Author's Note: I've been asked to be on a potential panel for the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers that will be a gathering of scholars that have focused on and written books about creators and influencers. This proposal is being organized by the brilliant Daniela Jaramillo Dent and Crystal Abidin....
Beyond the fact that my latest book, “Digital Culture in the Platform Era: Studying Celebrity, Influence, and Superstars Online,” has given me a place to flesh out some of my previous concepts I covered with a little more clarity, the book became a way to organize my research agenda to...
PDF Version of the Article My nearly quarter of a century as a professor in higher education has allowed me to see my students grow and find their way in the world. Sometimes they will friend me on social media and, for a rare few, send me memes via direct...
"Meme Life: The Social, Cultural, and Psychological Aspects of Memetic Communication" has been out for almost four years now. The beauty of having such a well-received book is that people want to talk about it. This continuous dialogue about what I wrote for my “Memes and Society” course allowed me...
Shifting towards the end of my Meme Life tour that has taken over the last three years of my academic career and into promoting the Digital Culture in the Platform Era book starting this summer means that I should wrap up my “Defining Memes” series that supplemented the definitions for...
The last three years as the Irene Casteel Endowed Chair for Education, Professional, and Social Sciences at Ohio Northern University have been an amazing honor. "Meme Life: The Social, Cultural, and Psychological Aspects of Memetic Communication" was given an extended tour, which gave it the necessary exposure to earn the 2023...
Publisher's Note: The following preview is my proposal for the Creator Economy Track at SxSW2025 in March 2025. This PowerPoint presentation and article is a continuation of my SxSW Interactive 2011 presentation on "Nanocelebrity: How to Combine Expertise with Voice." Specifically, I am looking at how Internet celebrities have helped...
A regret of mine when writing “Meme Life” two years ago was not finding the work of An Xiao Mina, specifically her book “Memes to Movement: How the World’s Most Viral Media is Changing Social Protest and Power.” This book was meaningful as it provided a model for using memes...
Memes (unlike other works of digital culture) tend to be shared among friends, family, and colleagues because they are immensely rich, complex in their messaging, and have elements that resonate with others they care about. These three aspects of memes are why they are part of our digital communication, and...
One of the areas that I wanted to address early on in "Meme Life" was to offer the theoretical underpinnings that defined our general understanding of how memes and memetic communication impact the exchanging of information with one another and how memes allow people to interact via the various mediums...
