“Put it back”. Issues and challenges of historicising online virality
Valérie Schafer (University of Luxembourg):
From the Hampster Dance, All your Base are belong to us and the Dancing Baby in the second half of the 1990s to Bernie’s mittens at the US presidential inauguration and the image macros of the Evergreen blocked in the Suez Canal, through Disaster Girl or Distracted Boyfriend to name but a few, memes and Internet phenomena have become in the last twenty years an important part of our digital cultures (Shifman, 2014). After presenting why historicizing virality matters (which is the purpose of our Hivi research project supported by the Luxembourg National Research Fund and conducted at the University of Luxembourg, https://hivi.uni.lu), this talk will focus on the challenges related to sources. Historicising online virality requires first acknowledging how difficult it is to build corpora and develop chronological views in the vast and heterogeneous amount of data lakes and sources available on the live web and in web archives. All these repositories preserve viral content in a very different manner, covering different frames and periods, while the actors who come into play have different sizes and motivations, from giant platforms (Twitter, YouTube – see Burgess and Green 2018, etc.) to small communities, through heritagisation platform (i.e. Know Your Meme – see Pettis, 2021) and web archives. Therefore, it is necessary to consider the many levels of politics, curation, and agencies at stake when studying the history and heritagisation of memes and Internet phenomena and their impact. Finally, temporalities and scales are also challenging, and scalability is key for studying the spreadability of digital contents, notably in a long-term perspective. There is a constant need for balancing between several scales to study circulation and flow (Jenkins, 2009), processes, participation (Milner, 2018), and appropriation while recontextualizing memes and Internet phenomena in their complex and changing environments (changes of platforms, of participation, of the audience, of meaning...).
References
Jean Burgess, Joshua Green, YouTube: Online video and participatory culture, Cambridge MA, London, Polity Press, 2018
Nicholas A. John, The age of sharing, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2017.
Henry Jenkins, If It Doesn’t Spread, It’s Dead (Part One): Media Viruses and Memes, 2009 (http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2009/02/if_it_doesnt_spread_its_dead_p.html).
Ryan Milner, The world made meme: Public conversations and participatory media, Cambridge MA, The MIT Press, 2018, p. 19-21.
Ben Tadayoshi Pettis, “Know your Meme and the Homogeneization of Web History”, Internet Histories, 2021 (to be published).
Limor Shifman, Memes in digital culture, Cambridge MA, The MIT Press, 2014.
