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The funny cat pictures and viral videos known as "internet memes" fill our inboxes and social media sites. Scholar Alice Marwick provides an overview of memes, a history of the term and its overall significance.

Our article analyses partisan, user-generated Facebook pages and groups to understand the articulation of political identity and party identification. Adapting the concept of scenes usually found in music studies, these Facebook pages and groups act as partisan scenes that maintain identities and sentiments through participatory practices, principally by making and sharing memes. Using a mixed methods approach that combines social media data and interviews during the 2019 Canadian federal election, we find that these partisan scenes are an active part of elections and the overall political information cycle in Canada but endure beyond election cycles. Rather than trying to sway voters of different political affiliation and influence the election outcome, Facebook users employ memes to hang-out and build community, thereby reinforcing partisanship.

This article 'tracks' memes, forms of networked, pictorial/caption humour and social commentary – as well as cultural labour, through a process of value change: the 'meme stream'. This is a process of incorporation of cultural resistance and labour into, and by, the dominant forces of capital that facilitate them: social media networks and their advertisers. We use Marcuse's Repressive Tolerance alongside Debord's Spectacle to argue that as memes move, increasing their audience as they go, they lose resonance with a dedicated audience but gain exposure with a more diffuse audience, which is detrimental to the expression of political, countercultural or socially provocative positions. We use Doge as our explanatory structural example. Our contribution is to demonstrate that the systems that allow for the flow and movement of memes reduce their expressive content, shifting them towards a template that is impotent for cultural, social or political critique.

Este trabalho apresenta um projeto de iniciação científica (PROBIC/Centro Universitário Franciscano), e refere-se a revisão bibliográfica acerca do tema meme. O objetivo central deste trabalho é o de introduzir os principais conceitos que circundam o termo meme, desde sua analogia à genética até a sua recente apropriação e ressignificação nas redes sociais. Além de apresentar os principais tipos de memes, uma breve explanação e diferenciação de meme e conteúdos virais, e também a desambiguação entre meme e mene.

This article explores how "the left" meme and the character and emotional reception of taboo-breaking therein via the case of r/DankLeft—a USA-centric Marxist, Anarchist, and Democratic Socialist Internet meme community. It asks: what themes do popular r/DankLeft Internet memes relate to, how does taboo feature within popular r/DankLeft Internet memes, and can any differences in the ways in which taboo-related r/DankLeft Internet memes are received be discerned. In turn, it carries out a thematic analysis of 366 popular memes, a multimodal critical discourse analysis of 41 taboo-related popular memes, and a comparative sentiment analysis of the comments these and other memes have received in r/DankLeft. The article finds that popular memes in r/DankLeft primarily relate to perceived threats to its community of users. It also shows that taboo-breaking does feature in r/DankLeft memes and that when it does correlative patterns emerge in terms of popularity and emotional reception.

Memes and meme factories are increasingly the new fronts for ageism online. To address the lack of studies exploring memetic expressions of ageism, this study utilized multimodal discourse analysis to analyze 98 image macros from five meme factories in Singapore. Expressions of ageism were consistently found in how the meme visually and discursively portrayed older adults, and three ageist themes of infantilization, barbarization, and fetishization were identified. Memes that infantilized older adults often portrayed them as immature and illiterate despite their age and emphasized their dependence on others. Memes that barbarized older adults portrayed them as being uncultured or having inferior cultural tastes, while memes that fetishized older adults positioned them as an object of sexual fetish. The intersections of ageism with sexism, classism, and racism were also noted. Practical implications of these findings were discussed, and several recommendations were offered for meme factories to reduce visual ageism.

Etwa ab 2014 tauchten in deutschen Städten Sticker auf, die alle sehr ähnlich gestaltet waren: Kleine schwarze Quadrate, auf die mit weißer, serifenloser Schrift in der Regel sechs Buchstaben in zwei Zeilen gedruckt waren, eingefasst in einem roten Balken oben und einem roten Balken unten: "FCK SPD", "FCK NZS", "FCK CPS" usw. Wieso diese Sticker sich in ihrer Gestaltung am Logo der New Yorker Rap-Gruppe Run-DMC orientierten, blieb unklar. Oskar Piegsa und Lorenz Grünewald-Schukalla begannen sich zunächst in E-Mails über das Phänomen auszutauschen. Daraus entstand eine Korrespondenz, die bis in den September 2016 anhielt und grundsätzliche Fragen zu Memes im Allgemeinen und dem Run-DMC-Logo-Meme im Speziellen diskutierte. Wir dokumentieren den Austausch in einer eigens für diese Zeitschrift gekürzten und überarbeiteten Fassung.