"Mimetics as Digital Culture"

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About the Author

Jacklyn Heslop has her B.A from California State University, Stanislaus and is currently working on her M.A in English with a special emphasis on rhetoric and the teaching of writing at the same institution. She hopes to continue on to her PhD in order to continue her studies into memetics and/or writing centers. In addition to those already stated, her research interests are multimodal pedagogy, digital and visual rhetorics, and alternative forms of assessment (specs/contract grading).

Contents

Introduction

The Enthymeme: Filling in Missing Pieces

Cultural Inheritance: Darwin to Digital Rhetoric

Meme Creation and Reproduction

Enthymemes and Visual: Is There an Argument?

Reading the Meme

Conclusion: The Start of a Memetic Enthymeme

Works Cited

Introduction

We live in a digital landscape where most communication for the younger generation is aided by technology, specifically social media. News feeds, or social updates with occasional links to informational media, are filled with digitally mediated conversations that occur through words, images, or often a mixture of the two. Nearly every computer-savvy person knows of the heated debates and vulgar insults thrown out in the comment section of controversial or trending posts; yet, these have not been a source of serious study for argumentation theorists. While underexposed as a valuable source of communication, rhetoric has changed as a result of the reliance of impersonal modes of argument on social media and digital platforms.

The advent of the internet created a space for global communication that transcends time and location. One of the most common features of the internet era is the “meme.” Although typically thought of as a funny picture connected with a particular phase, “A meme is the simplest unit of cultural replication,” and as a result “Human development is a process of being loaded with, or infested by, large numbers of memes” (Bacalu 154). Memes, or memetics, are often known as simple phrases, referential images or videos, yet performances or “behaviors for collective appreciation” become “units” of our collective culture (Milner 18). For example, when a friend is known for an idiosyncratic tick, such as “talking” with their hands or nodding their head like a chicken, this behavior becomes “memetic” and will be associated with them. On a larger scale, memes become cultural references as populations mimic behaviors or images that work to reference established norms, thus becoming ingrained as traditionally appropriate behavior.

Memetics cover a lot of cultural landscape, but linguistic and visual memes flood our daily lives, so much so that their linguistic, and by extension their rhetorical value, needs to be explored further. In this paper, I aim to explore the creation of memetic media and compare the features of the internet meme to Aristotle’s concept of the enthymeme. My desire is to demonstrate the obvious links between the two that have, so far, lacked explicit exploration.