“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 to question and re-examine the text that came from a series of PowerPoints and Post-it Notes from my office. It was from the reflection of the work that I came across a section that I wish I had the ability to take another shot at writing. It was the “Defining Collectives” section with the third chapter of the book. I like how I set up the arguments in the earlier sections of the book that helped me define influencers and opinion leaders for “Digital Culture in the Platform Era.” I don’t like how it feels that I shortcut a definition because I was struggling to come up with a good description of something that wasn’t a community, but still using memes as a means to communicate.
The problem with that section is that I simply conflated networks and collectives together. I use the broad definition of collectives being “a collection of common characteristics to define a social unit’s boundaries” (Tilton, 2022, p. 89). The next section then becomes the foundation of my definition of networks (which I still like as a definition of networks), being that networks should contain the “lovely rhyming trio” of:
- nodes (as the people and bots that interact and exchange information with each other within a given space),
- roads (as the connections that allow people and bots to interact and exchange information within that given space), and
- loads (as the content and expressions that are shared among the people and bots within that given space).
The problem with making the definition of network central to collectives is that communities also use networks. Therefore, I want to offer the following as my revised attempt to define a collective. Collectives are action-oriented and situational groupings, where people come together around a shared goal, cause, or creative act, but not necessarily shared identity or long-term continuity. This new definition circles back to what inspired the original definition of collective (namely, Paul McLean’s (2016) “Culture in Networks”) and attempts to untangle it from his definition of networks. In addition, this endeavor to revise the definition of collectives means that I can attempt to craft some archetypes of collectives in the same way that I created the six archetypes of communities when I wrote “Journalism Breakdown” in 2020. We can break down these groupings into three categories (cultural clusters, societal stimuli, and direct action responses)
Cultural Clusters
1. Collectives of Expression:
This first collective and network type focuses on cultural works and creative content that have a shared aesthetic or creative impulse. The Internet is an outlet of participatory media, and collectives of expression tend to be the means through which these works are produced within social media platforms (Jemielnak & Prezegalinska, 2020). Members remix and circulate their own works around what is popular. We can see this in the form of TikTok duets (O’Toole, 2023) or other social media platforms that allow for video responses where the original and response are stitched together in one video post (Høgenhaug et al., 2025). Both the collective and its associated networks are the “active” part of content creation that fuels what Henry Jenkins would call the “participatory culture” that defines the modern Internet, as they are the ones responsible for the production of the works we see online (Jenkins, 2023).
2. Collectives of Attention:
If the collectives (and networks) of expression represent the “active” part of content creation, then we can argue that collectives (and networks) of attention are the more “passive” parts of content creation. We can define this grouping as using the nature of the Internet to direct mass focus toward a cultural artifact (any digital file that is created to give meaning to what is happening in society) (Vicari & Kirby, 2022) or performance (any live or recorded act that reflects the creative expression of a given artist or group) (Auslander, 2022; Fryer & Cavallo, 2021) for the purpose of sharing that work and giving an arena for commentary. These groupings only exist in moments of shared spectatorship. We can see these collectives form when people are live-tweeting during an award show (Barker, 2022) or a collective viewing of a play via livestream (Reis & Ashmore, 2022).
Societal Stimuli
3. Collectives of Experimentation
This innovative grouping type is built around temporary collaborations designed to put forth the effort to test out a developing concept or prototype a product through a centralized effort. I tend to think about the early days of the SETI@home and other volunteer computing projects that emerged in the early parts of the 21st century (Nov, Anderson, & Arazy, 2010; Sarmenta, 2001). These collectives and networks often would use open-source coding practices to allow for a communal environment without necessarily the sense of identity one would find in a traditional community of this nature. Hackathons tend to be one example of this collective (Schulten & Chounta, 2024; Lara & Lockwood, 2016), and the experimental art project Blocumenta using blockchains as the means of connection is another (Thwaites & Pailthorpe, 2019).
4. Collectives of Urgency:
The grouping happens when people (and the networks that support those people) form spontaneously in response to an immediate crisis or emerging event, often coordinating online to provide aid and advocacy. It is fair to see these types of collectives form when there is a social disruption happening (natural disasters or political unrest), and the collective can provide the coordination and rapid response in a way that other social organizations can not. We can collectives generally dealing with issues like “climate emergency” (Salles, 2021) or when people use Twitter to organize relief efforts during a hurricane (Mihunov et al., 2020). We can argue that the World Central Kitchen is a collective of urgency in the ways that they handle hunger throughout the world (de Waal, 2024; Dunn & Kaliszewska, 2023; Firth, 2023).
Direct Action Responses
5. Collectives of Mobilization:
The main focus of this grouping is the ability to organize people (in the form of the collective) and resources (in the form of the network) to coordinate messaging and push forth a campaign of public visibility around a given cause. Often, this organizing effort happens through coordinated action online to move what is happening on the Internet to the real world. We can see platforms like Facebook being more built for non-profit organizations to use those tools for fundraising through direct appeals (Klein & Yogi, 2022), GoFundMe campaigns to raise awareness and funds for people’s medical conditions (Paust, 2021), or even campus events like “Relay for Life” raising money for the American Cancer Society.
6. Collectives of Resistance
The final grouping organizes around opposing and undermining a perceived harm to society. We can look at Anonymous as being one such model for this grouping. The grouping is known for the coordinated dissent against large multinationals and political entities in an effort to “tackle corruption, repression, and injustice” (Alexopoulou & Pavli, 2021). This dissent often comes in the form of leaking valuable information that those multinationals and entities do not want released (Costa, 2025; Fortin, Campisi, & Néron, 2022). These groupings will use hashtags and viral content to amplify a given message. We can see the roots of Anonymous in modern movements like “No Kings,” which coordinates protests across the United States and throughout the world via digital coordination. Media from the protest are shared online and become the foundation for traditional media stories about the underlying messaging that the grouping is trying to promote.
In Conclusion
Where communities and audiences are bound by social connection and consumption, collectives and networks are bound by coordination and distribution. Communities are the active representation of a given purpose that can be shared with an audience through online content. Collectives have the actors that use those networks as an infrastructure to perform actions and connect with one another with a shared intent.
