Limor Shifman

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Limor Shifman is a professor of communication at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and is the Vice Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences. [1] Her work has been in researching and developing an area of study surrounding Internet memes, a subarea of digital culture and digital media research. Since the late 2000s [2] she has been an active contributor to the research area of memetics, a more broad area of research interested in cultural evolution of ideas. [3] She is married to neurogeneticist Sagiv Shifman.

Contents

Education and career

Limor Shifman initially worked in theater and media as a writer, producer and presenter. Her work researched the history of Israeli humor and popular culture for the Department of Children and Youth, Israel Public Television. [4] Shifman completed her doctoral work at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem's Department of Communication and Journalism [5] where she maintains a professorship. After completing her dissertation, in 2005 she became a research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute. [5] Since the late 2000s, her work shifted from the history of Israeli humor and television research to what she eventually would call Internet memetics.

Internet memetics

After the decline in interest of memetics in anthropology, Shifman provided a text for why memetics should be redeveloped within a media and communication-oriented framework. [6] In this text she defines internet memes to be the following:

(a) a group of digital items sharing common characteristics of content, form, and/or stance, which (b) were created with awareness of each other, and (c) were circulated, imitated, and/or transformed via the Internet by many users.

Further, she outlines content as "both ideas and ideologies", form as "the physical incarnation of the message", and stance as "the information memes convey about their own communication." Stance is about how actors (e.g. people) position themselves in relation to content and form of the media as well as those who might be addressed by the message. Prior to Shifman, few researchers defined memes with communication-oriented development. [7]

In defining memes this way, she notes that the earlier memetics research struggled in distinguishing memes from meme-vehicles, and suggests that attempting to do so was a failed project. She cites Susan Blackmore as providing the metaphysical outline which inspired her memetic concept, arguing that much of memetics prior to her conception was either behaviorist- or mentalist-driven, taking sides in arguing that memes were respectively accounted for as material behavior or as a theory of cognition. She rejects these two sides and opts for what she calls an "inclusivist" approach, which denies that the memetic research can cleanly dissect memes into a cultural idea and its medium. She credits Blackmore as being the only other popular memetics researcher who does the same. By empirically connecting memes to digital media, Shifman provided theoretical developments in memetics which diverge from earlier interests. As such, Internet memetics often avoids strong associations with historical arguments from cultural anthropology, theory of mind, and philosophy of biology. Instead, they operate across several theoretical paradigms of sociology, communication, and media. [8]

Shifman's theorizing in Internet memetics has been mentioned in journals such as Internet, Communication, & Society, [9] New Media & Society , [10] [11] [12] and Social Media + Society. [13] [14]

Internet memetics research is more specific than research in "Internet Memes." For example, many studying Internet memes argue they are developing different theoretical interests, such as pragmatics [15] [16] or semiotics. [17] [18] [19] Despite these theoretical distinctions in interest, many of these authors cite Internet memetic theory as having overt similarities in empirical interests to Shifman.

Related Research Articles

A meme is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme. A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices, that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures. In popular language, a meme may refer to an Internet meme, typically an image, that is remixed, copied, and circulated in a shared cultural experience online.

Memetics is a theory of the evolution of culture based on Darwinian principles with the meme as the unit of culture. The term "meme" was coined by biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, to illustrate the principle that he later called "Universal Darwinism". All evolutionary processes depend on information being copied, varied, and selected, a process also known as variation with selective retention. The information that is copied is called the replicator, and genes are the replicator for biological evolution. Dawkins proposed that the same process drives cultural evolution, and he called this second replicator the "meme". He gave as examples, tunes, catchphrases, fashions, and technologies. Like genes, memes are selfish replicators and have causal efficacy; in other words, their properties influence their chances of being copied and passed on. Some succeed because they are valuable or useful to their human hosts while others are more like viruses.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Visual rhetoric</span> Communication through visual elements

Visual rhetoric is the art of effective communication through visual elements such as images, typography, and texts. Visual rhetoric encompasses the skill of visual literacy and the ability to analyze images for their form and meaning. Drawing on techniques from semiotics and rhetorical analysis, visual rhetoric expands on visual literacy as it examines the structure of an image with the focus on its persuasive effects on an audience.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Oxford Internet Institute</span> Research institute at the University of Oxford

The Oxford Internet Institute (OII) serves as a hub for interdisciplinary research, combining social and computer science to explore information, communication, and technology. It is an integral part of the University of Oxford's Social Sciences Division in England.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Internet meme</span> Cultural item spread via the Internet

An Internet meme, or simply meme, is a cultural item that is spread via the Internet, often through social media platforms. Internet memes can take various forms, such as images, videos, GIFs, and various other viral sensations. Characteristics of memes include their susceptibility to parody, their use of intertextuality, their propagation in a viral pattern, and their evolution over time. The name is from the concept of memes proposed by Richard Dawkins in 1972.

Internet studies is an interdisciplinary field studying the social, psychological, political, technical, cultural and other dimensions of the Internet and associated information and communication technologies. The human aspects of the Internet are a subject of focus in this field. While that may be facilitated by the underlying technology of the Internet, the focus of study is often less on the technology itself than on the social circumstances that technology creates or influences.

Memetic engineering, also meme engineering, is a term developed by Leveious Rolando, John Sokol, and Gibron Burchett based on Richard Dawkins' theory of memes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Digital rhetoric</span> Forms of communication via digital mediums

Digital rhetoric can be generally defined as communication that exists in the digital sphere. As such, digital rhetoric can be expressed in many different forms, including text, images, videos, and software. Due to the increasingly mediated nature of our contemporary society, there are no longer clear distinctions between digital and non-digital environments. This has expanded the scope of digital rhetoric to account for the increased fluidity with which humans interact with technology.

/pol/, short for Politically Incorrect, is an anonymous political discussion imageboard on 4chan. As of 2022, it is the most active board on the site. It has had a substantial impact on Internet culture. It has acted as a platform for far-right extremism; the board is notable for its widespread racist, white supremacist, antisemitic, anti-Muslim, misogynist, and anti-LGBT content. /pol/ has been linked to various acts of real-world extremist violence. It has been described as one of the "[centers] of 4chan mobilization", a title also ascribed to /b/.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Helen Margetts</span> Political scientist, University of Oxford

Helen Zerlina Margetts, is Professor of Internet and Society at the Oxford Internet Institute (OII), University of Oxford and from 2011 to 2018 was Director of the OII. She is currently Director of the Public Policy Programme at The Alan Turing Institute. She is a political scientist specialising in digital era governance and politics, and has published over a hundred books, journal articles and research reports in this field.

Graeme Kirkpatrick is Professor of Social and Cultural Theory at the University of Manchester. He has also worked as Professor in media arts, aesthetics and narration at the University of Skövde in Sweden, and been a visiting Professorial fellow of the Digital Cultures Research Programme at Flinders University in Adelaide.

The history of humor on the Internet begins together with the Internet itself. Initially, the internet and its precursors, LANs and WANs, were used merely as another medium to disseminate jokes and other kinds of humor, in addition to the traditional ones. In lockstep with the progress of electronic communication technologies, jokers took advantage of the ARPANET, e-mail, Usenet newsgroups, bulletin board systems, etc, and finally the Whole World Wide Web. Gradually, new forms of humor evolved, based on the new possibilities delivered by electronic means of communication. A popular form of internet humour is found in the form of 'internet memes'. Reaction videos, where amusement is expressed through a person's response to something, are another prevalent form of humor unique to the internet.

Alpha male and beta male are pseudoscientific terms for men derived from the designations of alpha and beta animals in ethology. They may also be used with other genders, such as women, or additionally use other letters of the Greek alphabet. The popularization of these terms to describe humans has been widely criticized by scientists.

Lilie Chouliaraki is a professor in Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Sciences (LSE). Chouliaraki’s main area of research is the mediation of human vulnerability and suffering. She empirically explores how the media affects our moral and political relationships with distant others in the sense that it affects how we see the vulnerability of other people and how we are asked to feel, think and act toward them.

Nick Dyer-Witheford is an author, and associate professor at the University of Western Ontario in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies. His area of study primarily focuses on the rise of technology and the internet, as well as their continuous impact on modern society. He has written six books, along with seventeen other publications.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ryan M. Milner</span>

Ryan M. Milner is a writer and professor in the communications department of the College of Charleston in South Carolina. He teaches several courses on modern media technology and digital communications. His primary field of study is focused on the effects of the internet on society and how people respond differently to emerging technologies.

Michele Zappavigna is an Australian linguist. She is an associate professor at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. Her major contributions are based on the discourse of social media and ambient affiliation. Her work is interdisciplinary and covers studies in systemic functional linguistics (SFL), corpus linguistics, multimodality, social media, online discourse and social semiotics. Zappavigna is the author of six books and numerous journal articles covering these disciplines.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Condescending Wonka</span> Internet meme

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Kishonna L. Gray is an American communication and gender studies researcher based at the University of Kentucky College of Arts and Sciences. Gray is best known for her research on technology, gaming, race, and gender. As an expert in Women's and Communication Studies, she has written several articles for publications such as the New York Times. In the academic year 2016–2017, she was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Martin Luther King, Jr. Visiting Professors and Scholars Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, hosted by the Department of Women's and Gender Studies and the MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing Program. She has also been a faculty visitor at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University and at Microsoft Research.

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References

  1. ↑ "Limor Shifman". limorshifman.huji.ac.il. Retrieved 2023-01-11.
  2. ↑ Shifman, Limor; Thelwall, Mike (December 2009). "Assessing global diffusion with Web memetics: The spread and evolution of a popular joke". Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. 60 (12): 2567–2576. doi:10.1002/asi.21185.
  3. ↑ Dawkins, Richard (1976). "Memes: The New Replicators". The selfish gene (1st ed.). Oxford University Press.
  4. ↑ "OII | Five Research Fellows Join the Oxford Internet Institute". www.oii.ox.ac.uk. Retrieved 2023-01-11.
  5. 1 2 Shifman, Limor; Katz, Elihu (October 2005). "'Just Call Me Adonai': A Case Study of Ethnic Humor and Immigrant Assimilation". American Sociological Review. 70 (5): 843–859. doi:10.1177/000312240507000506. ISSN   0003-1224. S2CID   143447712.
  6. ↑ Shifman, Limor (2014), Memes in digital culture, MIT Press, ISBN   978-1-4690-6325-6, OCLC   929971523 , retrieved 2023-01-11
  7. ↑ Lankshear, Colin; Michele, Knobel (2006). New literacies : changing knowledge and classroom learning (2nd ed.). Buckingham [England]: Open University Press. ISBN   033522010X.
  8. ↑ Lewis, Kevin (2016-06-07). "A Review of Memes in Digital Culture". Digital Humanities Quarterly. 010 (2). ISSN   1938-4122.
  9. ↑ Ask, Kristine; Abidin, Crystal (2018-06-03). "My life is a mess: self-deprecating relatability and collective identities in the memification of student issues". Information, Communication & Society. 21 (6): 834–850. doi:10.1080/1369118X.2018.1437204. hdl: 11250/2592260 . ISSN   1369-118X. S2CID   148874422.
  10. ↑ Moreno-Almeida, Cristina (June 2021). "Memes as snapshots of participation: The role of digital amateur activists in authoritarian regimes". New Media & Society. 23 (6): 1545–1566. doi: 10.1177/1461444820912722 . ISSN   1461-4448. S2CID   216440970.
  11. ↑ Smits, Thomas; Ros, Ruben (2021-10-08). "Distant reading 940,000 online circulations of 26 iconic photographs". New Media & Society. 25 (12): 3543–3572. doi: 10.1177/14614448211049459 . ISSN   1461-4448. S2CID   242254797.
  12. ↑ Ragnedda, Massimo; Addeo, Felice; Laura Ruiu, Maria (2022-03-12). "How offline backgrounds interact with digital capital". New Media & Society: 146144482210826. doi: 10.1177/14614448221082649 . ISSN   1461-4448. S2CID   247430308.
  13. ↑ de Saint Laurent, Constance; Glăveanu, Vlad P.; Literat, Ioana (January 2021). "Internet Memes as Partial Stories: Identifying Political Narratives in Coronavirus Memes". Social Media + Society. 7 (1). doi: 10.1177/2056305121988932 . ISSN   2056-3051. S2CID   232765397.
  14. ↑ Caliandro, Alessandro; Anselmi, Guido (April 2021). "Affordances-Based Brand Relations: An Inquire on Memetic Brands on Instagram". Social Media + Society. 7 (2). doi: 10.1177/20563051211021367 . ISSN   2056-3051. S2CID   235724927.
  15. ↑ Dynel, Marta (2016-01-29). ""I Has Seen Image Macros!" Advice Animals Memes as Visual-Verbal Jokes". International Journal of Communication. 10: 29. ISSN   1932-8036.
  16. ↑ Wiggins, Bradley E. (2020-11-17). "Memes and the media narrative: The Nike-Kaepernick controversy". Internet Pragmatics. 3 (2): 202–222. doi:10.1075/ip.00032.wig. ISSN   2542-3851. S2CID   201510255.
  17. ↑ Cannizzaro, Sara (2016-12-31). "Internet memes as internet signs: A semiotic view of digital culture". Sign Systems Studies. 44 (4): 562–586. doi: 10.12697/SSS.2016.44.4.05 . ISSN   1736-7409. S2CID   53374867.
  18. ↑ Wiggins, Bradley E. (2019). The discursive power of memes in digital culture : ideology, semiotics, and intertextuality. New York, NY. ISBN   978-0-429-49230-3. OCLC   1079399708.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  19. ↑ Smith, Alexander O.; Hemsley, Jeff (2022-08-09). "Memetics as informational difference: offering an information-centric conception of memes". Journal of Documentation. 78 (5): 1149–1163. doi:10.1108/JD-07-2021-0140. ISSN   0022-0418. S2CID   252163642.
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