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.
