As elaborated below, these decisions regarding both the medium and production encourage engage-ment, as they facilitate the creation of sequel imitations

n other words, each amount of sharing activity by likely bots tends to trigger a disproportionate amount of human engagement.

Giddens argues that social action is linked directly to the creation of rules and practices which recursively constitute the structure wherein social action takes place.

Whereas a cultural artifact offers information about the culture that creates and uses it (Watts, 1981), a social artifact informs us about the social behavior of those individuals or groups which produce it (

a genre with its own set of rules and conventions and a genre whose production is a product of postmodern conceptions of representation and replication (Baudrillard, 1994) and the obfuscation of the consumer/producer binary which is manifest in the practices of participatory culture (Jenkins, 2007)

Internet memes are a digital version of Dawkins’ (1976) idea of memes, defined as individual bits of cultural information that propagate from person to person while undergoing variation, selection, and retention. Memes are transmitted throughout a population via social learning, and at any given time, members of a population either are adopting cultural traits (which become memes) or rejecting those traits through a complex interplay of social, emotional, and cognitive processes (Baker & Gammon, 2008).

This Emotional Selection Hypothesis

When one is embedded within an existing network of likeminded individuals

Textual tags were manually assigned. The tags were used to identify the main action or point of the meme

Memes were provided a categorical tag based on visual content. This tag provided a textual representation of the image even if the image had no embedded textual phrases

Humor is an interesting emotional category that contains a vast array of sub-categories.

Although there are plenty of theories which could all be modelled, because the extant theory is so heavily based on assumptions which would have to be built into the models to make them work, they could all show interesting results which are, however, devoid of any resemblance to how culture actually happens

The resulting materialistic theory of consciousness2, where a „pandemonium‟ of various thoughts and nerve impulses struggle for expression, posits that what we comprehend as a serial stream of consciousness is actually a retrospectively experienced stream of narrative which was subject to continual editing as the various areas of the brain made their contributions.

Rather, it is the usual practice to selectively pick examples from culture to help illustrate how memes may work and therefore convenient memes tend to be invoked to help description rather than candidates for real memes discovered in their cultural settings