What’s a meme? You’ll have seen one online. Those pictures of cats, celebrities, or comics that recur, with slightly different captions, in social media feeds. Or those looping animations, GIFs, that people post instead of replies. Silly phrases that get shared, with little variations, in chats and conversations. Videos that follow a formula, featuring a gesture, a dumb challenge, or a song repeated for likes. Put programmatically: memes are types of media that are produced, copied, varied, and shared online by communities of users. They’re internet ephemera, but they are also, perhaps, contemporary online culture’s definitive media.

We can take this to mean a number of things. For a culture that’s produced through the participation of the internet’s users, internet memes are exemplary cultural products. What sets these media apart from, for instance, viral videos or images is that memes aren’t just copied or forwarded, but reiterated by internet users. They’re templates for the production of media variation. For participatory culture’s boosters, memes evidence the internet’s ability to engender collective creativity: new memes emerge at vertigo-inducing rates. For participatory culture’s critics, though, memes evidence something else: the internet’s ability to engender a nausea-inducing amount of hate.

Memes have been at the centre of some of online culture’s worst moments over the last few years. I don’t recommend you do this, but if you’re curious, give “Pepe the Frog”, “Pizzagate”, or “NPC Wojak” a quick Google. These memes and many others like them have been used as vehicles in the “new online culture wars” that have plagued the internet for more than half a decade. Like the culture wars of the 90’s, these have been fought over the question of what the internet is and who it’s for—only, taken to a new extreme. Spread from bulletin boards like 4-Chan and 8-Chan, memes have become standard bearers for new online antagonisms.  

What makes memes particularly definitive, though, is that as they’re circulated and varied by users: they drift. The concept, “meme,” registers this mutant quality linguistically. When we say “a meme”, we might mean either a particular meme—this silly cat meme—or the meme type to which it belongs—the silly cat meme. “Meme” is singular or plural; when used in the singular, it necessary invokes the plural, and vice versa. This capacity to change makes memes definitive, finally, because they’re products of an online culture that is able to produce and circulate media; that’s, in fact, constituted in and by the media it circulates and produces.

In memes, we see not only all that makes online culture good or bad—though we see this too—but this culture’s mechanisms. Memes stitch together a culture that can be understood at different scales. At the scale of meme instances, this is a culture whose content can be hateful. Overwhelmingly, it’s a culture whose content is silly and cute. But at the scale of meme pluralities, this culture is ambivalent. I don’t mean either good or bad, though memes can be this. Ambivalence is memes’ terrain (Ryan and Milner, 2017). They circulate as part of an online culture that uses irony, in-jokes, and absurdity to generate affect, good or bad. Their only constant is novelty; their success is measured by their (plural) spread. At scale, their content becomes secondary to their capacity to continue to circulate as new.

This is the terrain of a range of emergent media practices, from memes to clickbait to fake news. These practices also exploit a certain ambivalence about content and a capacity to circulate. This ambivalence means that a story, a claim, a dubious fact—or a meme—can spread, if it’s plausible enough and if it finds the right networks in which to propagate. For a fact, the criterion of plausibility might be that it could be true; for a meme, that it might be, or feel, right. Or vice versa. Memes teach us a way to apprehend these practices. Like memes, they rely on a density of circulating material to constitute a plurality, of links or claims, that can become an online culture that is what it circulates. 

These media are hard to study. They can be horrible, though this isn’t the hardest part. As someone who more or less grew up online, I can say that you get used to it. They’re hard to study because they’re constantly changing, and because they occupy a constantly remade terrain. In circulation, these media move between siloed sites and platforms whose different affordances create spaces for different cultures. Circulation constantly remakes the where of the cultures constituted by it. Media cultures change rapidly. The what is never static. That’s the hard part: the vertigo, the obsolescing, the novel argot.

A particular meme’s impact doesn’t tend to last long. There are always other memes to make. In the end, the meme really makes one thing evident: as it circulates, the only thing it’s an index of is itself. They invite us to study media’s how: their circulation.

Scott Wark