sort – are
therefore natural to participants in a participatory culture. And the projects by Jacobs and Leal
described in Section 1 of this section reveal how a participatory approach can function as a powerful
aid to learning. A participatory community-based model will thus inherently, as a participatory
culture, contain informal learning, and, assisted by heritage and educational specialists, will aid in
more formal education of participants. Through these formal and informal mechanisms, participants
will participate in education and training of new participants, training them in the requisite skill,
knowledge, and strategies. And, as full participants in the preservation and management cycles, they
will partake in the development of learning objectives and strategies, develop curriculums, and
identify missing or deficient skill and knowledge sets.

Conclusion

In this thesis paper I explored the concept of internet memes as heritage, their need for
preservation, and how participatory community-based approaches are necessary. Specifically, I
concentrated on process of selecting which internet memes to preserve. My research was mostly of
an exploratory nature. I sought to understand what exactly internet memes are, how they can hold
heritage value, the present efforts to preserve internet memes, and potentials for how to develop the
efforts further. I then briefly outlined some recommendations. With more research, these
recommendations could be further developed and then tested for viability and practicality.
In the first chapter of my thesis, I studied the concept of memes in general and the origins of
that concept. Although the concept and nature of memes are highly debated, essentially a meme is a
“copy-me,” a cultural, that is, a non-genetic, replicator spread through imitation. Many scholars
criticize or resist of the idea of memetics for numerous reasons. Some do so because they believe that

337
Jenkins et al., “Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century,” 3, 7.
84
memes are “Lamarckian” and therefore scientifically invalid. Others argue that they are scientifically
invalid because memes have not been empirically demonstrated as material objects, unlike with
genes. Lastly, many scholars find the concept largely unnecessary. Notably, some of the scholars in
this last category criticize memes from a semiotic perspective. They contend that memes are merely
what semiotics calls signs and sign processes.
I need not pick a side in the debate. My intent for the chapter was to understand the basic idea
of a meme as the root concept of internet memes. From this, I concluded that internet memes must be
understood as not merely virtual objects. They are virtually tangible expressions of intangible cultural
interactions through networks of electronic communication. The interaction is what makes an internet
meme a meme.
In the second chapter, I defined internet memes, gave a brief timeline of their formation and
emergence, and provided some examples of particularly famous internet memes. The memes
discussed constitute a nearly infinitesimally small sample of the vast ocean of internet memes. My
inclusion of them was to demonstrate how quickly they can rise to massive popularity, fame and
influence. A highly successful meme will often spawn further memes, and can wield significant social
impact even beyond the virtual.
The third chapter explored the social impact of memes in more depth. It examined internet
memes as agents in, and creations of, community formation and how they can transcend the virtual
to influence society and politics as hybrid virtual-actual expressions of ideas and values. Behind the
internet meme artifact lies deep social context. Isolating an internet meme from that context severs
the artifact from its meaning.
In Chapter 4, I explained that if a digital heritage specialist seeks to preserve internet memes,
it is critical that they remember the relevance of social context. Of course, the artifacts themselves, in
order to be preserved, must be selected and preserved as digital objects. It is the communities which
formed through the creation of and interaction with these objects which grants the objects heritage
value. If the heritage value is to be preserved, the social context of participatory digital communities
must be retained as much as is feasible. Since internet memes transcend the digital, these preservation
efforts must do likewise. The various forms of actual media, products, and other material objects
which involve an internet meme must be preserved, as must documentation of performative aspects
of a meme, should those exist. Currently, only a few institutions have focused on preserving internet
memes specifically. The majority of the preservation work is from independent, private website
properties. And even with these companies, hardly any preservation efforts include the artifacts and
interactions from the actual world in addition to the virtual, despite many internet memes being hybrid
virtual-actual, or digitally-entangled, artifacts.

85
 A core problem to preserving internet memes is therefore the problem of retaining the
contextual information and meaning of the artifact, especially that of the actual world. To preserve
some semblance of meaning, the context of interactions that produced the internet meme must also
be preserved, not just the artifact itself. This task is enormous. Traditional archival approaches are
largely inadequate, and this difficulty compounds with the problem of accessing digital systems as
well as the impossibility of fully replicating the billions of individualized experiences of digital users.
A further complication is that in the virtual world, complexity tends to be reduced and nuances
disappear. This results in the flattening of complex issues and loss of diverse voices, and fosters
extremism. A prime example of this is the case of Pepe the Frog and how alt-right users co-opted the
meme to suit their white nationalist and supremacist political agenda, with implications in the actual
world. The hypothetical “Nazi” scenario mentioned by Atalay is therefore no longer hypothetical for
an internet meme preservationist. To avoid extremism and the loss of diversity and plurality in the
heritage narrative of a given internet meme, a preservationist must act with professional and moral
judgment.
Multiple specialists have noted that digital heritage is intangible cultural heritage. Techniques
for preserving the complex social contexts of intangible heritage can thus serve digital heritage
specialists. Both non-digital intangible cultural heritage and digital heritage, in this case, internet
memes, are participatory. They are continuous traditions in which contemporary members partake of
and contribute to. In chapter 5, I submit that a model of “participation as preservation” suggests a
way forward for selecting internet memes for preservation. The heritage professional becomes a
facilitator of discussions between, and participations of, specialists and the members of the various
heritage communities of which internet memes are the artifactual expressions.
From the knowledge gained in my research, I suggest eight ideas to consider for the task of
selecting internet memes for preservation: 1) public tagging; 2) social living labs; 3) continuous
professionally facilitated dialogue between heritage community members, professionals, along with
dialogue between communities; 4) collection of multi-media and actual world artifacts, 5)
documentation of oral histories and testimonies 6) participatory heritage planning and management;
7) participant-driven recruitment; 8) and participant-driven education, learning, and training.
Internet memes are the result of fluid and continuing social interaction and communal
formation and reformation. They evolve and morph as the community voices do, the alterations to
the memes a testament to the ongoing interactive activity. Including the relevant heritage
communities as full and equal participants in the selection processes for internet meme preservation
ensures that the participatory culture in which internet memes are embedded is preserved along with
the digitally-entangled internet meme artifacts themselves. Yet, the best advantage of a participatory

86
community-based approach is that it does not just aid specialists in preserving the heritage meaning
for particular artifacts. It also acknowledges that the heritage communities are what give meaning and
value to the artifacts in the first place and it empowers these communities to preserve what is
meaningful to them.

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Zeijden, Albert van der. “A Participatory Approach to Visualising The Craft of the Miller.” In Visualization
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