The Discursive Power of Memes in Digital Culture: Ideology, Semiotics, and Intertextuality

This comprehensive work probes various facets of Internet meme from different perspectives.It analyzes the origin of the term "meme"; its function, power, and ideology embodied in Internet meme; its commercial and political types; its audience and identity; and its artistic implications.Drawing upon a host of theories and concepts in the fields of semiotics, cultural studies, discourse studies, and politics and communication studies, the author offers a kaleidoscopic study of Internet memes in relation to digital culture.It also involves an interesting array of critical empirical studies of the latest and most popular Internet memes in various social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.The book is sorted into eight Chapters.Chapters 1 and 2 serve as the introduction of the basic theories and concepts as the start point of the whole work.In the beginning chapter, the author reviews Dawkins' (1989) conception of meme that "conveys the idea of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation" (p.182; italics in original).The Internet meme is similar to Dawkins' original concept of meme in that it grabs people's attention and is propagated and transmitted via resemblance or reproduction.However, the author argues that Internet meme is more oriented toward the concept of enthymeme, as it in essence embeds and embodies visual argumentation.In addition, meme is usually transmitted through remixing (for instance, parodying, amending, and referencing other sources), rather than merely imitating.Subsequently, the author refers to Shifman's (2013) model regarding the tripartite typology of meme, based on which he further develops an elaborated model of Internet meme: the content (deliberate communication without human speech embedded with ideological practices), the form (category of utility such as video, GIF, and image macro), and the stance (socially charged meaning constructed through multimodal semiosis and intertextuality).Chapter 2 discusses the inherent relationship between discourse, ideology, power, and Internet meme with its multi-semiotic and intertextual nature.Based on the ideas of Foucault, Barthes, Althusser, and others' classical ideas on discourse, the author argues that power is maintained through discourse, and ideologies penetrate and get operationalized through Internet meme.Besides, Internet meme involves various semiotic modes and embeds other texts in constructing ideology.Chapter 3 argues that meme as a type of genre undergoes generic development from its original form.Based on structuration theory, it holds that social structure is maintained and constructed through agency and predominantly contains agency.Internet meme, just as social institution does, endures three processes: maintenance, elaboration, and modification.Its initial form is a type of spreadable media adhering to social structure; subsequently, the spreadable media are altered by individual into emergent meme, which in turn is further remixed and imitated as Internet meme.Chapters 4 and 5 deal with political memes and commercially motivated Internet memes.The author offers a detailed empirical study of various popular political and commercial memes propagated in various social media on the Internet.In Chapter 4, the author analyzes the Jokerized memes of Obama and Trump (the Internet memes that tampered with their photos into the appearance of the Joker, the antagonist in the movie ORCID iD