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

A photo of Willie Wonka with the text'I can see you're upset. Maybe you should post more about it on Facebook. That should eliminate any drama.'

Figure 7: Another Sarcastic Wonka, taken from Quickmeme


While I wouldn’t attempt to claim that the changing nature of memes isn’t present in all of the literature I’ve reviewed (because it is), I would argue that in the more scientific study of memetics the “mutation” is the sort of “ends,” meaning that a meme proceeds to a moment of mutation then isn’t the meme anymore, and the bulk of the researcher’s focus is on the replicating machine itself. The mutations, however, are much more valuable to the rhetorician than to the scientist in most cases. A mutated idea is not a flaw, or a mistake, or even evolution in the biological sense; it is creativity and the application of new knowledge to redirect the memetic action. This is why there isn’t a legion of people making the same identical Sarcastic Wonka, but rather each person generates something new. Sarcastic Wonka wants more Sarcastic Wonkas. It doesn’t care, in particular, for society to generate the perfect Uber Sarcastic Wonka. The meme becomes particularly useful as an observational unit when married to activity theory. While activity theory finds its initial roots in psychology, I believe the observational units it described and the processes it stressed are conducive to the study of memes. In its most useful form for my purposes, activity theory, via Victor Kaptelinin and Bonnie Nardi (1996), looks at how any activity can be broken down into actions then into operations, a framework that has worked exceptionally well for those studying Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and hence logically should work well in an environment like the web, which is a huge Human to Human Computer Mediated Interaction. This of course compliments the more traditional activity theory view, posited by Alexi Leont'ev, that human beings engage in actions that only make sense when viewed in the social context of activities; in this construction activities do work or satisfy needs while actions are the constituent pieces that make up activities.
It also makes sense that these actions could be repeatable and replicable, and over time participants would build a set of understandings – in the form of memes—that can be shared and discussed, modified and enacted And this brings me to what I think is a critical moment: defining the “meme” in this context. I define the meme as: a meme is a culturally situated set of repeatable acts that are meant to achieve a single goal while inviting further action and/or the product of these actions. This, of course, means that memes can chain into long meme-strands. These memes would represent the storage of actions, the transmission of activity—or work— from one person to another.

So as a unit, a meme would consist of the following:

  1. 1)A gatekeeper of some sort (which may or may not be prohibitive)
  2. 2)Some type of replication (another action, a physical thing, a structure)
  3. 3)The product or result could “do” some sort of work/make some statement
  4. 4)The unit should be discrete and in some way self-sufficient
  5. 5)It should likewise be transmittable to other parties easily
  6. 6)It should encourage some other action (most often to replicate, but also on occasion to continue to a similar task or to simply be aware of a situation)