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 still developing, so send me ideas and check back to see how it shapes up!

Initial Course Description:

Memes matter! This course offers an academic exploration into the social and technical implications of internet memes. Students will engage with scientific theories related to memetics and digital communication, gaining experience with key analytical tools and methods used in computational social science. The course will involve various hands-on exercises, including “meme archaeology” to trace the origins and evolution of different memes, network analysis to map digital communication structures, experiments in promoting viral content, and more. The study of internet memes is an emerging area of scholarship, so topics and exercises will incorporate new developments as appropriate.

What I tell people when asked, "are you actually teaching a real college class about memes?"

Talking about memes is a good (even great!) way of talking about human communication. How do ideas spread? How do people try to persuade other people? What is language and how does it change? How do communities and audiences form? These are deep questions that fit well into the liberal arts. They are also very abstract questions - some may say too abstract. The topic of memes offers a tangible phenomena to help broach deeper questions about human communication.

This class is “about memes,” and also about human communication in a world that is mediated by more and more tools, toys, and technologies. It is about communication in the true sense of the word: “to have something in common with someone else.” It is about the part of communication that shares etymology with communal, communion, and community. What could be more important?

Topics and Themes

An academic lens on memes can draw from a wide range of scholarly topics. For the first iteration of this class, I grouped things into four main themes:

  1. Structuration and sociotechnical systems
    1. How can communication be modeled?
    2. What is a sociotechnical system?
  2. Networks and communities
    1. What can be captured in a network?
    2. How can abstract graph theory algorithms address practical questions about real-world networks?
  3. Attention and cognition
    1. How does social media interact with attention spans?
    2. How does social media interact with mental health?
  4. Media markets
    1. How does political economy interact with digital media?
    2. What is public media and why does it exist?

Future versions of this course may include:

  • Mimesis and imagination (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
  • Memetics and Evolutionary memes (Richard Dawkins)
  • Mimetic theory (René Girard)
  • Digital anthropology (Heather Horst)

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, again focused on a single sound, trend, hashtag, image, etc.
  • 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.
  • Collaborative Filtering. Students will set up a simple recommendation algorithm based on collective preferences, labeling content individually then devising different approaches to recommend content for classmates.
  • Feed Analysis. As a way to reflect on attention patterns, students will log content from their social media feed(s) and analyze this data to identify patterns and phenomena such as context collapse.
  • Headline Testing. Students will design and conduct a simple A/B test to explore how engagement can be measured, sharing posts to platforms like Reddit.
  • Online-to-Offline. Students will research the stories behind real people in popular meme pictures, for example, Zoë Roth as disaster girl, or John Phillips as "crying Northwestern kid".

Books

For the first iteration of this class, I used two main books:

  • Memes in Digital Culture by Limor Shiffman
  • Information Theory: A Tutorial Introduction by James V Stone

Future versions of this course may include:

  • 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
  • Made to stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath and Dan Heath

Peer-Reviewed Papers

Structuration and Sociotechnical Systems:

  • Marwick, A. E., & boyd, d. (2011). I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience. New Media & Society, 13(1), 114-133. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444810365313
  • Davis, J. L., & Chouinard, J. B. (2017). Time Collapse in Social Media: Extending the Context Collapse. Social Media + Society, 3(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305118763349
  • Vitak, J. (2012). The Impact of Context Collapse and Privacy on Social Network Site Disclosures. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 56(4), 451-470. https://doi.org/10.1080/08838151.2012.732140
  • Guerrero-Solé, F., Suárez-Gonzalo, S., Rovira, C., & Codina, L. (2020). Social media, context collapse and the future of data-driven populism. Profesional de la información, 29(5). https://doi.org/10.3145/epi.2020.sep.06

Networks and Communities

  • Aguilar, G. K., Campbell, H. A., Stanley, M., & Taylor, E. (2017). Communicating mixed messages about religion through internet memes. Information, Communication & Society, 20(10), 1498-1520. (PDF)
  • Zannettou, S., Caulfield, T., Blackburn, J., De Cristofaro, E., Sirivianos, M., Stringhini, G., & Suarez-Tangil, G. (2018). On the Origins of Memes by Means of Fringe Web Communities. Proceedings of the Internet Measurement Conference 2018, 188-202. https://doi.org/10.1145/3278532.3278550
  • Moody-Ramirez, M., & Church, A. B. (2019). Analysis of Facebook Meme Groups Used During the 2016 US Presidential Election. Social Media + Society, 5(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305118808799
  • Journell, W. (2019). Meme-ing Electoral Participation. European Journal of American Studies, 14(2). https://doi.org/10.4000/ejas.12158

Attention and cognition

  • Weng, L., Flammini, A., Vespignani, A., & Menczer, F. (2012). Competition among memes in a world with limited attention. Scientific Reports, 2, 335. https://doi.org/10.1038/srep00335
  • Qiu, X., Oliveira, D. F. M., Shirazi, A. S., Flammini, A., & Menczer, F. (2017). Limited individual attention and online virality of low-quality information. Nature Human Behaviour, 1(7), 0132. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-017-0132
  • Brandtzaeg, P. B., & Lüders, M. (2018). Time collapse in social media: Extending the context collapse. Social Media+ Society, 4(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305118763349

Media markets

  • Ross, A. S., & Rivers, D. J. (2017). Communicating mixed messages about religion through internet memes. Information, Communication & Society, 20(10), 1441-1457. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2016.1229004
  • Kearney, A. M., & Bandy, J. (2022). "Self-Quaranteens" Process COVID-19: Understanding Information Visualization Language in Memes. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 6(CSCW1), 1-36. https://doi.org/10.1145/3512894

General Audience Articles

Movies and Such