Not Sure If Brilliant or Merely Pedestrian: Toward a Rhetoric of the Meme by Phill Alexander

Figure 1: April 1st, 2008: YouTube Rickrolls Everyone

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This is a story about realizing the value of ubiquitous memes and letting lolCats lead to lasting learning. Consider it a 2015 love song to social networking as literate practice. It all starts innocently enough, just a boy and his Rick Astley clips.

I was teaching genre, and my first-year writing students were struggling a bit to understand my “as Carolyn Miller (1984) said, genres are about social action” way of defining genres in practice. They were struggling even more with that reading itself, so I promised them I’d find something they were more familiar with to explain how social use alters genre.
  
So I Rickroll’d my students. Right there in the middle of the afternoon.

Rickrolling, for those who might not be familiar, is the practice of sending a video or other link which either leads to Rick Astley’s performance of “Never Gonna Give You Up” or even better to a video that begins normally then suddenly springs Rick Astley upon the audience like a fake can of nuts with a spring snake inside. The Rickroll, I explained to my students, is an example of an internet meme: a formulaic replication and retransmission of someone’s original Rick Astley prank, an action that turns a “music video” by genre classification into something else—a meme, an interesting game of one-up and mischief, a practical joke— as the video is no longer meant to be consumed and enjoyed as it once was but has rather been transformed by action into a gotcha, a punch-line, or worse, a punishment. The Rickroll, like any meme, begins and spreads, changing slightly but retaining its basic structure. It might come at different times, in different ways, for different durations, but if you’ve been Rickroll’d, eventually “you’re no stranger to love/you know the rules/and so do I (do I).”