What is a meme, technically speaking?

Memetic logics of participation: Fitness body culture on Instagram

“…While context-specific logics manifest in consumers remixing and blurring the boundaries between the contextual memes of the fitness memeplex, platform-afforded logics manifest in consumers’ adherence to conventional platform vernacular and attention-seeking and visibility-maximizing platform conventions. As such, these logics manifest “as collections of technical content resulting from a combination of digital participatory culture as well as software production practices” (Rogers and Giorgi, 2023: 2)—they interconnect, cross-reference, and reinforce a consumer culture beyond the affective context in which the consumption takes place—a platformized consumer culture.…”

“…Accordingly, the networked public of #fitness constitutes an "imagined collective" (Boyd, 2011: 39). That is, a self-promoting and competitive public of "collapsed contexts" (Boyd, 2011: 49) where only consumers adjusted to the specificities of the platformized ecosystem (Gibbs et al, 2015;Rogers and Giorgi, 2023) become successful in ensuring longevity (Dawkins, 1976(Dawkins, /2016) of their attentional capital-a networked public permeated by individual pursuits of attention and visibility. There, metaphorically speaking, only the fittest will survive.…”

“…This interplay produces memeplexes, that is, meme complexes, which we understand as groups of contextual memes (Shifman, 2014b) where meaning materializes following “the specificities of the platform, its material architecture, and the collective cultural practices that operate on and through it” (Gibbs et al, 2015: 258). In this sense, platforms and (web-)sites are the source of memes and therefore shape their compositionality—memes, after all, “are collections of technical content constructed in software environments online” (Rogers and Giorgi 2023, 13). We understand that memes materialize as compositions of material and expressive components, that is, standardized templates (Shifman, 2014a).…”

“…To investigate these participatory logics, we build upon a meme theoretical perspective (Dawkins, 1976/2016; Shifman, 2014a; 2014b) and apply a networked content analysis (Niederer, 2016). Our study turns to the fitness body culture that unfolds at the intersection between consumers and the hashtag #fitness on Instagram as a context in which “the cultural aspects and the technical specificities of the online [site] employed for the data collection” tie together (Rogers and Giorgi 2023, 3). We aim to extend Caliandro and Anselmi’s (2021) research on memetic logics of branded material consumption objects.…”

The platformization of consumer culture: A theoretical framework

“…A brand public is a form of consumer collective that emerges around brands on social media, whose member’s interaction is not based on direct conversations but rather on the mediation of the same digital device (e.g., #louisvuitton)—which all members use and on which their attention is focused (Arvidsson and Caliandro, 2016). Although disconnected, the members of a brand public are capable of creating a common imaginary (Caliandro, 2014; Giordano et al, 2018), since they are subject to the same socio-technical constraints (Boyd, 2011; Rogers and Giorgi, 2023). For example, Caliandro and Anselmi (2021), studying six brand publics on Instagram (#starbucks, #mcdonalds, #smirnoff, #greygoose, #zara, #louisvuitton), noted that, when generating branded posts, users tend to reproduce a very repetitive and standardized visual repertoire.…”