Memes, Limor Shifman
Memes, Limor Shifman
List: $19.98 | Sale: $13.99
Club: $9.99

Memes
In Digital Culture

Author: Limor Shifman

Narrator: Karen Saltus

Unabridged: 3 hr 47 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Ascent Audio

Published: 10/01/2015

Includes: Bonus Material Bonus Material Included


Synopsis

In December 2012, the exuberant video "Gangnam Style" became the first YouTube clip to be viewed more than one billion times. Thousands of its viewers responded by creating and posting their own variations of the video--"Mitt Romney Style," "NASA Johnson Style," "Egyptian Style," and many others. "Gangnam Style" (and its attendant parodies, imitations, and derivations) is one of the most famous examples of an Internet meme: a piece of digital content that spreads quickly around the web in various iterations and becomes a shared cultural experience. In this book, Limor Shifman investigates Internet memes and what they tell us about digital culture.

Shifman discusses a series of well-known Internet memes -- including "Leave Britney Alone," the pepper-spraying cop, LOLCats, Scumbag Steve, and Occupy Wall Street's "We Are the 99 Percent." She offers a novel definition of Internet memes: digital content units with common characteristics, created with awareness of each other, and circulated, imitated, and transformed via the Internet by many users. She differentiates memes from virals; analyzes what makes memes and virals successful; describes popular meme genres; discusses memes as new modes of political participation in democratic and nondemocratic regimes; and examines memes as agents of globalization.

Memes, Shifman argues, encapsulate some of the most fundamental aspects of the Internet in general and of the participatory Web 2.0 culture in particular. Internet memes may be entertaining, but in this book Limor Shifman makes a compelling argument for taking them seriously.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Simon on June 25, 2018

I really dragged my feet over this book. Perhaps because I normally associate memes as non-analytic, fun fare, when I began the book and was confronted with a relatively dense theoretical discussion of the subject my enthusiasm dimmed somewhat. However when I forced myself to finish what I'd started......more

Goodreads review by Aaron on September 06, 2018

The MIT Essential Knowledge Series is the perfect venue for a book on something like this, and in keeping with its subject there's a lot packed into a small space. Memes and viral content are ubiquitous, and even if individually each shared image is trivial, in the aggregate they present a fascinati......more

Goodreads review by Hannah on March 25, 2021

A quick read that introduces helpful concepts / points of inquiry for understanding memes in an academic sense.......more

Goodreads review by T on March 29, 2019

fundamental standard work for the academic analysis of internet memes. probaply nothing new for most readers but it's a good introduction to this topic from an academic view especially in view of how to write about memes using academic speech.......more

Goodreads review by Masha on May 02, 2017

nice meme 👌👌👌👌......more