Memes in Digital Culture (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series)
Shifman, Limor
ISBN 10: 0262525437 ISBN 13: 9780262525435
Published by The MIT Press, 2013
Used
Soft cover
From
World of Books (was SecondSale), Montgomery, IL, U.S.A.
Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars
AbeBooks Seller since December 20, 2007
This specific item is no longer available.
About this Item
Description:
Item in very good condition! Textbooks may not include supplemental items i.e. CDs, access codes etc. Seller Inventory # 00092397418
Synopsis:
Taking “Gangnam Style” seriously: what Internet memes can tell us about digital culture.
In December 2012, the exuberant video “Gangnam Style” became the first YouTube clip to be viewed more than one billion times. Thousands of its viewers responded by creating and posting their own variations of the video—“Mitt Romney Style,” “NASA Johnson Style,” “Egyptian Style,” and many others. “Gangnam Style” (and its attendant parodies, imitations, and derivations) is one of the most famous examples of an Internet meme: a piece of digital content that spreads quickly around the web in various iterations and becomes a shared cultural experience. In this book, Limor Shifman investigates Internet memes and what they tell us about digital culture.
Shifman discusses a series of well-known Internet memes—including “Leave Britney Alone,” the pepper-spraying cop, LOLCats, Scumbag Steve, and Occupy Wall Street's “We Are the 99 Percent.” She offers a novel definition of Internet memes: digital content units with common characteristics, created with awareness of each other, and circulated, imitated, and transformed via the Internet by many users. She differentiates memes from virals; analyzes what makes memes and virals successful; describes popular meme genres; discusses memes as new modes of political participation in democratic and nondemocratic regimes; and examines memes as agents of globalization.
Memes, Shifman argues, encapsulate some of the most fundamental aspects of the Internet in general and of the participatory Web 2.0 culture in particular. Internet memes may be entertaining, but in this book Limor Shifman makes a compelling argument for taking them seriously.
About the Author: Limor Shifman is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Communication and Journalism at Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
Bibliographic Details
Title: Memes in Digital Culture (The MIT Press ...
Publisher: The MIT Press
Publication Date: 2013
Binding: Soft cover
Condition: Very Good