Not Sure If Brilliant or Merely Pedestrian: Toward a Rhetoric of the Meme by Phill Alexander
Figure 4: the original LolCat, taken from the website named for it
the base unit of cultural formation and change. It is a “replicator” that accounts for both continuity and variation in words, styles, ideas…memes are subject to the possibility of constant mutation as they pass from person to person and media to media. (111).
He added to this by stating that “the activity of the replicator is essentially to make copies of itself. Variation may or may not occur in such replication” (111). These moves make the meme a bit easier to digest for the non-scientist, someone less concerned with equations. Fuller’s definition also makes the link between what Dawkins and Blackmore talk about and something like LolCats, a collection of cat-related memes meant almost entirely to make people laugh, much clearer: the focus is on the replication. In this sense one might even simplify memetics so much as to compare it to a copy machine in a standard office: copies usually look “about” the same as the original, but there’s a slight degradation in quality (particularly for images, or if something else gets on the screen) that will continue each time the item is copied from a copy. Memes replicate and change, but they only change as a result of modification while copying.
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In a 2004 piece in the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, Yuzuru Tanaka, Kimihito Ito and Daisuke Kurosaki wrote of “Meme media architectures for re-editing and redistributing intellectual assets over the Web.” This piece uses memetics in a straight-forward but useful way: the authors assert the value of a system that would allow users to create content in one place then publish in multiple places. While the authors could not have anticipated what exists now (since web technology has exploded in the 11 years since the piece was written), I believe what they theorize and propose in this article is one step removed from services like Digg or Glue, where the idea of a filter website is modified into a sort of catch-all replicator, or a collaborative meme basket, if one wishes to get creative with terms. It likewise invokes those apps that so many use which post status messages across social media at the same time (you know who you are, people who post the exact same status update to Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter).
Another place where memetics is hinted at is in Bronwyn Williams’s (2008) “What South Park Character Are you?” Williams used Henry Jenkins (2006, 2008) as a focal lens, thinking about how the concept of convergence culture-- assertion that digital media—television, radio, internet, gaming, texting, etc.—all converge in a prosumer cultural mix, wherein users both consume and create, within a large pool--and popular media shape student use of social networking sites. What is in the text but not teased out in this specific way (due no doubt only to the focus Williams chose) is that students, through their participation in convergence culture, do memetic work. The same could be said for C&C articles like “Palin/Pathos/Peter Griffin” by Abby Dubisar and Jason Palmeri (2010) and even “’Twilight is so anti-feminist that I want to cry:’ Twilight fans finding and defining feminism on the World Wide Web” by Sarah Summers (2010).