FRAMEWORK

This is an attempt to critically examine user-generated participatory content that has all too regularly been overlooked or disregarded as being simplistic or absent of any real value: the resonance of viral content on YouTube and Internet memes. In the discussion below, I will explain and analyze what it means to “go viral,” what it takes to do just that, and how the visual, audio, and verbal messages of viral videos and memes are representative of cultural values and changing conditions of the times in which they are created and shared.

In Memes in Digital Culture, Limor Shifman writes, "Dawkins defined memes as small cultural units of transmission, analogous to genes, that spread from person to person by copying or imitation. Examples of memes in his pioneering essay include cultural artifacts such as melodies, catchphrases, and clothing fashions, as well as abstract beliefs (for instance, the concept of God)” (9). Shifman goes on to state, “Like genes, memes are defined as replicators that undergo variation, competition, selection, and retention. At any given moment, many memes are competing for the attention of hosts; however, only memes suited to their sociocultural environment spread successfully, while others become extinct” (9).

When Shifman initially defines and describes memes, he isn’t talking about the Internet and memes as we think about them today. Instead, Shifman discusses the meme as a thing, a unit that is spread through people and cultures like a virus; even from the beginning, memes had the potential to go viral. And this is how we think of memes today, although their significance and power is often overlooked.

We disregard memes more often than not as meaningless Internet content, a flaw that must be mended. Shifman writes, "As units that propagate gradually through many interpersonal contacts, memes were considered irrelevant for understanding mass-mediated content, which is often transmitted simultaneously from a single institutional source to many people. But this is no longer the case in an era of blurring boundaries between interpersonal and mass, professional and amateur, bottom-up and top-down communications. In a time marked by a convergence of media platforms, when content flows swiftly from one medium to another, memes have become more relevant than ever to communication scholarship" (6-7).

Memes reflect the beliefs, experiences, and values of individuals and social groups alike. Their power comes from the fact that they are user-generated artifacts that are able to be shared across boundaries and time zones and oceans at any and all times of day, and all at once. Users who create the content and upload it online are, according to Shifman, both the medium and the message. “In an era marked by ‘network individualism,’” he states, “people use memes to simultaneously express both their uniqueness and their connectivity” (30). Users who create memes and videos weave their identities into the content, making themselves part of a larger conversation with a larger audience.

It’s important to remember that in talking about memes, I am not talking about individual pieces of Internet content that stand alone. Memes are part of a larger conversation and they exist within relation to one another; as Shifman states, “an Internet meme is always a collection of texts” (56). This is important to remember because it’s easy to confuse a meme with a piece of viral online content. A viral is, according to Shifman, “a single cultural unit (such as a video, photo, or joke) that propagates in many copies” (56). Whereas virals are individualized, memes are collective.

That being said, although there is a distinction between virals and memes, many memes have viral success online. Shifman lays out six factors that enhance the virality of Internet content: positivity (and humor), provoking “high-arousal” emotions, packaging, prestige, positioning, and participation.

Content that is positive lighthearted, funny, and inspiring is more likely to be shared than content that is negative, damning, or threatening, although there are exceptions (positivity).
“Berger and Milkman found that people share content that arouses them emotionally—both positively and negatively” (Shifman 67) (provoking “high-arousal” emotions).
Clear stories that are simple and easy to understand will spread better and faster than complex, confusing ones (packaging).
Articles, videos, stories, and photos created and shared by famous people and/or publications are viewed as more reputable and credible, and are therefore more likely to be shared and read and shared again (prestige).
Content that resonates with a particular group at a particular time as part of a conversation will have more impact and will be shared more based on its relevance (positioning).
Lastly, Shifman writes that “viral success can be achieved when a campaign gives its audience an opportunity to engage and affect rather than just ‘pass through it’” (72). When people are given an opportunity to be a part of something and make their voices heard, they are more likely to share content that acknowledges and encourages them to do so (participation).

This explanation of memes as pieces of culture that share stories, things that are bound together when similar and used as foundations for other similar ideas and stories to build upon and multiply, is repeated in Anandam Kavoori's book, Reading YouTube: The Critical Viewers’ Guide, as well.

Kavoori writes, "As the sociologist David Silverman puts it, 'all we have are stories. Some come from other people, some from us. What matters is to understand how and where the stories are produced, what sort of stories they are, and how we can put them to intelligent use in theorizing about social life' (1998: 111)" (2). Kavoori then writes, "Using such a hybrid format is, I believe, wholly appropriate to the task at hand--telling the story of a popular medium through popular means--the Internet" (2).

Kavoori relates even more to Shifman when he discusses Miller and Shepherd (2009), who "offer the concept of 'affordances' as a way to understand Internet genres. Affordances, they suggest, represent the relation or interaction between media texts and their environment, which online include linking, instant distribution, indexing and searching, and above all, interactivity. These affordances are 'directional,' they make 'some forms of communicative interaction possible... leading us to engage in or attempt certain kinds of rhetorical actions rather than others' (28). I see such 'affordances' working across the terrain of storytelling on YouTube, allowing for certain kinds of stories--the genres--to be generated" (12).

In analyzing what makes certain YouTube videos more popular than others, Kavoori discusses the performance of identity, which is prevalent on YouTube. These user-generated videos, according to Kavoori, allow for “collective recognition through presentation of a virtual self, and, simultaneously, a sense of personal agency, where the webcam becomes the tool for the manifestation of what in another age was certainly street theatre and locker-room clowning” (33).

At this point, let us turn our attention to a current political movement that invites and encourages participation in digital and physical spaces, and that inspires and generates memes and videos to spread its message and promote activism and demand change: #blacklivesmatter.

MOVEMENT