Grammar: Structures for Making Statements and Making Do

The Death of the Meme

Figure 2.1 A self-referential image macro, ironically pairing the qualifier *dank*—slang for high-quality marijuana—with browsing memes. It reappropriates a character called Gnome Child from the 2001 online game *Runescape*. Collected in 2014.

On May 15, 2014, Fernando Alfonso III published a piece for The Daily Dot speculating on the bleak future of internet memes. Referring mostly to image macros (such as “Hipster Kitty” from chapter 1), Alfonso (2014) argues that “they’ve been bled dry of all their novelty, and they’re just not funny or relevant anymore.” Describing the “dilution” of these once novel texts, he speaks to their rise and resulting “overkill” on Reddit, which he says took steps to broaden its content beyond the visual quips. He speaks to the seep of image memes into “mainstream” sites like Facebook, which had in response adjusted its algorithms to favor articles over images. The mounting evidence suggested a bleak future indeed. For whatever reason, memes—at least as a label for a specific set of niche texts—just weren’t cool anymore. Like punk rock and craft beer, memes were dead, crushed under the weight of their own success. In light of these charges, a study of the formal and social structures underscoring memetic media has to reckon with the alleged demise of their cultural resonance.

Like Alfonso’s, my moment of reckoning also came in 2014, when I was discussing my Ph.D. dissertation with a student. “I remember memes,” the college sophomore said. “They were really big in high school. Junior year.” The thought that my two-year-old dissertation was now a historical analysis of a dead communicative genre prompted some angst. And I wasn’t alone. Whitney Phillips, expanding her 2012 dissertation into a 2015 book on self-identifying internet trolls, discusses similar shifts and similar angst. Trolling—as the term was employed by Phillips’s research informants—emerged from the same media ecology as many esoteric internet memes. They had grown up in the same “cultural soup” on sites like 4chan, Something Awful, and others during the early 2000s. Phillips chronicles the increasingly self-referential, intertextual, and esoteric memetic practices of trolls during these years, but also the dilution of these practices toward the end of her study. “By early 2012,” Phillips writes, “it became painfully clear that I was no longer writing a study of emergent subcultural phenomena. I was instead chronicling a subcultural lifecycle” (2015b, 44–45).

By 2012, Phillips (2015b) reports, both the terms troll and meme were exhibiting simultaneous mass usage and definitional ambiguity. Phillips argues that the rise of the reference database Know Your Meme signaled a major shift in the subcultural dimensions of internet memes, as well as trolling. The database grew from a small 2007 video project affiliated with the site Rocketboom into a popular wiki purchased by the larger Cheezburger Network in 2011. “Know Your Meme was written with the novice in mind,” Phillips says, “with detailed, almost clinical explanations of the Internet’s most popular participatory content. KYM thus helped democratize a space that had previously been restricted to the initiated” (139). By 2012, Know Your Meme had established itself as the go-to reference guide for internet memes. This was also the year of the last ROFLCon internet culture conference, which founders Tim Hwang and Christina Xu (2014) say became dauntingly commercial. Likewise, in 2012, 4chan’s founder Christopher “moot” Poole told Forbes that “as online culture has moved offline, pop culture has moved online, they’ve met in the middle, and become the same thing now” (quoted in Olson 2012). In this intertwine, the subcultural resonance of internet memes had seemingly run its course.

By 2015, it seems we’re well past the reign of the pantheon of esoteric stock characters that emerged from sites like 4chan, Reddit, and Tumblr over the last decade. Now the invocation of the very term meme on those same sites is more and more ironic. Figure 2.1 is an image macro mocking internet memes and the cultural practices surrounding them. The language in the image reappropriates a memetic sentiment sometimes quoted on participatory media sites. One iteration, posted to Reddit’s /r/Atheism subreddit in 2012, posits that “we were born too soon to explore the cosmos, and too late to explore the earth. Our frontier is the human mind. Religion is the ocean we must cross.”¹ In figure 2.1, the reference to “dank memes” as the site of exploration in the present compares negatively to the great cultural feats of the past and future. “Dank”—a term of praise for quality marijuana—can be read ironically here, because of its associations with “stoner” slang and its juxtaposition with the high ideals of scientific exploration.² Further, the font in the image shifts just as “browsing memes” becomes the subject, indicating a shift in tone, a juxtaposition constituting a punch line. The image—composited from a character in the online game Runescape called Gnome Child—resonates in the blank stare of its subject and the dreamlike, glitch art space behind him, which creates a larger, more opaque version of him—almost a psychic projection; the blackness behind the figure birthing asymmetrical neon green, blue, and red lines. All this signals mockery, and uses stoner slang and a preteen-oriented videogame to hone that mockery. Whatever “browsing dank memes” is, exploring the galaxy it is not.

Figure 2.2 also denigrates memes by connecting them to juvenile contexts. This image was posted to /r/TheWalkingDead, a subreddit devoted to the popular Walking Dead comic, television, and videogame universe. Part of a playful “photo recap” for season 5, episode 13 of the show, the post shows Carl and his father, Rick—survivors of a zombie apocalypse—at a party in a walled community they have recently entered. Carl is shown socializing with the other teenagers in the town, while Rick socializes with the adults. In the photo caption, Carl tries to bond with his fellow teens by asking them if they remember memes. Rick is not impressed. In the thread accompanying the post, a Reddit participant “didn’t get” the meme joke, and asked for an explanation. The answer was that Carl is “a teenager, talking to other teenagers. Who haven’t seen the internet in God knows how long. Carl wants to remember memes.” The two responses to that answer—coming around the same time—were “dank may mays, if you will” and “dank memes m8.” Both responses invoke the faux praise “dank,” and both denigrate memes beyond that. The first calls memes “may mays,” a common pejorative term (an ironic mispronunciation of the word meme), while the second includes the slang “m8” (shorthand for mate, or friend), another example of slang vernacular invoked ironically. All this, combined with the fact that Carl is not generally a well-regarded character on the subreddit (due to his very teenage awkwardness), contributes to a running joke about texts gone stale.

Figure 2.2 Two images from a 2015 episode of *The Walking Dead*, captioned by a Reddit participant for an /r/TheWalkingDead “photo recap” thread. It annotates a scene featuring Carl and his father, Rick. Posted on March 10, 2015.

But the narrative of subcultural corruption is often far too simplistic. The idea of a discrete, bounded subculture that opposes a hegemonic mainstream is fallacious, or at least murkier than an easy binary. Holly Kruse (2003) and Wendy Fonarow (2006) argue that the relationship between “indie” music scenes and “mainstream” music cultures is much more interdependent than the “subcultural authenticity” narrative suggests. The same could be said for the niche practices that have loosely labeled “internet culture” over the last decade. Lamenting that “4chan is too safe now,” or that “Reddit is too popular,” or that “Tumblr is too commercial” obscures the ways in which those sites, their participants, and the texts they create have always been intertwined with mainstream culture. Even the earliest 4chan memes reappropriated establishment media like pop songs, television characters, and videogames. The line between internet culture and popular culture has long been a blurry one.

Memetic media didn’t start with 4chan, just as they didn’t end with the final ROFLCon. Memetic practices persist, even if the specific resonant texts shift over time. If we’re tired of stock character macros in 2015, it doesn’t mean that “memes are dead”; it indicates that those memes don’t hold the specific cultural capital they did in 2010, or even that they hold cultural capital for people other than us. The relationship between niche collectives and broader cultural practices is always porous. The relationship between subcultural internet memes and broader memetic participation is porous as well.

Memetic logics are alive and well, more vibrant than ever, even if the corpus of texts in 2015 is wider and more widely distributed than the collection of characters and tropes that emerged out of esoteric forums a decade ago. The same memetic logics help craft both “stale” stock character macros and the collective vocal scorn for those stale texts. Despite their denigration of memes as subcultural texts, figures 2.1 and 2.2 still depend on these memetic logics. They’re obviously both multimodal, reproducing an aesthetic used over and over in memetic media. They’re both premised on reappropriation: figure 2.1 in its single panel combines an aphorism, a videogame character, and slang for marijuana, while figure 2.2 collects two photos from a set of about 150 captioned images, all taken from one episode of one TV show. Both were produced for collectivist participatory media sites. Both figure 2.1 and the conversation about figure 2.2 demonstrate the resonance of the mocking phrase dank meme, which spread in late 2014 across multiple participatory media sites. The insult is every bit as memetic as the targets it’s applied to. “Memes are dead” is thus a well-worn meme itself, one driven by memetic logics. These logics still underscore the creation, circulation, and transformation of collective ideas, and the memetic lens is apt in understanding a vast array of populist practices, both esoteric and widespread.

To be sure, there is a lot to learn from the “good old days” of memetic participation on sites like 4chan and Reddit, and the rest of this book will draw from this lineage. Even in 2015, more insular or bounded online collectives still have their fair share of inside jokes and esoteric references, and there is value in understanding how memetic logics and texts are used to facilitate both the ingroup affiliations and the outgroup antagonisms we’ll see in chapters 3 and 4. Even in a cultural studies moment “after subculture” (see Bennett and Kahn-Harris 2004), the concept of a “social imaginary” is significant. Arjun Appadurai (1996) argues that mass media help to create these imaginaries, collectives that feel a sense of communal identification even if they don’t demonstrate the interdependence of a traditional community. Although subculture has a different meaning today than it had when Dick Hebdige (1979) penned his study of British punks in the 1970s, it can still describe how members of a collective discursively cast themselves as antithetical to, apart from, or in opposition to a nebulous discursive “mainstream.” This analysis would be incomplete if it assessed memetic media without exploring the niche collectives that have become tied to the term. There is utility in understanding both the esoteric imaginaries and the mass participants producing memetic media.

In evidence of that utility, the rest of this chapter—pairing with next chapter’s discussion of vernacular—will build a case for the persistent power of memetic logics by examining their communicative characteristics, their social dynamics, and, ultimately, their role as a lingua franca in diverse mediated conversations. The sections to follow will assess the grammar surrounding the memetic logics introduced in chapter 1 and will tie memes to a lineage of reappropriation by bricolage and multimodal poaching. Even if memetic participation has gone “mainstream,” even if it’s more dispersed now than it was in 2005 or 2008 or 2011, even if Alfonso (2014) and The Daily Dot cite legitimate shifts, memes still matter. Whether or not the subculture has lost its edge, memetic logics are as pervasive as ever.

Toward a Multimodal Grammar

Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen (2006) begin their book Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design by connecting their titular term grammar with visual communication. They argue that when analyzing images, it’s not enough to assess them at the level of “lexis” (elements of the individual image). Instead, to understand a “visual statement,” readers need to understand how both its individual elements and its social contexts “are combined into meaningful wholes” (1). This use of grammar refers not to a prescriptive set of rules, but rather to a descriptive account of how systems of culturally specific meaning are constructed and reconstructed through social use.³ Even if readers don’t decode images as explicitly as they do written language, they perform interpretive work when they engage those images. Understanding images depends on understanding the socially situated grammar foundational to them.

Here I’ll argue that—far from being dead subcultural texts—internet memes tie into a long line of multimodal communication that has only become more prolific with the rise of memetic media. The grammar underlying these media is largely visual, but not solely visual; it is woven from multiple modes of communication. The next subsections will address the complex social reading and writing granted by this multimodal grammar. Memetic conversations—whether massive or esoteric—depend on these encoding and decoding processes, so assessing those conversations requires assessing the grammar at their heart.

Reading Images

Kress and van Leeuwen (2006) argue that humans, thanks to millennia of encoding and decoding visual messages, have developed the ability to quickly and implicitly read visual grammar. They argue that “visual communication is always coded. It seems transparent only because we know the code already, at least implicitly—but without knowing what it is we know, without having the means for talking about what it is we do when we read an image” (32–33). This is true whether we are subtly judging facial cues, assessing a room’s mood by its color scheme, or inferring emotion from the depth of field in a photo.

Images have long been employed for public commentary and public conversation. Caricature was used to ridicule Egyptian pharaohs in the 1300s BCE. Sexually explicit graffiti was found in the first-century ruins of Pompeii. Roman barracks in the third century contained visual mockery of early Christians. Martin Kemp observes that “like us, the later Romans appear to have been image junkies. Temples, public buildings, homes, and brothels all purveyed fine-tuned messages in the pictorial mode” (2011, 384). The European Middle Ages saw illuminated manuscripts, “bibles for the unlettered,” and coats of arms with memetic symbolism that spread within and between families. Juliet Fleming (2001) recounts the popularity in Elizabethan and Jacobean England of “posies”—phrasal and visual graffiti (though “graffiti” absent the term’s contemporary deviant connotations) that covered the walls of homes and churches, was inscribed onto jewelry and pots, was pinned to curtains, wrapped around gifts, and even tattooed onto the skin. These “portable epigrammes” conveyed commentary, prayers, lewdness, riddles, and solutions to those riddles. In these memetic snippets that spread across England, Fleming says there was “no difference between painting and writing; no difference, again, between writing on paper, a wall, copper, wood, a body, or an axe; and no difference, finally, between writing and other visual patterns” (25).

During the Renaissance, Kemp (2011) writes, “systematic naturalism” and mechanical printing technology inspired a representational revolution. From the sixteenth century, famous artists made black-and-white reprints of their work available, increasing their fame and the fame of their commissioner. Since the Enlightenment, visual storytelling and commentary has been a central component of the press. Reading images has historically been integral to reading the news, from the ambivalent racial portrayals in nineteenth-century publications like Punch and Puck, to the “Yellow Kid” comics that ran in both the New York Journal and New York World and subsequently gave “yellow journalism” its name, to the editorial cartoons of the twentieth century. Visual commentary has long been essential to public life, and—as we see with visual texts shared through memetic media—that commentary has long been a mix of powerful argument, silly satire, and combinations of the two.

For instance, figure 2.3 is a 1798 political cartoon by British cartoonist Richard Newton called “Treason!!!” (a title complete with a very familiar and very vernacular use of multiple exclamation points). In the image, John Bull (the national personification of Britain) apparently farts in the face of King George III. From mostly out of frame, Prime Minister William Pitt scolds John Bull. The crude visual gesture works as satire precisely because of its vulgarity. Chris Lamb, in his study of editorial cartoons, comments that “the basic technique of satirists is reduction: degrading or devaluating the targets of their satire by reducing their stature and dignity” (2004, 39). The message in this cartoon is resonant enough in its visual satire that readers more than two hundred years after its creation can still read its critique without much specific context. That I came across this image circulating on Tumblr in 2015—surrounded by GIFs from primetime comedy TV and screenshots from Snapchat—is a testament to its visual resonance.

Figure 2.3 “Treason!!!,” a political cartoon by British cartoonist Richard Newton. The subjects of the image are (from left to right): British Prime Minister William Pitt, John Bull (a personification of Britain), and King George III. Published in 1798.

Images resonate because of culturally encoded ways of seeing, and so the grammar of reading an image must always be understood within those cultural codes. Just as written or spoken grammar doesn’t exist outside of the cultural systems that form and are formed by language, images are bound by the same ways of seeing. Roland Barthes’s (1981) studium resonance speaks to this bounded perception. Some elements of the 1798 political cartoon (figure 2.3) might resonate with many people today in the same way they resonated with the image’s intended audience in 1798. The vulgarity of John Bull’s act, his more “common” dress compared to the more “noble” attire of the king, the juxtaposition of the trivial bodily function and the serious (and fully capitalized) charge of treason—all of these scan for me at the studium level. I can read them because they all still carry weight in my cultural context. Other individuals in other cultural contexts may not read those components of the image as I do, however, and there are contextual dimensions to the cartoon I can’t understand without an awareness of the cultural and political climate of late eighteenth-century Britain. Perhaps part of the reason this image spread among participants on Tumblr in 2015 was the humor inspired by its seeming anachronism. At least that was the punctum prick I felt when looking at John Bull’s elated face during his seemingly out-of-place defiance. To audiences unaware of Enlightenment satire, a political fart joke from 1798 may be a striking surprise, notable enough to spread.⁴

Even with the importance of cultural context in mind, there are formal components we can assess as we read an image. Several sources outline how analysts and audiences can interpret meaning, emotion, and even argument in images (see Kress and van Leeuwen 2006, Lester 1995, Rose 2012). Compositional elements—including color, space, perspective, distance, focus, movement, and detail—can be deconstructed during image analysis. Memetic media add collective elements to this compositional analysis, and are unique for their extensive intertextuality, even within a single image. Limor Shifman (2013) provides vocabulary for assessing the mixture of text and context in memetic images. She argues that memetic texts can be analyzed by examining their “content” (what they say), “form” (how they look), and “stance” (“information [that] memes convey about their own communication,” 367). While content and form are largely contained within a single image, assessing how a text stands in relation to broader contexts requires more awareness of those contexts. Stance is revealed in a text’s “participation structures” (which voices are included and which are silenced), “keying” (the tone and style it adopts), or its “communicative function” (emotive, phatic, poetic, etc., 367).

The compositional elements of content and form combine with the contextual element of stance to help us decode what might resonate in an image. Resonance—at the studium or punctum level—is essential in fostering the inspiration to create, circulate, and transform memetic iterations of visual texts. If something in an image or its context doesn’t resonate enough to spread, it won’t spread. And the collective dimensions of this resonance can produce unexpected results; multimodal grammar can be applied in surprising ways.

One such surprise—to Warner Bros. Studios at least—came with a 2014 meme called “Sad Batman.” “Sad Batman” began with a promotional photo for the upcoming 2016 film Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice tweeted by the film’s director, Zack Snyder, on May 13, 2014 (figure 2.4). Snyder posted the photo along with a caption that read, “I shot this with my @Leica_Camera M Monochrom. #Batman #Batmobile #Gotham”—demonstrating either fanlike devotion to or intentional cross-promotion of Leica cameras. To borrow Stuart Hall’s ([1973] 1993) term, the “dominant” read on the content and form of the image might tie into the dark and hypermasculine connotations that come with Batman as a pop cultural icon. The image is grayscale, befitting the somber tone that has come to be associated with the caped crusader. Batman and his iconic Batmobile—always the subject of fan discussion when a new Batman film is on the horizon—emerge into focus out of haze to the left of the frame, drawing the eye of the viewer to the right. From there, we follow the gaze and posture of Batman (a gaze mirrored by the positioning of the Batmobile) to the ground. The high angle in the shot gives us the perspective of looking down at a tortured, stoic, masculine hero. Batman broods, and this is a brooding image.

Figure 2.4 A promotional photo for the 2016 film *Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice*, shared on Twitter by the film’s director, Zack Snyder (“@ZackSnyder”). Posted on May 13, 2014.

Or at least it was meant to be a brooding image. Neither the camera cross-promotion nor the dominant read is what resonated with many in the image’s audience, many of whom were already skeptical of the upcoming film. The man under the batsuit in Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice is actor Ben Affleck, a casting decision that had been loudly critiqued as out of step with Batman’s character. With reservations about “Batfleck” already resonant, Snyder’s photo was an apt target for a flurry of memetic reappropriation. This flurry produced what Hall calls “negotiated” reads on the apparent melancholy mood of the dark knight, which keyed a satirical stance toward Snyder’s Batman image. In the days after the photo was posted, “Sad Batman” became its memetic iteration. Sites like The Verge and Buzzfeed cataloged humorous Photoshops of the image (Malone 2014; Sottek 2014). A tumblog—WhySoSadBatman.tumblr.com—was created on May 13, 2014, and was active for a month. “Sad Batman” remixes crafted new meanings by playing with Batman’s archetypical hypermasculine brooding, arguably reinforcing charges that Affleck lacked the gravitas needed to carry the role.

The top image in figure 2.5 inserts the familiar trope of the police officer issuing a speeding ticket as an explanation for Batman’s mood. The context emasculates the masked vigilante, who is known to have a tense relationship with the law. The bottom image in figure 2.5 reduces Batman—a figure known to strike fear in the heart of evil—to the passive victim of bullying. The two rings littered in the scene imply at least one person is off camera playing ringtoss with Batman’s bat-eared costume. By inserting new elements into the original photo, both images change our reading of Batman’s stoic silence in Snyder’s original photo. They make explicit a resigned defeat hidden in the image, one that shifts Batman from powerful masculine hero to passive victim.

Figure 2.5 Two “Sad Batman” memetic reappropriations of figure 2.4, each giving the original image a new context to create a humorous juxtaposition. Collected in 2014.

The images in figure 2.6 do similar work by removing Batman from his original context, exaggerating the loneliness of Batman in the process. In figure 2.6’s top image, Batman’s defeat comes not from the villains Joker or Bane, but from a spilled glass of milk. If we follow his eyes, he’s staring directly at the mishap, consumed; the masculine hero has succumbed to a domestic tragedy. The bottom image in figure 2.6 places Batman in a setting that should be happy, a log ride at an amusement park. Instead, he’s got no one to share it with, and reverts to his forlorn gaze as the ride—hardly a Batmobile—carries him toward the edge of the frame, a sad moment for the orphan hero. Both images use space to create their humorous juxtaposition. These images keep Batman relatively small in bigger, open settings, and they keep him alone in typically social spaces. In doing so, they turn cultural understandings of Batman on their head to make a joke at the hero’s expense. The memetic process that birthed “Sad Batman” depends on cultural participants’ ability to read images and then to write their own iterations, playing with a socially situated, visual grammar.

Figure 2.6 Two “Sad Batman” memetic reappropriations of figure 2.4, each pulling Batman from his original context to create a humorous juxtaposition. Collected in 2014.

The easy creation, circulation, and transformation of “Sad Batman” images—along with the countless other image memes that pepper mediated cultural participation—support Kress and van Leeuwen’s contention that “visual communication is coming to be less and less the domain of specialists, and more and more crucial in the domains of public communication” (2006, 3). Even if the esoteric pantheon of characters that rose to prominence between 2002 and 2012 are fading, memetic texts spread now more than ever. As tools of media production and distribution become increasingly inexpensive and accessible, participants can increasingly create, circulate, and transform visual commentary of their own.

Multimodal Texts

But despite the prevalence of memetic images, participatory media allow for the inclusion of more than just stationary visuals. Words, sounds, videos, and hypertext all abound through memetic media, and memetic participation is punctuated with multimodal communication in a way that a static book on memes can’t fully capture. Any grammar of memetic texts can’t be merely linguistic, or even merely visual. The texts we read are multimodal, and multiple modes of communication can be employed for the purposes of expression, commentary, and conversation.

Multimodality is central to the grammar of memetic conversations, whether they’re massive, niche, or interpersonal, and multiple modes of communication can have memetic dimensions. Hashtagging an old photo of yourself with “#TBT” for “throwback Thursday”—common in 2014 on sites like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook—employs memetic grammar. Auto-Tuning a presidential address to sound like a song does too. The classic “Rickroll” bait-and-switch—a meme in which participants promise to hyperlink to something relevant to the conversation and instead hyperlink to the music video for Rick Astley’s 1987 hit “Never Gonna Give You Up”—is premised on similar structures. Likewise structured on memetic grammar is the “Ice Bucket Challenge” that spread across sites like Facebook and YouTube in 2014 and 2015. For the challenge, participants dumped cold water on their head, posted the act to social media, and asked specific people either to do the same or to donate to ALS research. Across these multiple communicative modes and multiple social contexts, participants make statements through memetic logics.

In these examples, word, image, audio, video, hypertext, and even physical performance intertwine. #TBT is a phrasal acronym, but the hashtag makes it hypertext on many sites, and its predominant use is to label an image. Auto-Tuning often depends on the memetic manipulation of a video recording along with its source audio. The hypertext “Rickroll” joke connects its targets to a music video. The “Ice Bucket Challenge” is a physical performance, but it becomes an internet meme when people capture its iterations on camera and share them online. The visual dimensions of memetic media are vibrant, but their multimodal dimensions shine just as brightly.

For instance, a unique multimodal hybrid has become prevalent in the participatory media ecology. Not quite image, not quite video, animated GIF files are staples on sites like Tumblr, Reddit, and Imgur, among many others. Typically, GIFs are small, looping video files (made from the quick, successive display of individual images) that are absent audio or playback controls.⁵ GIFs may seem too small and limited for the high-definition digital age. However, their versatility and spreadability have made them a resonant genre of memetic media. They pepper comment sections and punctuate text-message conversations. Jason Eppink (2014) argues that GIFs have their own “ethos,” “utility,” and “aesthetics,” which have facilitated their pervasiveness. Eppink says the small files “are promiscuous and frictionless, with low barriers for viewing, processing, and sharing. It is largely because of its limitations that the GIF thrives” (303, original emphasis).

Figure 2.7 presents six individual frames from a “Sad Batman” GIF file. The whole file contains fifteen frames, producing less than a second of looped image (not too far off from the twenty-four frames per second that is standard in film). The fifteen images come together to tell the story of Batman pushing a vacant swing in the driving rain. The “perfect loop” of the GIF causes the swing to ceaselessly glide back and forth, as Batman gazes at its emptiness. Through the GIF format, the image uses motion to further the “Sad Batman” aesthetic, while the file remains small and static enough to sit seamlessly alongside still images. This multimodal liminality provides GIFs resonance as memetic texts.

Figure 2.7 Six selected frames from a “Sad Batman” GIF file, which reappropriates figure 2.4. The images loop to create the illusion that Batman is pushing an empty swing in the rain. Collected in 2014.

The multimodal grammar essential to memetic participation can be applied to contexts large or small, subcultural or mainstream, public or private. Just as linguistic grammar facilitates the shared understanding of spoken and written language, multimodal grammar facilitates the shared creation, circulation, and transformation of memetic media. And while creation, circulation, and transformation are each vital, the transformational nature of memetic media carries unique significance. Participants make statements through multimodal grammar; they make do by weaving those statements from what has come before. Reappropriation is therefore as essential to memetic grammar as multimodality. The next section will discuss the centrality of that reappropriation. From the depths of 4chan in-jokes to the prominence of Facebook charity videos, novelty is woven from existing threads.

Bricolage, Poaching, and Reappropriation

The multimodal reappropriation inherent to memes ensures that they’re layered texts. The same tools that facilitate multimodality facilitate the remix of found materials. In an environment of prevalent reappropriation, memetic grammar isn’t just about reading and writing images, or even reading and writing multimodal texts. It’s about doing that work by borrowing from the contributions of others, and transforming those contributions into something unique. In this way, a grammar premised on memetic logics depends on bricolage and poaching. Here, I’ll discuss the lineage of reappropriation in creative production, and tie memetic media to that lineage.

Memetic Media and Bricolage

Creative production has long been theorized in terms of reappropriation. Claude Lévi-Strauss ([1962] 1966)—himself reappropriating the verb for “extraneous movement”—speaks of the centrality of “bricolage” in folk cultures. The “bricoleur,” he argues, is a cultural participant who produces differently than the “craftsperson.” The craftsperson has the resources and support needed to produce within the sanctions of cultural systems; the bricoleur, conversely, is “someone who works with his hands and uses devious means” (16–17). When bricoleurs contribute to culture, they do so by “making do” with “whatever’s at hand.” Bricoleurs’ tools are “finite” and “heterogeneous,” since they don’t own the means of production or have the resources to work with sanctioned materials. Bricoleurs’ contributions to culture come from reappropriating what others have already created. Michel de Certeau (1984) makes similar claims about cultural participants who poach from cultural systems that don’t belong to them. Both the bricoleur and the poacher produce from within ecologies they do not control, using materials they do not own.

And these creations are foundational to memetic participation; memetic media are ripe with bricolage. Indeed, if grammar labels socially constructed systems of understanding, then memetic grammar depends on bricolage. It’s the heart of the memetic social system. The examples of bricolage in memetic texts are countless; intertextual references layer one after another as content spreads. No media text is safe from memetic reappropriation. So far—only a chapter and a half into this book—we’ve seen references to the 2009 Video Music Awards, Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, Twilight, Mario, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Breaking Bad, American President Barack Obama, several Wes Anderson films, several Kanye West lyrics, impressionist art, Runescape, The Walking Dead, a British satirical cartoon from the eighteenth century, and Batman. All of these texts have been the subject of memetic circulation and transformation.

To say that such bricolage is grammatical is to say that it provides an implicit and flexible guide for social participation, just like written grammar’s foundational role in language. Understanding reappropriation—just like understanding the multimodal dimensions of memetic grammar—allows participants to read other people’s contributions to a conversation and to write their own. For instance, figure 2.8 samples a 2012 collection of annotated “monster” images which were created for a thread on 4chan’s /co/ (“Comics and Cartoons”) board⁶ and were cataloged and shared on Imgur and Reddit thereafter. “Created” here, though, really means poached from another source and annotated by participants. The images that inspired those in figure 2.8 come from a blog dating back to 2009 by artist John Kenn Mortensen (known as Donn Kenn). On the blog, “Donn Kenn Gallery,” the artist describes himself this way: “Born in Denmark 1978. I write and direct television shows for kids. I have a set of twins and not much time for anything. But when I have time I draw monster drawings on Post-It notes. … It is a little window into a different world, made on office supplies.” Kenn’s work—in an unannotated form—has garnered attention of its own through participatory media: his blog gets regular comments, has a shop, has been linked to from Reddit, and has been the inspiration for a pair of books.

Figure 2.8 Three of Donn Kenn’s “monster drawings” from JohnKenn.blogspot.com, captioned by participants on 4chan, and shared to Reddit and Imgur. Collected in 2012.

But for all of Kenn’s production, his Post-It note scenes were the start, not the end, of the creative expression on the /co/ thread that produced the images in figure 2.8. The annotative work in the images is simple, the result of basic text placement in some kind of photo-editing software. However, meanings can shift in those small annotations; implicit dimensions of the images—ones that resonated with their annotators—become explicit through their annotation. The top image in figure 2.8 interprets a specific emotion on the abstract face of its child subject. In the middle image, the arrangement and format of the dialogue signals the flow and tone of a fictionalized conversation, telling one of a multitude of possible stories. The bottom image juxtaposes its banal dialogue with its conspicuously outlandish visuals. All these reappropriations craft their humor by using words to emphasize specific emotions their creators saw in Kenn’s drawings. Through their small creative acts, participants on the /co/ thread were able to add their voice to Kenn’s expression. Those images became conversational through bricolage, and resonated in their reappropriation.

In all, memetic media, like many popular media forms before them, are premised on bricolage and poaching, taking elements from established contexts and weaving them into a new expression. The ease of multimodal creation, the collectivist dimensions of this creative process, and the participatory spread of memetic texts add even more to the significance of bricolage and poaching in popular culture.

Imitation, Reappropriation, and Creation

The centrality of bricolage and poaching to media participation complicates its ties to memetic theory, and pushes the theory further away from the deterministic perspectives critiqued in chapter 1. Richard Dawkins (1976) originally introduced the same criteria for memetic success that he established for genes: longevity (how long a meme lasts), fecundity (how far a meme spreads), and fidelity (how true a meme stays to its origin). But transformative reappropriation means that those genetic criteria are an imperfect match for internet memes. At the least, “success” might mean something different for internet memes than for genes. Longevity can be defined in many ways and measured by many metrics. The “Binders Full of Women” meme born out of former Governor Mitt Romney’s gaffe during a 2012 American presidential debate—he claimed that when he searched for qualified female officials during his tenure as Massachusetts governor, he was brought “binders full of women”—may not have lasted long, but it spread widely in its brief period of resonance. “LOLCats”—around since at least 2008—are older memes by the standards of internet culture, but less so beyond that framing. Fecundity may matter when discussing how viral a text or an idea is, but a text can be memetic even between only a few friends, provided they’re imitating and transforming from a shared ingroup premise. Both these criteria are complicated by the flexibility of participatory media. A grammar premised on reappropriation and transformation produces conversational mutations that influence the duration and flow of memetic media.

But reappropriation and transformation make fidelity, in particular, an ill fit for memetic media. This mismatch underlies the common critique that memetic theory overemphasizes strict imitation in its understanding of the social spread of ideas. As David Haig argues, memetic replication is “nothing like the elegant simplicity of the double helix” (2006, 61). Instead, the spread of culture makes tangled knots. Fidelity may be an asset to genes, but memes may be stronger when transformative practices allow individual variations on collective premises, even at the cost of fidelity. In the most biological conceptions of memetics, the fact that culture changes as it is transmitted is a hindrance to the utility of the metaphor because genes, by contrast, are copied with high fidelity. Dawkins (1982) admits to this complication, commenting that in cultural practices, “the copying process is probably much less precise than in the case of genes: there may be a certain ‘mutational’ element in every copying event. … Memes may partially blend with each other in a way that genes do not” (112). To Dawkins, “these differences may prove sufficient to render the analogy with genetic natural selection worthless or even positively misleading” (112).

Fidelity is a helpful idea to a point, at least in some cases. Imitation of others’ language may facilitate the spread of memetic hashtags like #TBT or phrases like “dank memes.” Imitative spread brought Donn Kenn’s Post-It-note monster images—unaltered—to a popular thread on Reddit’s /r/WTF, which in its top comment linked to his blog and his books. On Tumblr in particular, GIFs often transcribe scenes from film and television verbatim. These GIFs recreate moments from shows like Supernatural, Power Rangers, and Parks and Recreation, or from movies like Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, Lilo and Stich, and The Dark Knight.

But the imitation and transmission of media texts is only part of memetic participation. Bricolage and poaching—the social processes that guide these multimodal texts—demonstrate the inadequacy of an emphasis on imitation in memetics. At the least, they force us to acknowledge that imitation is only the beginning of reappropriation. #TBT resonates because participants can add their own “throwback” to the shared understanding. This addition can be a typical “throwback” photo (something from an expected range of “earlier” in the creator’s life, like a childhood photo) or it can ironically deviate from the norm (something outside of that range, like a photo from the day before or a sonogram picture of a fetus in utero). The typical use skews more toward imitation of the hashtag, and the ironic use more toward humorous reappropriation. Both, however, depend on creative participation in a social process. The “imitation” is willful and hardly mindless; it’s based on socially situated expression.

Even the unaltered translation of films and television shows into image and GIF files is reappropriational. These scenes are central to the “reaction shot,” “MFW” (“my face/feeling when”), and “MRW” (“my reaction when”) images shared on sites like 4chan, Reddit, Tumblr, Twitter, and Buzzfeed. These reaction shots reappropriate popular media to provide social cues in mediated conversation, even as they leave the source text unaltered. The images in figure 2.9 are all frames from GIFs on Reddit’s popular /r/ReactionGIFs subreddit, which explains in its description that “a reaction GIF is a physical or emotional response that is captured in a GIF, which you can link in response to someone or something on the Internet.” More than simply transcribing media texts, participants on /r/ReactionGIFs poach them for new uses.

Figure 2.9 Three frames from “reaction GIFs” posted to /r/ReactionGIFs, reappropriating popular mass media. Left to right: a surprised Andy Dwyer from a 2013 episode of *Parks and Recreation*; a pair of grimacing Power Rangers from a 2013 episode of the show *Unofficial Sentai Akibaranger*; the excited news team from the 2004 film *Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy*. Posted respectively on March 27, 2014; December 19, 2014; and March 24, 2015.

The images in figure 2.9—like the comics in figure 2.8 and the Walking Dead stills in figure 2.2—become something new when applied to new contexts. The first image in figure 2.9 is of an excited Andy from the show Parks and Recreation. This excitement gets new context when accompanied by the image’s title on /r/ReactionGIFs: “MRW my parents found a pack of cigarettes in my 13 year old brother’s backpack, and he responds with ‘But I only smoke when I’m drunk!’” The second image shows the Power Rangers in anguish; their pain is used to convey “my reaction when I opened the oven to get my lasagna, just to discover I had never turned on the oven.” The news team from Anchorman jumping for joy in the third image is “CNN’s reaction upon hearing about ANOTHER plane crash.” On /r/ReactionGIFs, a post will often spawn a chain of accompanying GIFs reappropriated from other pop media; these GIFs respond to each other in the comments, creating a multiturn, multiparticipant conversation around a single reaction shot. Reaction shots are the result of not the mere imitation or transmission of a media text, but the reappropriation of that text for conversation.

The transformation of pop media is essential to memetic participation. For instance, the “Sad Batman” meme wasn’t the first time the caped crusader resonated on participatory media. Quotations from the 2008 Batman film The Dark Knight have been employed on collectives like 4chan, Tumblr, and Reddit in the years since its release. The claim from the film that Batman is “the hero Gotham deserves” is translated into “the hero Reddit/Tumblr/4chan/this thread/this board/the internet deserves” in various contexts. When the Joker, Batman’s archenemy, burns a giant pyramid of cash in the film, he insists that “it’s not about the money; it’s about sending a message.” The phrase has become a popular retort when one participant asks another about the cost of something.

Another Joker line from The Dark Knight inspired massive memetic reappropriation. The villain, costumed as a nurse and explaining his motivations to Gotham District Attorney Harvey Dent, exclaims, “If tomorrow I tell the press that, like, a gang banger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics, because it’s all ‘part of the plan.’ But when I say that one little old mayor will die, well then everyone loses their minds.” The Joker’s “everyone loses their minds” response to a perceived logical inconsistency became the inspiration for a stock character macro in 2013. The images in figure 2.10 apply the Joker’s rant to topics like technological innovation, gender identity, gaming, and personal hygiene. The images demonstrate fidelity to their source text in that each caption comments with bewilderment on a societal inconsistency, and in this way the texts spread the central idea of the original scene (as well as awareness of the film and franchise itself). Shared understandings of the Joker’s monologue in The Dark Knight—or at least an awareness of the Joker character in general—premise the contributions here.

Figure 2.10 Four memetic variations of the “Everyone Loses Their Minds” Joker stock character macro, reappropriating a scene from the 2008 film *The Dark Knight*. Collected in 2015.

In their form, the images in figure 2.10 demonstrate fidelity to the prototypical image macro aesthetic as well. In image macros, the top-line setup flows into the bottom-line punch line through the visual subject in the center of the frame. This structure produces what Kress and van Leeuwen (2006) call a “vector”: a sort of visual “action verb” that indicates process by moving the eye through the image. In the case of standard image macros, the top-to-bottom vector creates a sort of ellipses, where the visual subject of the image stands between the written setup and the punch line, prompting the reader to pause to take in the subject (in figure 2.10, the Joker) before finishing the joke. Further, even the prevalent use of the Impact font in image macros is a formal imitation that facilitates transformative reappropriation. Kate Brideau and Charles Berret (2014) argue that Impact resonates as a typeface due to its strength, clarity, and rhythm, making it ideal for statements conveyed in short bursts. Because of the predominant use of Impact in image macros, the font has become a signal for memetic expression.

But even with these imitative dimensions, the fidelity of the images in figure 2.10 to The Dark Knight’s content and to the prototypical image macro form exists only to provide a recognizable premise for transformation. In the case of these four images, the Joker’s more dubious logic about murder, as expressed in the movie, is boiled down to more agreeable social arguments. The Joker’s exact phrasing mutates with each reappropriation as well. For instance, the Joker’s original “nobody panics” becomes “no one bats an eye” and “no one cares” in the bottom two images. In the top two images, the sentiment is even less explicit; it’s merely implied. Three of the four images also transform the Joker’s original use of “everyone” to “everybody,” a common shift in the meme. Each new iteration of the “Everyone Loses Their Minds” macro is unique, and that macro can carry innovations as limitless as the participants creating them.

Within a grammar premised on memetic logics, fidelity only resonates to a point. Too much fidelity to an original idea or text—what Shifman (2014) calls a “founder meme”—may actually undermine the longevity and fecundity of a memetic idea. Noam Gal, Limor Shifman, and Zohar Kampf (2015) make a similar argument about the “It Gets Better” LGBT-empowerment YouTube video series. Memetic iterations of the founder video—produced by activist Dan Savage—adhered closely to their source, and therefore, counterintuitively, did not open up the conversation to diverse identities and perspectives. Likewise, too much fidelity is what caused Alfonso (2014) to charge that stock character macros have been “bled dry” of their novelty and robbed of their relevance. On the other hand, too little fidelity might make a memetic text too unrecognizable to carry a coherent message. Stephanie Vie (2014) makes this argument about brands that appropriated the Human Rights Campaign’s Facebook “Equality Logo” for LGBT rights, twisting the memetic display picture to fit their brand first, and second to send a message of empowerment. When it comes to fidelity, the Goldilocks “just right” value is apparently somewhere between extreme imitation and extreme transformation. And—as we’ll see in the next chapter—different participants, forums, boards, sites, and collectives can have different standards for that Goldilocks balance.

This tension between imitation and transformation manifests in the anxiety that memetic conversations reduce participation to pastiche, which to Andrew Murphie and John Potts “is a recycling of the past without the critical edge of satire or the subversive role of parody” (2003, 59). But this anxiety assumes that memetic media have a singularity of purpose, utility, and audience, whereas they are actually made up of innumerable texts that are produced by participants with diverse goals, literacies, motivations, and perspectives. The pastiche charge is leveled when the criterion for successful memetic reappropriation is some sort of social commentary, or some sort of subcultural identification. When, instead, bricolage and poaching are thought of as the multimodal fabric of collective conversation—just as linguistic grammar is the fabric of collective conversation—playful imitation and recycling have a different utility, and can “work” for wider ends.

Some memetic texts may be mere pastiche. Some may be poignant commentary. Some—as we’ll see in chapter 5—may flirt with both. Some may be neither, but rather may do their “recycling” for reasons entirely outside of any sort of critical, political edge. Memetic reappropriation may fit the “collective, aphoristic, and inscriptive” logics Fleming (2001) sees in Elizabethan posies better than the “individualist, lyric, and voice-centered” logics that scholars are trained to value in poetic expression today. On collectives like Reddit, 4chan, and Tumblr, the social, conversational, and collective value of memetic reappropriation might trump the temptation to look down on them as imitation, overkill, or pastiche.

Reddit, for instance, has several subreddits devoted to the collective reappropriation of pop media GIFs in the name of social play. /r/ReactionGIFs is only the surface of this reappropriation. On /r/GIFTournament, participants create reaction GIFs that are set in head-to-head competition and voted on by subscribers to the subreddit. On /r/DubbedGIFs, participants make a joke or a point by providing altered subtitles to pop media GIFs. On /r/BehindTheGIFs, participants create images of “backstory” explanation as a setup to a punch line consisting of a familiar GIF. Its top-voted post of all time provides context for a puzzling GIF of a mob kicking a trashcan. “Behind” that GIF, the creator of the post adds a crudely drawn trashcan telling us that “Hitler did nothing wrong” (an oft-quoted memetic phrase in its own right). The trashcan’s declaration is what inspired its mob beating.

Another Reddit staple, the /r/PhotoshopBattles subreddit is premised on participants editing an original image in the comments to its thread. The “battle” is won by the contribution that is most upvoted. On the subreddit, photos of North Korean supreme leader Kim Jong-un are frequently used as a source of playful participation. This repeated jabbing at the dictator may be pastiche, pop commentary, or something in between; multimodal grammar may facilitate social participation and public expression simultaneously.

For instance, one 2013 thread asked participants to Photoshop a Korean Central News Agency image of Kim overseeing the construction of a “ski center” (figure 2.11). Responses were playful jabs at Kim, and the playful tone of the subreddit was evident in the commentary around the images. Playful collective conversation “won out” in the thread over “political commentary.” However, some remixes of the image could be read as more explicitly “political” than others. For example, figure 2.12 features images that lampoon Kim (having him join the Power Rangers, replacing his body with Ned Flanders of The Simpsons), but make no overt political comment beyond belittling the dictator. The images in figure 2.13 play with the super-villain dictator trope more explicitly, having Kim oversee the construction of “Jaeger” mech warriors from the film Pacific Rim, and having him melt the face of one of his subordinates. Political, social, and playful purposes exist simultaneously in these images. Their very form makes Kim the butt of a memetic joke, like a collective version of World War II Warner Bros. cartoons that used Bugs Bunny to mock Hitler. Pastiche, maybe, but also evidence of the collective conversations inherent to memetic reappropriation.

Figure 2.11 A photo by North Korea’s Korean Central News Agency of supreme leader Kim Jong-un overseeing a ski center’s construction. Released on May 27, 2013.

Figure 2.12 Two memetic reappropriations of figure 2.11, from an /r/PhotoshopBattles thread. Both images connect Kim Jong-un to popular media characters: Kim is posed with the Power Rangers from the show *Mighty Morphin Power Rangers* (top); Kim’s body is replaced with that of Ned Flanders from the show *The Simpsons* (bottom). Posted on December 31, 2013.

Figure 2.13 Two memetic reappropriations of figure 2.11, from an /r/PhotoshopBattles thread. Both images play with “evil dictator” tropes: Kim is posed with “Jaegers,” mech suits from the 2013 film *Pacific Rim* (top); Kim is shown vaporizing the head of an advisor (bottom). Posted on December 31, 2013.

In all, if memetic cultural theory is going to apply to memetic media, then that theory has to account for the blend of imitation and transformation in social conversation. Cultural participants transform texts as they share them. An emphasis on imitation in memetics misses that point, just as “transmission” models of communication have long missed that same point. Bricolage and poaching are central to the “system of rules” underlying memetic communication in a way that Dawkins’s (1976) genetic fidelity doesn’t account for or doesn’t value. Fidelity, in memetic media, can only be kept to a certain degree. As the next chapter will demonstrate, a shared premise has to remain just recognizable enough to allow for creative innovation within a social vernacular. This social sensitivity reminds us that we need to think about process when considering the memetic dimensions of bricolage and poaching, and reminds us to appreciate the creative and conversational dimensions of reappropriation. Along with multimodality, this reappropriation is central to the grammar of memetic participation.

2 Grammar: Structures for Making Statements and Making Do