Nowadays, it is clear to both the academic community as well as laypeople that cyberspace has become an endless source for research and exploration. Our reliance on the Internet has expanded enormously, dispersing and adopting various facets of human society within the digital sphere. As such, cyberspace is considered an undeniable part of our “offline life.” Understanding the critical importance of this segment of our reality, scholars try to embrace and explain different aspects of this relatively new dimension ranging from cybersecurity and the effectiveness of online education to AI ethics and telemedicine. While memes as a research subject are not new, one of the most intriguing research projects which provides an innovative perspective on digital culture, art history, and contemporary activism is Shana Macdonald's book—The Art of Memes in Feminist Digital Culture. Readers' anticipation of conventional statistically inclined social media analysis will quickly encounter a more theoretically impressive area. Macdonald considers memes not only as digital art forms and communicative agents with “revolutionary” potential but also as internet entities with significant historical roots in cinema, photography, performance art, and other prominent twentieth-century artistic traditions. The author states directly that this research tries to underline the explicit connection between modern feminist memes and “their feminist cultural past.” As such, memetic resistance culture cannot be considered a new phenomenon, though some developmental stages need to be addressed. Readers immediately understand the message of the author, who provides a comprehensive explanation throughout the next three chapters. Focusing on particular memes that address a feminist, queer, and anticapitalistic message, Macdonald evaluates the form of countercultural memes and discursive power to explain their influence on activists' online agenda and digital viability within the dominant cultural space as well as to understand how mechanisms of power in mainstream media function. Doing so, Macdonald elaborates three old tactics—college, reenactment, and montage—which emerged and productively circulated way before the rise of digital culture, and meme creators have utilized them all, producing “highly remixable contemporary aesthetics.” Each tactic, which is explained in its own separate chapter, allows the author to explain not only tactics as relevant modern tools that demonstrate their hidden protest ability but their historical metamorphosis, reconnecting the past and the present. The first chapter discusses the ways to apply previous collage forms to digital meme practice, referring to Cubism, Dadaism and artists such as Barbara Kruger and Hannah Hoch. The second chapter focuses on another formal meme method—reenactment that embraces reshaping of existing imageries (iconic reenactment), writings (narrative), and models into original cultural entities. Analyzing the Barbie-themed memes, Macdonald argues that iconic and narrative reenactments found a fertile ground within cyberspace opening numerous artistic opportunities for meme creators. The significance of feminist creativity and achievements of the 1980s and 1990s can be observed in the following popular memes, which circulated predominantly on Instagram: Hofmeyr's antler Barbie, Weird Barbie, and Delta Barbie. Having become convenient and widely used on a daily basis by social media users of all age groups, carousel slide decks, video reels, CapCut patterns, and other meme practices have developed from film forms known for decades, such as montage editing, which is evaluated in chapter three. Several experimental movies as a part of past countercultural art provide the foundation for the author's analysis. In general, Macdonald argues that contemporary meme culture has demonstrated that significant abilities not only survive but flourish, advancing particular agendas within hostile online environment due to heavy reliance and adaptation of the “vintage” methods from the 20th century rebellious art trends. The last chapter is not structured as a traditional conclusion, but it does tie up the author's ideas. Through the contrast of joyscrolling practice to doomscrolling phenomenon, Macdonald evaluates the future perspectives of meme activism and online resistance. The Art of Memes explains a much-needed account about memes' political perspective for online resistance and the strong connection of modern digital artifacts to the earlier cultural trends that endow memes with particular immunity to poisonous surroundings. As with any research in its theoretical and chronological approach, there are a few crucial terms that I wish the author to articulate: late-stage capitalism, tech capitalism, capitalist platforms, and dominant culture. The research offers an eloquent and effective guide to digital culture and meme practices for a diverse readership, including students, social media enthusiasts, brand managers, and scholars. Social activists from various fields and meme makers can find valuable insights to enhance their online presence and advance their agendas. This book is timely and a welcome research that underlines the significant interconnections between feminist digital culture, the history of art, meme production, and activist forms of reasoning shaping contemporary online resistance. The author has nothing to report. The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
Julia Sweet (Tue,) studied this question.