Literature Review

What is a Meme?

The first usage of the word can be credited to biologist Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene in 1976 (Shifman, 2013). Dawkins defined memes as a small cultural unit of transmission that spreads person to person by copying and imitation (1976). Examples of memes included melodies, clothing fashions, and concepts like God.

The word meme was later picked up by Internet users to describe the phenomenon of a rapid uptake and spread of a “particular idea presented as a written text, image, language, move, or some other unit of culture stuff” (Shifman, 2013, p. 364). Thus, Dawkins’ idea was co-opted to the digital world and has remained a part of the Internet’s dialect ever since.

Ross and Rivers (2017) said a meme is a group of items sharing common characteristics of content which are created, transformed, and circulated by many participants though digital participatory platforms.

Memes as Rhetoric

Memes are often a form of political and social debate. This study looks at the ways that rhetoric is used in memes that debate the issue of U.S. immigration. Rhetorical analysis traditionally focuses on the words a person uses but a branch of rhetorical analysis that has become popular in recent years is the study of visual rhetoric. Visual rhetoric involves the analysis of the symbolic or communicative aspects of visual artifacts. According to Foss, it is “a way of approaching and analyzing visual data that highlights the communicative dimensions of images or objects” (2004).

Defining memes as visual rhetoric has an additional advantage. Many memes contain textual elements superimposed onto a visual element. There was initial concern about how to handle the analysis of both of these elements together, but research has shown that when images and words appear together, written verbal rhetoric can be identified as an extension of visual rhetoric. (Foss, 2004). Thus, both elements work in tandem to create the entire rhetorical impact of the text.