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 memes from the first chapter of the former book. The book went through a quasi-chronological literature review with an overview of how Richard Dawkins, Ian Bogost, Susan Blackmore, Limor Shifman, Ryan Milner, and Seong-Young Her have tweaked this definition over the course of sixty years. I proceed to offer my interpretation of the definition by explaining that I think of memes as:
active, multilayered communication constructions that are influenced by social factors and represent a mode of individual expression, in which meaning-making is controlled by both a community that understands that the whole of the work is greater than the sum of its parts and a collective that places that creative content into some part of the broader cultural industry embedded in society (Tilton, 2022, p. 31).
After publishing the book, my off-time has allowed me to craft additional definitional constructions of memes based on other scholarship in the field. I started with Robert Aunger and The Electric Meme, as that was the work that was more directly lacking in my first chapter. Brian H. Spitzberg’s “Multilevel Model of Meme Diffusion” and An Xiao Mina’s Memes to Movement: How the World’s Most Viral Media is Changing Social Protest and Power formed this series’s second and third entries on the site. There was a lull in this series (and posts in general) as my focus needed to be elsewhere. The plan is to restart this series with the one I researched before the break. So, with all apologies to the brilliant Bradley E. Wiggins, I want to turn my attention to The Discursive Power of Memes in Digital Culture as the bridge between my two books.
Memes as Ideological Practice
The first thing that I appreciate about Wiggins’ work (especially this book) is the directness of focus within his writing. It is not uncommon for me to struggle with stating the thematic takeaway that a reader would find about the book. Wiggins states it on page xv of the Preface/Forward:
The central argument is that internet memes are discursive units of digital culture and that these units of discourse indicate an ideological practice (Wiggins, 2019, p. xv).
His narrowing of memes to non-video works allows him to focus on multiple aspects that one can manipulate within the graphic to create a meaningful message to the creator and the community they are sharing it with. The argument is that the malleability of the construction, comprehension, and dissemination (furtherance) of image-based memes is the practice that meme creators take part in to craft a pervasive message that can influence the general discourse of a community and, thus, the ideology of the community. I feel that this adjusting of a community ideology that Wiggins uses helps address the “hijacking of the term” from the original concept that Dawkins posed in his The Selfish Gene book. Wiggins crafts this clear distinction from Dawkins’ original work that describes memes as random works that replicate aspects of culture (using Dawkins’ own words from 2013 to make this distinction), to present memes as those works that can present “visual arguments, which are semiotically constructed with intertextual references to reflect an ideological practice” (p. 9). It is this setup that forms the bridge to allow Wiggins to discuss the “Discursive Power of Memes in Digital Culture” in the second chapter.
His second chapter contains the second point I appreciate about Wiggins’ scholarship. There is a sense of scholarly kinship in the way that he references Henry Jenkins’ Participatory Culture to establish a meaningful definition of digital culture. I felt that Jenkins was hitting on this central idea of transmediation in the form of “content creators’ ability to examine works of popular culture and repurpose those works to produce a newer piece of media” (Tilton, 2022, p. 12). Understanding transmediation in this way allows content creators to speak natively in the media’s visual language and sense of aesthetics. Wiggins chooses to sidestep that point by rightfully pointing out that financial considerations are absent in this argument, making it difficult for all who desire to participate to have the chance to do so. He prefers de-emphasizing the “shareability of digital items” and elevating “the relationship to discourse.” The beautiful coda to this analysis is that “cultures are lived; the digital is programmed. A merging of the two represents a technological achievement tantamount to praise and concern” (Wiggins, 2019, p. 22). This merging of the two that Wiggins so neatly encapsulated in this statement is shown when we can see discourse in action through the life cycle of Internet memes. The discourses that memes facilitate, thus their discursive power within digital culture, are only understood within the context of ideology, semiotics, and intertextuality. Ideology is worth pulling out of this trio based on how Wiggins focuses on it for his definition and why he argues it gives memes their cultural power online.
Wiggins triangulates ideology within:
- John Storey’s Cultural Theory and Popular Culture definition of “a systematic body of ideas articulated by a particular group of people” (Storey, 2006, p. 2),
- the Marxist means that ideology masks reality to the point that the average person only sees a dominant view of the world, and
- Stuart Hall’s encoding and decoding of collective social understanding, which allows one to get others to see if they acquiescent to that person’s worldview.
I struggled with this critical aspect of the definition in my description of memes. Where Wiggins embraces the arguments within memes, I chose to focus on the collective composition that gives memes their power. Wiggins counters the collectiveness of memes that I present in my definition when he introduces Roland Barthes’ conceptualization of myths. Wiggins uses Barthes’ focus on purifying conflict and othering to make anybody who uses myths in their work as merely attempting to craft “a statement of fact” (Barthes, 1977, p. 301) that is not explicitly grounded in the shared reality of society. Myths allow for fallacies to appear in the cultural works and not be questioned by the audience viewing the work or the community that is promoting the work.
It is this focus on specifically memes that have as “their subject matter some form of critique of a social, cultural, political, economic, and/or related phenomena” (Wiggins, 2019, p. 30) a type of digital artifact that lends itself towards its analysis through the careful study of semiotics in so far as it is presenting its argument through its signs that act as some form of “real-world representation of the more abstract claims… that signs refer to other signs which refer still to other signs” (p.32) so that these signs form a layered expression that can extend a given argument online, as thus the discourse around a subject a community is discussing becomes embedded knowledge to community members through these memetic interactions.
It is this last connection that I think Wiggins makes a solid conceptual argument in so far as it sets up intertextually within his construction of defining memes. He brings in the work of Anthony Giddens to his definition of memes with the development of structuration. It is here that I find another cross-section between my work and Wiggins. I focus on the idea that memes give some agency to those who use them online. There is a reason that the last four chapters of “Meme Life” discuss the types of acts that memes help people do within digital culture. Wiggins places Giddens’ structuration within the work of Louis Althusser’s Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, specifically emphasizing the imagined connection between people online and their perceived ability to interact within these spaces.
The last point I will pull from The Discursive Power of Memes in Digital Culture is his deep dive into the idea that memes work. His use of the Ducreux image macro as a prime figure for the chapter has always earned my admiration and respect. He uses the various artifacts produced by this macro to expand the definition of genre beyond the repeated characteristics within a particular grouping of mediated works. He underlies that knowing genres helps the layperson better understand the “complex system of social motivations and cultural activity that is both a result of communication and impetus for that communication. Genres, therefore, are central to understanding culture” (p. 40). His connection of memes to genre theory as a form of categorization is less about the various characteristics embedded in the memetic artifacts, but rather what actions and activities are associated with the various memetic content we share. Applying genres to memetic content to describe where memetic artifacts fit in the broader realm of digital culture is useful for discussions and analysis.
A final impression of reading Wiggins’ book is that it reminded me of one of my favorite textbooks with the all-time best title for any book I have ever read, Everything’s an Argument for the University of Kentucky by Andrea A. Lunsford and John J. Rusklewicz. Beyond the title just causing me to giggle a little bit, it was a well-structured book that restructured communication as a positional pursuit designed to have the communicator develop their writing, talking, and content creation to focus on the why within the position, the occasion for the argument, the kinds of arguments one can make, and the audiences for such work. It felt like Wiggins was attempting to box in memes into the same rhetorical place as Lunsford and Rusklewicz did with the work that students would submit for college assignments. I admire Wiggins’ focus within the book, but it is too focused for how I analyze memetic artifacts.
