Memes present us with the familiar tension between individual texts and the fluid generic categories that bind them together. What is the “meme” when I Rickroll a friend: is it the friend’s arrival at the YouTube video of Rick Astley shimmying in a church, or is it the recognizable practice of concealing this link and delivering the friend to the video unwittingly? For rhetoric scholar Eric Jenkins (2014), it is the latter. Jenkins argues that a meme “is a mode—a shared, virtual orientation” toward objects that “circulate across media platforms, producing a recognizable structure” for actualizations in the form of…
Author: Kyle Cunningham
Kyle Cunningham
Kyle Cunningham is a doctoral student at UNC Chapel Hill and the Digital Humanities Manager at the UNC's Digital Literacy and Communications Lab. His research interrogates how memes function rhetorically to construct collective belonging and identity within, between, and beyond far-right digital publics and also attends to the material infrastructures of platforms that condition participation and influence the circulation of reactionary discourse.