Soforexample,ifyou’rejustsettingupatimetomeetsomeonesomewhere,likeifIknowtwopeopleandthey’rehavingaconversationlike,“Oh,I’llmeetyouatfouro’clockatwherever,"Iunderstandsomeofthat’sperfor-mativeandyouwanttoknowthatyouguysactuallyhavefriendsandsomeofthat’slikeandmaybeyou’rehopingthatI’lljoininandbelike,“Hey,you’remeetingatfouro’clockatthisrestaurant.Great,canIjoinin?"

Earlyon,histweetswerewhathedescribedas“theequivalentofaFoursquarestatuslike,Tmherenow,’or‘I’mdoingthis,’or‘Thisthingjusthappenedtome,’orwhatever.”Aftertheincorporationof©intotheplatformhowever,hedescribedhisfeedas“probablyatleast50percentconversationatalltimes,just©repliestopeople.”

ForusersintheUnitedStates,giventhepricingmodelsfortextmessagesonmostUSmobilephonecarriersatthetime,Twitterofferedalower-cost

ThefeatureisthekeytoTwitter’sroleasamediumforconversation,

Grindr trains users to give the pleasure of touch, externalize the joys of connection, and crave vibra-tions and taps from the app under the guise they are really sent from another person’s hand.

Grindr participates in what Pfister and Yang (2018) call technoliberal-ism, an intensification in capitalism where apps “work to build new sys-tems that can replace existing ways of doing things” (p. 254). A key way these systems intervene is by creating user experiences so seamless that people incorporate digital products into their daily performativities. Dat-ing apps like Grindr privatize common spaces of queer stranger socia-bility like bars and coffee shops through their geolocative affordances.

(Wang, 2016). After completely purchasing the com-pany in 2017, Kunlun Tech granted access to Grindr users’ data to engi-neers in Beijing while migrating the app’s management away from the United States (Wang & O’Donnell, 2019). There is no evidence to date the Chinese government has misused the information, but this episode with Kunlun Tech affirms why we must pay attention to homoconnectivity and how queer data can be wielded by multinational corporations and state actors whose motivations might overlap by chance, choice, and force.

For example, South Korea (Hancocks & Suk, 2017) and Egypt (Raghavan, 2017) are just two countries that have re-lied on Grindr to identify and jail queer individuals.

Homonormativity marks a double-move where dominant social norms attempt to relegate all aspects of queer life to the private sphere while coopting the language of queer public politics like equality, freedom, and privacy to secure the positions of bigotry and corporate culture

According to MacDonald, for instance, social media is primarily a gateway to self-promotion and therefore is at least partly responsible (alongside changes to traditionalfamily life and the growth of celebrity worship) for an increasingly narcissistic society.

Reality television seemingly welcomes‘ordinary’participants into the mediasphere,and baits them with the high likelihood of fame, celebrity or, at the very least, massexposure

That is, context collision occurs when‘differentsocial environments unintentionally and unexpectedly come crashing into each other’

the key to helpingthe aspiring professional to achieve competitive advantage in a crowded marketplace’

Online media is, moreover, an exceedingly consumer-centric space, because indivi-duals actively and autonomously seek out the resources they are most interested in–and therein lies the‘need’for self-branding.

Sports stars, for instance, canearn many times more from their endorsement fees than from prize money.

Political leaders suffer a similar fatewhen they deviate from policies and are then punished by voters for having abandonedtheir promises.

broke of TigerWoods’extramarital infidelities in late 2009, several sponsors suspended their contractswith him almost immediately, including Accenture, AT&T, Gatorade, General Motors,Gillette and TAG Heuer.

In the article‘The Brand Called You’, Tom Peters argues thatindividuals must assume control of their own brand identity to stand out in the labourmarket, project a dynamic and memorable image, and consistently deliver value toconsumers, employers and market

Transplanting this to the realm of ideas would suggest that more than anything, these memetic videos spread the notion of partici-patory culture itself: a culture based on the active spread and re-creation of content by users.

Three attributes of the comic seem to account for the prominence of humor in this sample of memetic videos: playfulness, incongruity, and superiority.

ambivalence.

“We Are the 99 Percent” slogan of the Occupy Wall Street protest, showing how its appropriation into various contexts created a personal but universal narrative where, to cite Grant Meacham, “every-body is unique but in a similar situation.”

it provided people with an opportunity to assert their influence via social media. Having seen the video and having been moved by it, users could actually do something with their rage, such as send a premade twit-ter message to a key policy maker.

This approach, tagged by Ethan Zuckerman as “attention phi-lanthropy,”5 generated public support of celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey, Rihanna, and Justin Bieber, further boosting the campaign.

simple videos or jokes could prove as more “sharable” since people understand them quickly and assume that others will decode them easily as well. Here, again, Kony 2012 provides a striking illustra-tion. Simplicity is pivotal both in the videos’ definition of the problem and in its proposed solution.

One of Berger and Milkman’s key findings is that people are more likely to share positive than negative stories. In ad-dition, they prefer sharing items that are perceived as sur-prising, interesting, or practically useful.

The closest neighbor of the meme concept in both popular and academic discourse is “viral.”

This differentiation between two types of memetic content can be further associated with stance alternations. For example, the utterly serious keying of the original photograph has been transformed in the process of memetic uptake, which involves explicit playfulness.

When they refused police orders to evacuate the area, two officers reacted by pepper-spraying a row of still-sitting students directly in their faces.

In what follows, I will imple-ment this strategy to evaluate the ways in which Crock-er’s video was transformed in the course of its memetic diffusion.

Moreover, this ap-proach claims that if memes were indeed only abstract units of information, it would be impossible to disassoci-ate them from their manifestation in the outside world.

By contrast, the “real world” existence of memes like planking is often ephemeral, as they are based on capturing a moment through photography.

“hypermemetic” assumes a further meaning: it depicts a culture in which memes have a mul-tidimensional presence.

It involves technology-based manipulation, for instance by Photoshopping an image or adding a new soundtrack. A plethora of user-friendly applications that enable people to download and re-edit content have turned remixing into an extremely popu-lar practice.

Yet a quick look at any Web 2.0 environment reveals that people do choose to create their own versions of Internet memes, and in star-tling volumes.

For instance, while the single lipdub “Numa Numa” features one guy from New Jersey, its analy-sis in chapter 7 as part of a stream of thousands of similar videos that constitute the lipdub genre will reveal a larger story about the eroding boundaries between top-down pop culture and bottom-up folk culture in contemporary society.

6chApter 1Gump.

I will argue that we live in an era driven by a hypermemetic logic, in which almost every major public event sprouts a stream of memes.

The term “meme” was coined by Richard Dawkins in 1976 to describe small units of culture that spread from person to person by copying or imitation.

“WhereTwitterandothernewmediaclearlydidmatterishowthey5conveyedinformationabouttheproteststotheoutsideworld.Tra-ditionalmediawereatadisadvantageincoveringeventsinsideIranfbecauseofrestrictionsplacedonjournalists,andthusendeduprelying$onnewmediaforcontent.Hence,theoutsideworld'sperceptionsofutheprotestswerecruciallyshapedbyTwitter

Further,CaddelldescribesinfightingamongtheTwitterersastheirpopularitygrew,withmultiplecontendersvyingtoportraypopu-larcharactersandsomemoresecretivemembersconcernedthat,iftheirtrueidentitieswere“outed,”theirprofessionalstandingcouldbecompromised.

Inrecognizingthisconnection,atrollisabletoasserthisorherculturalliteracyandtobolsterthescaffoldingonwhichtrollingasawholeisbased,framingeveryactofreceptionasanactofculturalproduction.

ThespreadofSusanBoyledemonstrateshowcontentnotdesignedtocirculatebeyondacontainedmarketortimedforrapidglobaldistributioncangainmuchgreatervisibilitythaneverbefore

Underthestickinessmodel,companiesgaineconomicvaluebyofferingmerchandisethroughsomekindofe-commercecatalog,chargingforaccesstoinformation(throughsomekindofsubscrip-tionorservicefee),orsellingtheeyeballsofsitevisitorstosomeoutsideparty,mostoftenadvertisers.

nassumingthatanyformofcommunicationrequiresadiscreterepresentation,semioticianstookhumanlanguageastheprototypicalex-^^>---pampleofacommunicationsystem.

1.Anewmediaobjectcanbedescribedformally(mathematically).Forinstance,animageorashapecanbedescribedusingamathematicalfunction.2.Anewmediaobjectissubjecttoalgorithmicmanipulation.Forin-stance,byapplyingappropriatealgorithms,wecanautomaticallyremove“noise’’fromaphotograph,improveitscontrast,locacetheedgesoftheshapes,orchangeitsproportions.Inshort,mediabecomesprogrammable.

Thisisnotdissimilartoaxiomaticlogic,inwhichcertainaxiomsaretakenasstartingpointsandfurthertheoremsareprovedontheirbasis.

GIF thrives nearly two decades after its introduction, sustaining a renewed interest in the loop.

MySpace

Steve Wilhite, principalengineer of the GIF, pronounced the acroynm ‘jif’.

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GIFs