"Mimetics as Digital Culture"

Download PDF

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

Cultural Inheritance: Darwin to Digital Rhetoric

Moving away from Aristotle’s enthymeme, the concept of meme originated, surprisingly, with biologist Richard Dawkins. While his book The Selfish Gene focuses primarily on the replication of genetic material, his last chapter “Memes: The New Replicators” attempts to explain the evolution of culture. Dawkins conflates his understanding of biological evolution with cultural evolution. He argues that “Cultural transmission is analogous to genetic transmission in that, although basically conservative, it can give rise to a form of evolution” (Dawkins 203). Dawkins is a Darwinian biologist, who believes that:

The new soup [referencing allele pools] is the soup of human culture. We need a name for the new replicator, a noun which conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. “Mimeme” comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like ‘gene.’ I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I appreciate to meme. If it is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related to “memory,” or the French word même [same]. (206)

Before continuing with my discussion of meme history, I must digress into an explanation of Darwin’s theory of evolution. Evolution is the rise of a new species, which, when simplified, means a population of sexually reproducing individuals that cannot cross-breed with another population. Dawkins exemplifies this cultural evolution by explaining that Chaucer's Middle English would be incomprehensible to a modern Englishman, and vice versa; Chaucer would not recognize standard English (203). If those from the Medieval age were to be alive today, there would be limited communication between the two parties, meaning all involved would be unable to replicate ideas, behavior, and/or beliefs within each population. Darwin’s theory of evolution revolves around the drift between viable genetic exchanges through some kind of isolation, whether that be time, space, or internal mechanisms such as behaviors. Thus cultural evolution occurs when a group speciates, or becomes a unique species, promoting quick growth in what we recognize as culture.

Dawkins uses “mimeme,” the Greek word for imitation, shortened to meme to explain how ideas, pictures, or phrases “propagate themselves by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in a sense, can be called imitation” (203). He demonstrates the memetic process through a scholar discovering an interesting fact and sharing it with his colleges or in his lectures, and, once it is shared, that piece of information “parasitizes” the host (207). Memes, for Dawkins, act as a viral component that enter into the audience’s mind, non-consensually infecting the individuals. Once infected, the individuals cannot separate their understanding of the cultural unit from themselves. Inheritable material, such as genes, are non-negotiable pieces that constructs his or her physical traits; memes, as cultural units, then make up one’s cultural inheritance impacting their speech, behaviors, and frames of reference. One is born into a family and cannot separate their genetic inheritance from their physical selves, and memetics follow the same logic. Once one is infected with a specific cultural unit, there is almost no way to uninitiate the self as a replicator.

Dawkins’ memetic process does have its limitations defined primarily by the time it was written. Published in 1976, he claims that the ability for memes to replicate is limited by computer space (211). In the 1970s, download speeds were slow, and the space on hard drives restricted the amounts of information one could access. Because of this, Dawkins’s understanding of what makes a meme has not been ignored; instead, he provides a historical understanding. Going forward, this paper’s analysis is rooted in the ideas of digital rhetorics, the work that studies “meaning-making, persuasion or identification as expressed through language, bodies, machines, and text that created, circulated, or experienced through or regarding digital technologies” (Hoss 6). The same as with Dawkins’s original idea, the lenses inspired by digital rhetoric argue for the participatory nature that, when applied to memes, explains the potential for unregulated authorship and recreations that occur regardless of space or time.

At the start of Bill Wasik’s book And Then There’s This, he coins the term “nanostory” to describe the viral nature of fads and the lifespan of internet content (5). He furthers this idea arguing “the Internet is revolutionary in how it has democratized not just culture-making but cultural monitoring, giving individual creators a profusion of data with which to identify trends surrounding their own work and that of others” (Wisik 14). Because memetic spread takes place throughout digital spaces, meme culture means people see and recreate using established templates to further their participation within the culture of the digital era. Digital culture, as I will continue to discuss, encompasses the spaces where digital communication and identity are formed. Gamers, content creators, “influencers,” and other identity groups that fall under the umbrella of digital culture act as subcultures that establish and “enforce” their own rules, roles, and regulations. For the purpose of this study, the focus on digital meme culture, otherwise referred to as Internet memetics, deals with memes that allow users to “signify communal belonging” (Nissenbam and Shifman 485). In all, much of digital culture and the media housed on various platforms revolve around this ability to establish ideas or forms, reproduce content, then die as quickly as it began. Meme templates, the form/structure they take, become the cultural units Dawkins establishes, but “speciation” occurs at an alarming rate because viral popularity saturates the space’s consciousness leaving little room for individuals to recreate in order to “signify” their belonging.

Similar to Wasik, the authors of “Internet Memes as Contested Cultural Capital: The Case of 4chan’s /b/board” believe that digital meaning-making “function[s] as cues of membership, distinguishing in-group members from mere passerbyers” (Nissenbam and Shifman 485). Nissenbam and Shifman further their analysis to argue that Internet memes have now become a form of cultural capital, referring to Bourdieu’s work on one’s ability to demonstrate their understanding of a culture and secure their membership within it (Nissenbam and Shifman 498). While they clarify that memes are unstable cultural capital, they establish that their instability is what allows members to continually redesign, and thus reinforce the required knowledge to belong to the “in-group” (498). In his chapter, “Critique of Digital Reason,” David Gunkel theorizes that digital reason belongs to the post-structural and postmodern critiques in order to argue that the rapid expansion of technology endangers reason and demonstrates that once qualified, it loses meaning. When conflated with Nissenbam and Shifman’s claim of unstable cultural capital, the viral nature of memetic media could be short-lived thanks to the tendency for more mainstream groups to expect rational, organized discourse, at least in the sense of what is comprehensible to the average demographic of the community.

For example, and in an attempt to move toward this study’s purpose, an internet meme is “a group of digital items sharing common characteristics...which were created with awareness of each other, and were circulated, imitated, and/or transformed via the Internet by many users” (Shifman qtd by Milner 14). Each meme is imitated through an awareness of and adherence to a particular style, which can include: the tone in which the words/phrases are to be read, placement of words, font and text size, as well as image format (quality, GIF/standard image, etc.). All memetic media imitates established behaviors or beliefs of a certain group. Internet culture pulls images from popular sources, such as social media, to reference relatable struggles or mock what it deems as inappropriate behaviors.