Internet Memes (work-in-progress)
Thanks to the flexibility of "May Term" at Transylvania University, I get to teach a class about internet memes in May 2025 😃. This syllabus is in its earliest stages, so send me ideas and check back to see how it shapes up!
Materials
I am currently reviewing a range of potential books and other materials to use in class, including:
- Memes in Digital Culture by Limor Shiffman
- Extremely Online by Taylor Lorenz
- Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch
- The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore
- The World Made Meme: Public Conversations and Participatory Media by Ryan Milner
Another area involves the real people in popular meme pictures, for example:
Topics
An academic lens on memes can draw from a wide range of topics:
- Mimesis and imagination (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
- Memetics and Evolutionary memes (Richard Dawkins)
- Mimetic theory (René Girard)
- Network theory
- Network analysis
- Communication infrastructure
- Communication theory
Exercises
- Meme Archaeology. Students will do a deep dive on a sound, trend, hashtag, image, or other meme to pin down its origins.
- Meme Evolution. Students will trace how memes and their meanings change over time.
- Meme Networks. Using network software (e.g. networkx or igraph), students will construct and analyze a network of actors who use a given meme.
- Going Viral. Students will share some piece(s) of media to the internet with the goal of reaching as many people as possible.
