Memes

In Digital Culture

By: Limor Shifman

Narrated by: Karen Saltus

In December 2012, the exuberant video "Gangnam Style" became the first YouTube clip to be viewed more than one billion times. Thousands of its viewers responded by creating and posting their own variations of the video - "Mitt Romney Style", "NASA Johnson Style", "Egyptian Style", and many others. "Gangnam Style" (and its attendant parodies, imitations, and derivations) is one of the most famous examples of an Internet meme: a piece of digital content that spreads quickly around the web in various iterations and becomes a shared cultural experience.

In this audiobook, Limor Shifman investigates Internet memes and what they tell us about digital culture. Shifman discusses a series of well-known Internet memes - including "Leave Britney Alone", the pepper-spraying cop, LOLCats, Scumbag Steve, and Occupy Wall Street's "We Are the 99 Percent". She offers a novel definition of Internet memes: digital content units with common characteristics, created with awareness of each other, and circulated, imitated, and transformed via the Internet by many users. She differentiates memes from virals; analyzes what makes memes and virals successful; describes popular meme genres; discusses memes as new modes of political participation in democratic and nondemocratic regimes; and examines memes as agents of globalization. Memes, Shifman argues, encapsulate some of the most fundamental aspects of the Internet in general and of the participatory Web 2.0 culture in particular. Internet memes may be entertaining, but in this book Limor Shifman makes a compelling argument for taking them seriously.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your My Library section along with the audio.

©2014 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (P)2015 Gildan Media LLC

Excellent Overview of Critical Studies on Meme Culture

The content of the book is outstanding but the performance leaves much to be desired. The reader would often read aloud entire web addresses.

Great Read

This is the first book l've read from the MIT Essential Knowledge Series. It was published in 2014, so it's missing some commentary on factors that distinguish today's memes from those made over a decade ago (the use of generative Al, for example). Still, it serves as a great primer for those interested in the nature of memes and Internet virality. I'd recommend Jonah Berger's "Contagious" if you're interested in a similar book.