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!

Guiding Questions

I get a wide range of reactions when I tell people I'm teaching a class about internet memes, from "that's amazing!" to "how are you allowed to do that?"

I am happy to acknowledge the topic itself was partly intended to attract student attention. After I listed a course titled "social and ethical issues in computing" and nobody signed up, I decided to work on marketing a little bit more.

Memes are fun, and they also provide a nice gateway topic to some deeper questions about computers, communication, and society:

  • What is the role of digital culture in society at large? How has this changed over time?
  • What is the relationship between our digital communication systems and our internal attention? Are we losing our deep thinking skills? Is it really "brain rot?"
  • How can graph theory and network analysis principles apply to information diffusion and content virality?
  • Why does some mediocre content become so popular, and why does some incredible content remain in obscurity?
  • How does visual communication fit into broader cultural symbolism?How does this vary across different types of visual communication (images, memes, AI-generated media, television, movies and film, etc.)?
  • How is online content created, modified, and distributed to serve different political and economic interests?

Topics and Themes

An academic lens on memes can draw from a wide range of scholarly topics:

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

I am currently reviewing a range of potential books 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
  • Made to stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath and Dan Heath
  • "How Memes Became the Voice of a Generation" by Caroline Kitchener

Peer-Reviewed Papers:

General Audience Articles

Movies and Such