Serious or unserious? Negotiating digital citizenship through memetic practices

The digital citizenship scholarship has long studied how the performative principles of online humour and memetic practices are used to negotiate civic belonging and to enact ‘incongruities as existing in and between states discourse and practice’. By foregrounding ‘diffusion’, however, what is missed is how those objects, and the linked claims to civic belonging, are constantly (re)negotiated already before coming into wider use. Building on this research, I examine the circulation and active remediation of image and text by foregrounding the communication that precedes those moments. I claim that turning to communication is relevant for understanding how digital aesthetic media contributes to the formation of online communities and for advancing our theorisation of ‘digital citizenship’. To do so, I turn to uses of Latin on 4chan as a case of ‘unserious citizenship acts’ (i.e. ‘rules for Roman citizens’), and I argue that their contestations show how communication at the point of production is ‘seriously serious’, and that the negotiation of civic belonging behind that work is missed if we only focus on the output’s diffusion.