Spitzberg’s Definition: Memes as a Communal Bridges

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 that comprise modern societal engagement. The four years spent working on the book and the course associated with this text forced a deep dive into the literature surrounding memes and digital culture. The end result of this work gave a good overview of the past half-century of scholarship in this field. However, I have attempted to provide additional articles and books that could have fit the first edition of “Meme Life.” This posting serves as the second in a series of articles designed to bridge the theoretical gap between what was published in the book in 2022 and the broad cross-section of the work out there. A fair work to examine under this context is Brian Spitzberg’s work from 2014. This section would fit in between Blackmore’s Definition and Shifman’s Definition in the first chapter of “Meme Life,” as this scholarship seems to start the bridge from the broader cultural overtones of memes to its current place within the digital culture literature.

Brian H. Spitzberg’s “Multilevel Model of Meme Diffusion” (M3D) was innovative in 2014 as it applied an interdisciplinary approach to a fundamental problem of adapting to the rapidly evolving nature of communication technology as part of the landscape of the discipline. Specifically, it was fascinating to see Spitzberg frame this work with the theoretical gauntlet Jonathan H. Turner laid out in his 1990 article “The Misuse and Use of Metatheory.” Spitzberg’s article fits the metatheory marker as it is the grounded work that addresses “the structure and implications of existent theories” as the means to explain “how the social universe operates” (Turner, 1990, p. 38). Spitzberg takes a similar approach to what I took in the first chapter of “Meme Life,” with a definitional overview of the conceptualization of memes over the last half-century. It seems that Spitzberg leans more on Richard Brodie’s “Virus of the Mind: The new science of the meme,” Joseph Henrich, Robert Boyd, and Peter J. Richerson’s “Five Misunderstandings About Cultural Evolution,” & Francis Heylighen and Klaas Chlelens’ “Cultural Evolution and Memetics” to extend the biological metaphor of memes that Richard Dawkins and Robert Aunger took to the forefront in the last 20th century. 

From this biological foundation, Spitzberg attempts to separate the memetic definition from Dawkins and Aunger’s work by incorporating two transformative elements into the concept of memes. Adding the frames literature into this discussion (specifically from Erving Goffman and Gregory Bateson’s work) explains why memes are meaningful and significant. Spitzberg highlights that memes parallel the notions of frames because both define patterns in the world that can be interpreted by a given community so that people within that community can sort the patterns as information for effective processing. The meaning-making conducted by the community ensures that “people develop a particular conceptualization of an issue or reorient their thinking about an issue” (Chong & Druckman, 2007, p. 104). In short, the patterns that memes highlight provide insight into the modern world, communities that interact online, and the citizens that engage with one another via the developed communication technologies of everyday use. Their significance comes from the ability of people to easily share these artifacts as a proxy for their emotional state, their beliefs about the world, or as a means to deliver a message to the community at large.

The second transformative approach that Spitzberg takes in this article is his inclusion of Everett Rogers’ “Diffusion of Innovation” theory into the discussion regarding memes. Spitzberg was right to point to the definition of innovations being any “idea, practice, or object that is perceived as new by an individual or other unit of adoption” (Rogers, 2003, p. 6) that the diffusion of these works is based on the ability of individual to use “a special form of communication in which the messages are about a new type of idea” (ibid, p. 6) that occurs “through certain channels over time among the members of a social system” (ibid, p. 5). Rogers’ work points to the ability of creative works like memes to replicate, as described by Dawkins. However, unlike the biological conceptualization defined in Dawkins’ work, Spitzberg points to the systematic ways that memes are imitated in society through Rogers. Rogers points to the successfully repeating “rituals, traditions, narratives, norms, roles, and institutions” throughout society as a model of making ideas easy to try on with the support of those within those social network systems.

The mastery of Spitzberg’s work is that it transforms this composite of literature into a supported meme transmission model. Spitzberg first explores the spectrum from the micro [i.e., individual-to-individual messaging and information exchanges] to the macro [i.e., status, social movements, institutions, policy formation, and culture (Spitzberg, 2014, p. 317)] societal structures to scaffold the impact of various factors that would impact the transmission, reception, and adoption of memes among a social network. He expands his model from his analysis of the different theoretical positions.

Spitzberg crafts a multilevel model to explain how memes shift from the microsocietal to the macrosocietal within five levels of competitiveness and a level of transmission. Spitzberg explores in the first level of memes the fitness and adaptiveness of such artifacts using: 

• how distinctive they are from other digital artifacts (entropy), 
• their redundancy to remove errors in the transmission process, 
• their ability to allow people within the social network to try on the meme via “the ability of communicators to attempt, express, rehearse, and incorporate the meme” in everyday interactions,
• how easily they can shift forms across multiple media formats, and 
• how the meme incorporates a richness of other mediated works. 

Spitzberg moves away from the meme towards the individual actors who share memes. He begins this discussion with how popular the actor is within their social network community and externally toward those who can propagate the memes to larger audiences. Individuals enhance memes’ ability to be broadcast via their level of competency in delivering messages to their communities and audiences. He begins a competency analysis through an examination of the individual’s computer-mediated competency, which Spitzberg defines as:

• how motivated they are to share a message,
• how knowledgeable is the person who creates the meme, 
• how skilled they are in crafting the meme,
• how versed they are in connecting the context to the message, and 
• know how to get a positive reaction to the meme.

Spitzberg expanded beyond computer-mediated competency to focus on the ethos and credibility of the actor, how central to the network the actor is with the rest of the network, and how well the actor understands the presence, richness, or naturalness present in the distribution mediums for memetic content.

Both the memes and the individuals who post them are part of the in-group competitiveness of the memes, or the meme’s ability to be adopted for use within a given community. When a meme moves beyond the community to a broader audience, the social network level factors determine the meme’s objective (e.g., how the meme impacts the native structure of the social network it was initially posted on) and subjective (e.g., how receptive the actors within the social network are to the meme) success to be adopted (in aesthetic and/or messaging) throughout the broader audience. The societal level introduces “potentially rival social networks, media environments, and chronological constraints” that will factor into the viability of the memes to continue to survive within the network itself. 

Finally, Spitzberg bounds the previous four levels into the geotechnical level. Crises (man-made or natural) can add a traumatic overtone to the meme and minimize its continued use. Adding to the potential limitations is the inability to bridge geospatial spans that prevent effective communication. The factors that can increase the viability of memes are directly related to the density and proximity of populations that share these memes, thus allowing them to be diffused among the populace quickly. 

Transmission is initially addressed in the 2014 article as the final level of analysis. However, the means that Spitzberg uses in the work suggest a means of transcending the memetic levels defined in this model. This conceptualization of transmission is marked as the outcome level, with the criteria for this level being:

• how many actors within the network adopting the meme as part of regular communication practices (i.e., popularity),
• how quickly the meme is shared throughout the network (i.e., velocity), 
• how persistent the meme is within network interactions (i.e., longevity), and
• how often do others share the meme in the network (i.e., fecundity).

In this manner, Spitzberg uses these criteria to discuss the outcome level is less as a bounded structure designed to encase the properties of the meme within one enclosed space for analysis and more as a means to project the meme beyond the limitations defined in the article. The outcome level becomes either the transmission mode or the meme’s efficacy toward mass adoption if scholars understand the proposed model that Spitzberg describes in his work.

When concluding this analysis of Spitzberg’s work, it is fair to point out how well it fits in with the definition crafted in “Meme Life.” Spitzberg focuses heavily on the macro-level, external elements of memes to explain their impact beyond the scope of the artifact. The first chapter of “Meme Life” could be incorporated as a substitution for the adaptive factors and still make sense. The conceptual, textual, visual, compositional, cultural, and performative layers meme creators use to affect the adaptive factors Spitzberg defines in his model’s meme level. The contextual, rhetorical, and meta-analytical layers impact the meme’s efficacy (as described in the outcome level section of his article). 

An area of beauty that I’ve discovered during my decade of research in the field of memes is how interwoven the various theoretical positions are within the scholarship. It feels less like an active battlezone where one group is trying to assert dominance over the scholars working in this area. Instead, it feels like friendly conversations that adjust the definition overtones of the field to match the current state of reality.