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AJPC 2 (2) pp. 253–271 Intellect Limited 2013
Australasian Journal of Popular Culture
Volume 2 Number 2
© 2013 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/ajpc.2.2.253_1
crisis
memes
image macro
templatability
Internet culture
social media
visual communication
freedom of expression
The University of Queensland
Crisis memes are the ghoulish and satirical posts that spread through social media
concurrently with serious journalistic reportage. They are folk productions that
respond to challenging events based on thematic and structural templates of popu-
lar online image macros. This article explores how templatability is relevant to the
underpinnings, development, structure and value of crisis memes. The combination
of frivolity and ghoulishness that is typical of crisis memes may be criticized for
not being reasoned discourse, reinforcing cultural divides and making use of copy-
righted content without permission and in ways that the copyright holder may not
wish. However, the value of crisis memes lies not in their content but rather their
place as a public voice that sidesteps the constraints of traditional media and as
an illustration of freedom of expression that may be threatened by increasingly
restrictive copyright regimes.
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When natural disasters, political feuds, terrorist attacks and other crises arise,
ghoulishly humorous posts created by users spread concurrently with seri-
ous professional reportage. By the day after the Mail Online (9 August 2011)
published a mobile phone picture of a hooded man defiantly displaying a
bag of looted basmati rice, the image spread from Facebook (EgonAllanon,
2011) to Reddit (okanagandude 2011) accompanied by the text ‘I don’t always
loot/but when I do, its cuz I need some basmati rice’ (Figure 1).
Similar posts can be found for several recent crises, ranging from natural
disasters (the Queensland floods), policy crises (the US debt crisis), terror-
ism (Norwegian mass killings), through to celebrity deaths (Amy Winehouse).
Even given the large number of potentially creative people in the world, just
how is that such posts are so readily produced? The answer, of course, is
that most are not created from whole cloth. Rather, they are image macros,
which are one form of online memes: thematically and formally replicated
trends in online behaviour. Michele Knobel and Colin Lankshear’s detailed
thematic analysis of nineteen classic online memes finds that one of the over-
arching purposes of online memes is social commentary (2007: 218) within
which they find three subcategories: people concerned with displays of good
citizenship; tongue-in-cheek, socially oriented, political critique; and social
activism or advocacy. Posts such as Figure 1 combine elements of all three
of these sub-categories. In this article I will refer to them collectively as crisis
memes. Although crisis memes could take forms other than image macros
(such as videos, animated gifs, twitter hashtags), judging by meme collection
sites such as Know Your Meme, the image macro form is the most visible. As
such, this article will focus exclusively on the underpinnings, development,
Figure 1: UK riots crisis meme.
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notable examples and ramifications of image macro crisis memes (referring to
them as ‘crisis memes’ for convenience).
I will underpin my discussion of crisis memes with some foundational
ideas about meaning as a process of movement to set the stage for introduc-
ing memes as proposed by Richard Dawkins’ (1989). Moving to analysis, rather
than follow Knobel and Lankshear’s (2007) thematic approach to meme analy-
sis, I will take a more structural approach, emphasizing the templatable forms,
situational deployment, purposes and values of crisis memes. After a short
history of the relevance of templatability to online memes, the analysis will
illustrate how crisis memes are based on thematic and structural templates of
popular online memes fitted to current social crises. The combination of frivolity
and ghoulishness that is typical of crisis memes may be criticized for not being
reasoned discourse, difficult to control, reinforcing cultural divides and making
use of copyrighted content without permission and in ways that the copyright
holder may not wish. However, I will argue that the value of crisis memes lies
not in their content but rather their place as a public voice that sidesteps the
constraints of traditional media and as an illustration of freedom of expression
that may be threatened by increasingly restrictive copyright regimes.
It is axiomatic to cultural studies that meaning is a process of movement. At
the heart of semiotics is Ferdinand de Saussure’s (1983) proposal that the basic
situation in which meaning occurs is the exchange of signs. Further, as Pierre
Bourdieu (1984) recognized, the connection between signifier and signified is
powered by the transfer of capital, be it economic or symbolic (educational,
social, cultural). Just as ideas themselves are the products of transfer, so to are
the ways in which ideas are manifested and used.
Humans are adept at transferring ideas from their point of origin to a
new situation. A fundamental property of human language is indexicality
(Peirce 1998). Since it is impossible to have unique terms for every possible
situation, we have the ability to fit our limited set of terms to new contexts.
The most obvious examples are pro-terms (e.g. ‘she’), references (e.g. ‘that’)
and names (e.g. ‘Bill’), but virtually all words necessarily have variations in
meaning across situation (e.g. ‘hello’ can be a greeting, an expression of
surprise, a summons, etc.) and social actions can be expressed by different
words (e.g. any number of words can be used for greetings). Transferring
ideas is also fundamental to Julia Kristeva’s (1980) concept of intertextuality,
the way in which the meaning of a text is shaped by other texts (e.g. quoting
lines from a sitcom to comment on a current situation).
Whereas intertextuality emphasizes the multiplicity of meanings, Richard
Dawkins’s (1976) concept of memes emphasizes the replication and evolu-
tion of meaning. Dawkins coined the term ‘meme’ to be the cultural analogue
to the biological ‘gene’: a self-replicating unit of information. Trends, fads,
fashions, ‘catchy’ things, patterns are all memetic. Although the metaphor
has been criticized as reductionist (Kull 2000), this is ultimately less relevant
to the metaphor’s usefulness than the notion of transference via replication
and evolution. Dawkins postulated that memes are subject to the evolutionary
forces of variation, mutation, competition and inheritance. Just how this will
occur depends on the behaviour of hosts, that is, people in cultures. Meme
survival is not a matter of moral or cultural preference but on three factors of
replication: Fidelity (how easily an idea can be copied), fecundity (how quickly
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it can be copied) and longevity (how long the idea lasts). These factors are
afforded or constrained by the infrastructure in which meaning is hosted. This
brings us, of course, to the Internet: the ultimate meme hothouse.
Just as for the twentieth-century electric light provided new flexibility for the
meanings of home, work and civil life (McLuhan 2003), for the twenty-first
century the Internet provides new flexibility for the creation and distribution
of symbolic capital (Bourdieu 1984; Castells 2000). The rise of social media has
dramatically lowered the bar for individuals to broadcast well beyond their
physical social circles. In danah boyd’s (2007: 126) terms, the networked public
has four infrastructural features that are highly conducive to memeticism:
Replicability: digital objects are infinitely and perfectly reproducible. Easily •
used and free social media provide multiple and exponential channels for
distribution, breaking the economic, cultural and generation barriers to
distribution of pre-Internet cultural industries. For most objects, no matter
the creator or licensing regime, its form is replicable and thus exploitable.
Searchability: objects of popular and folk culture are easily found via search •
engines, especially as metadata tags improves the indexing and curation of
digital objects. As such both raw materials and templates for generating
objects are easily found.
Persistence: although digital objects may not last as long as analogue •
objects, they are infinitely transferable and storable, and they certainly
persist far longer than the ephemeralities of co-present interaction.
Invisible audiences: digital objects are double articulations, created •
(by either cultural industries or individuals) for a particular audience but
with the knowledge that they can and will spread to an unknowable
audience wherever the Internet is available.
As Knobel and Lankshear note, ‘the concept of a “meme” itself has become
something of a meme online’ (2006: 202). Sites such as 4Chan and Reddit are
commonly cited as places of both deliberate and accidental meme generation
(Know Your Meme). The Cheezburger Network of sites encourages the cate-
gorization and collection of memes, while sites such as Meme Generator and
Rage Comic Builder provide both the raw materials and editing capabilities to
rapidly produce new instances of common memes. Further, in an interesting
twist on the nature of scholarship, sites such as Know Your Meme actively
track, research and report on the genealogy, forms and popularity of online
memes. As such, the last few years have seen a huge growth in Internet users’
memetic analysis and exploitation of meaning as templatable.
Templatabilty lies at the heart of online memes and especially crisis memes.
The memetic process is a product of the human capability to separate ideas
into two levels – content and structure – and then contextually manipulate
that relationship. Templating is the practical, methodical and material process
by which this contextual manipulation is expressed. The practices of templat-
ing have developed over time, and it is worth providing a brief history of three
structural versions of online memes as a basis for understanding crisis memes.
All of the crisis memes covered in this article are based on image macros,
one of the earliest forms of online meme. An image macro is a picture with
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superimposed text (Wikipedia 2011a), conforming to a template for their
combination and types of meaning. The images are usually striking represen-
tations of an action or emotion, often taking the form of a human, anthropor-
morphized animal or object. The text of the caption is usually in large point
size Impact typeface coloured white with a black outline. The words are often
written using Internet orthographic alterations.
The first acknowledged image macro was the 2001 O RLY? snowy owl
(Figure 2, left), used to indicate a dubious or incredulous response to a post
on the Something Awful forums (Know Your Meme 2011i). The etymology
of the name ‘image macro’ is important to the basic concept of templating
and how online memes themselves came to be so successful. The Something
Awful forum software allowed a user to enter text that would expand into a
pre-defined image (Wikipedia 2011d). This expansion of code is known as a
‘macro’ in computer science. In other words, a commonly understood prac-
tice in computer science involves exploiting pre-fabricated structures. It is
not surprising, then, that such understandings were imported into Internet
culture. O RLY? turned out to be the tipping point for the use of image macros
because its very simple pattern could be employed to great social effect.
4Chan users have probably generated the largest number and variety of
online memes of any online service (Know Your Meme 2011a; Wikipedia
2011a). In particular, 4Chan spawned the LOLcat (Know Your Meme 2011g).
Since Happy Cat (Figure 2, right) was posted in 2005 LOLcats have brought
image macros more generally into the mainstream, a necessary precondition
to the spread of crisis memes. Happy Cat widened the scope for memes in
two ways. First, it was not a response to the content of a post but stand-alone
content. Second, since it was provided as member of the category of humor-
ous cat posts to 4Chan, it spurred the posting of images patterned after it
rather than simple replication.
Figure 2: Classic image macros: O RLY? and Happy Cat.
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Happy Cat also set a standard for an idiomatic pidgin that has come
to be referred to as ‘LOLspeak’ with remarkably robust rules (Dash 2007).
Historically, language play has been a staple of typographic Internet
communication (Crystal 2001), and this heightened sensitivity to play with
language patterns is particularly important to meme development. Apart from
image macros, the other fundamental building block of online memes is the
language template termed ‘snowclones’ (Know Your Meme 2011l). Unlike
LOLspeak, which is based around particular grammatical patterns with
some common content themes, snowclones are more direct verbal templates.
Glen Whitman coined the term snowclone to refer to sentences such as
‘grey is the new black’ in which the two nouns ‘grey’ and ‘black’ can be replaced
by any two other nouns (Pullum 2004). Representing the nouns as ‘X’ and ‘Y’
shows the structure of the template: ‘X is the new Y’. This template can then
be deployed to comment on any situation in which one wishes to express the
sentiment of changes in trends. So, for example, ‘grey is the new black’ refers
to fashion trends. Figure 4 illustrates two LOLcat snowclones. Invisible Bike
(Figure 3, left) relies on a specific form of humorous cat image (a cat caught mid-
air looking like it may be engaging with an invisible object) and a labelling snow-
clone ‘Invisible <noun>’. I’m in ur spaceship/Stealing ur gravity (Figure 3, right)
treats the Invisible Bike image as a visual snowclone and then comments on the
image using a different verbal snowclone: ‘I’m in your <noun1>/<gerund verb>
your <noun2>’ (the In Ur Base Starcraft 2 snowclone, Know Your Meme 2011f).
In sum, then, the early 2000s saw the development of highly Internet-
specific meme production techniques based on templatability, especially
image macros combined with snowclones. Further, new instances often
represent evolutions of prior combinations. These techniques underpin the
development of crisis memes.
Commenting on power: image maCro snowClones and
adviCe animals
The UK looter crisis meme used to begin this article (Figure 1) is clearly aimed
at ridiculing the looter’s defiant representation of power. The structure of the
original meme provides a template that is suited specifically to commenting
on extremes of power.
Figure 3: LOLcat snowclones.
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The original version is an image macro snowclone based on the Dos Equis
beer brand advertising campaign centering on ‘The Most Interesting Man
in the World’ (Know Your Meme 2011f). The man (Figure 4, left) illustrated
male power as cool, self-satisfied and defiant of societal norms. The man’s
exploits are so epic in scale that his choice of beer is epic by association (I
don’t always drink beer, but when I do it’s Dos Equis). Although the campaign
nominally rests on the audience recognizing the man’s power, the audience
is also supposed to take an ironic position towards the man: he is impossi-
bly powerful and hence as much a figure of ridicule as respect. In the meme
version (Figure 4, right), the notion of power is conveyed through the image of
either the man himself or any figure that can be easily depicted through mid-
shot image. This is combined with a snowclone version of the campaign’s tag
line: ‘I don’t always <verb phrase1>, but when I do, <verb phrase2>’ with the
phrases positioned as setup at the top and punch line at the bottom. However,
the meme version usually emphasizes the original campaign’s ironic position
by using the punch line to show the figure as ridiculous.
The crisis meme versions of The Most Interesting Man in the World echo the
original meme’s method to critique a particular or category of person identified
with the crisis as both hardcore and ridiculous. The UK riots version (Figure 5, left)
uses the combination of the feeble image of the looter trying to look dangerous
with the ludicrous nature of his haul to critique many of the UK looters as lacking
both material and political ambition/motivation. When US troops killed Osama
Bin Laden, several versions of The Most Interesting Man in the World appeared.
Some used the original man to critique those in the United States who celebrated
the death of Bin Laden (Figure 5, middle). One widely circulated version used an
image of Barack Obama but retained the snowclone text (Figure 5, right). This
Figure 4: The Most Interesting Man in the World original and meme example.
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version contains both right-wing and left-wing critiques. By playing up the issue
of the US political right harping on the coincidental similarity of his name to that
of Osama Bin Laden, the image paints his hardcore action as petty. But it also
takes a left-wing perspective, painting action that might be desirable to the right
as a potentially unconscionable over-reach of power.
The Most Interesting Man in the World meme is part of a wider category
of memes called Advice Animals, which are image macros featuring animals
or humans and superimposed text purporting to represent a character trait or
archetype (Know Your Meme 2011b). The original meme, naming the cate-
gory, was Advice Dog (Figure 6, left). However, while The Most Interesting
Man in the World uses an unedited whole photograph, most Advice Animals
follow the distinct visual formula of superimposing just the animal/person
head on a colour-wheel background. The originator of any given Advice
Animal sets the image and colour-wheel and the rest of the series only add
new text based on the theme. Advice Animals are visually and thematically
coherent within and across series. One of the reasons Advice Animals have
become so prevalent is that sites such as Meme Generator (Figure 6, right)
provide all the artwork and tools required to create new instances of existing
memes and even help create new series, such as Advice Animal crisis memes.
During the recent US debt crisis, Advice Animals based on Barack Obama
Figure 5: The Most Interesting Man in the World crisis memes.
Figure 6: Original (Bad) Advice Dog and Meme Generator.
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(Figure 7, left), economist Paul Krugman (Figure 7, middle) and even Batman
(right) were used to critique the left-wing position.
The thematic formula of Advice Animal crisis memes seem to give their
creators license to express their political messages very directly compared to
other image macro snowclones. For the purpose of political comment, then,
Advice Animals allow for extremely rapid deployment of a political position as
soon as a particular crisis unfolds and for easy reuse when the same political
position needs to be espoused in a next crisis. Oddly enough, Advice Animals
at present are used to express far more US right-wing political sentiment than
left wing. Indeed, I was unable to find any US left-wing Advice Animals that
related specifically to news crises. That being said, perhaps because of their
very clear formula, in sites such as Meme Generator instances of Advice
Animals can be found using many languages other than English. Indeed, a
setting on the site requires users to identify the language used when generat-
ing a new version. It may be, then, that Advice Animal crisis memes are more
widespread and politically varied than the English language versions.
Commenting on disaster: exploitables and rage ComiCs
Images without text are termed ‘exploitable’ because they can have new
elements added. However, the term also refers to a class of memes that involve
superimposing images of a human or anthropomorphic figure onto another
image (Know Your Meme 2011e). Instead of critique, these crisis memes seem
to be produced and circulated simply as ghoulish humour.
Strutting Leo/Leo Strut comes from an opportunistic photograph of
Leonardo DiCaprio walking with exaggerated happiness (Figure 8, left)
(Know Your Meme 2011m). The exploitable element is cut out of the origi-
nal image (Figure 8, middle), and then superimposed onto other images. The
crisis meme version uses Strutting Leo to provide a heightened contrast in
which he does not care or is oblivious to current or impending disaster around
him, often superimposed onto historical disasters like the JFK assassination
(Figure 8, right). The celebrity status of DiCaprio may mean that Strutting Leo
versions are distributed more widely and understood more readily than other
crisis memes based on exploitables, but there are many crisis memes based
on non-celebrities, such as Disaster Girl (Figure 9) (Know Your Meme 2011d)
and Chubby Bubbles Girl (Figure 10) (Know Your Meme 2011c). Since their
creator does not need to write amusing text to accompany the image, Disaster
Girl and Chubby Bubbles Girl, they are one of the first memes to appear during
Figure 7: Advice Animals crisis memes.
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Figure 9: Disaster Girl original and crisis meme example.
Figure 10: Chubby Bubbles Girl original and crisis meme example.
Figure 8: Strutting Leo original, exploitable and crisis meme example.
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any given recent crisis. During the UK riots Disaster Girl was appeared on the
image of the burning shops in Croydon, South London (Figure 9, right).
Similarly, Chubby Bubbles Girl (Figure 10, left) was very recently deployed
(with some alterations) as Chubby Gaddafi with an image of Libyan protestors
(Figure 10, right). In this instance, Chubby Bubbles Girl has a minor element
of critique in that the girl is not running from the protestors, rather she gives
meaning to the background photograph as being about anti-Gaddafi protests.
Disaster Girl and Chubby Bubbles Girl are understandable and amusing as
stand-alone memes. However, for those who regularly browse or participate
in sites that spawn memes these crisis memes are readable as part of a series
or category. Each new iteration prompts association of the most recent use of
the meme with the original and whatever other versions have been seen.
Y U No guy (Know Your Meme 2011o) is one of a number of illustrated
figures called Rage Comics, each of which relates to a specific emotion (Know
Your Meme 2011j). The original meme depicts a figure with a sweating comic
face and arms held out imploringly, with a superimposed text-speak ‘I TXT
U/Y U No TXT BAK!?’ (Figure 11, left). This meme is always used to indicate
a perplexed and vexed questioner, and is in fact related to a series of other.
Rage Comics, like Advice Animals, can now be generated via sophisticated
generation sites such as Rage Comic Builder (Figure 11, right).
While Strutting Leo, Disaster Girl and Chubby Bubbles Girl are ghoulish
jokes based on the fact of a disaster, the Y U No meme is used to express the
anxiety of a disaster. Y U No was used in 2011 to express the perplexed rhetor-
ical questioning of people experiencing floods and cyclones in Queensland
(Figure 12, left) and similar questions about the UK riots (Figure 12, right). Y
U No is particularly adaptable as a crisis meme because visually the face and
arms of the figure provide the crucial emotion, while the rest of the image is
more freely adaptable. Thus for the Queensland example, the round head of
the figure is replaced by a map of the state. The name of the state is elided, so
this crisis meme is designed to be recognizable by those who know the state’s
shape. The UK riot version places the Y U No figure into a stamp frame and
adds a crown, taking the place of the Queen on the standard UK stamp. The
added phrase following Y U No is itself taken from another meme originat-
ing from a rediscovered 1939 wartime propaganda poster reading ‘Keep Calm
and Carry On’ (Wikipedia 2011b). The combination produces a confused
Figure 11: Y U No original and Rage Comic Builder showing use in a panel.
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imprecation for the rioting from the perspective of those (within or outside)
who hold a particular stereotypical viewpoint of British society as typified by
calm and the ‘stiff upper lip’ sentiment.
Commenting on Commenting: meme Combinations
As well as their own direct and fairly simple meaning, memes draw represen-
tational power from their association with one another. For example, when a
new exploitable appears, it is common to find it combined with other exploita-
bles with similar themes such as the combination of Disaster Girl and Chubby
Bubbles Girl (figure 13, left). Similarly, a striking photograph can be used in
conjunction with several verbal memes, as in the combination of LOLspeak
with the ‘You’re doing it wrong’ meme superimposed over the image of
homophobic Westboro Baptist Church protestors (Figure 13, right).
Figure 13: Disaster Girl and Chubby Bubbles Girl; LOLspeak and You’re Doing It Wrong.
Figure 12: Y U No crisis meme examples.
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As Alex Leavitt (2010) says of Figure 13 (right), the combination of textual
memes works to reframe the reading of the image, “while the protesters
believe that they are correct, the author illustrates a particular political
statement against their beliefs. Now, while the subcultural joke is still present,
the meme provides another way of approaching the picture’s context.”
The use of the infantalistic LOLspeak ridicules the apparently hypocriti-
cal position of the protestors, while ‘You’re doing it wrong’ proposes that the
creator and reader are superior to the protestors by virtue of being able to
see the hypocrisy to which the protestors are blind. This position of having
the right and ability to comment on news events suffuses online memes,
especially crisis memes.
It is thus especially interesting to see that online memes are also combined
to reflexively comment on online comment culture itself, especially in times of
crisis. The Scumbag Steve meme (Know Your Meme 2011k) is a form of Advice
Animal. It uses the image of a man with a particularly recognizable herring-
bone-patterned cap worn at a rakish angle and accompanying text in which
an act is described at the top of the image and the man’s deplorable stance
towards it is described at the bottom (Figure 14, left). Together, the image and
text illustrate being a ‘scumbag’. A typical crisis meme example is to attribute
scumbag status to politicians based on hypocrisy, as in Figure 14 (middle), in
reference to the infamous George W. Bush ‘Mission Accomplished’ speech.
Scumbag Brain (Figure 14, right) is an evolution, combination, and, in
this case, reflexive commentary on crisis memes. Internet users have taken to
pointing out their own anti-social actions by using the cap of Scumbag Steve
as an exploitable superimposed over an image of a human brain. When the
Norwegian terrorist killings occurred in close proximity to the death of singer
Amy Winehouse, this Scumbag Brain example was posted on Reddit after it
became clear that (1) significantly more commentary of all kinds was being
devoted to Winehouse and (2) of this, significantly more sorrow was being
expressed for the natural or suicidal death of a single person versus the 76
shot by Anders Breivik.
The moral dimension of this Scumbag Brain example also brings up the
issue that different sites of meme production have very different standards
as to what is considered acceptable. Know Your Meme pages on individual
memes frequently mention 4Chan in early origin reports e.g. Chubby Bubbles
Girl. 4Chan was designed to be an anonymous image-sharing forum in which
users could post without restriction. Users in the/b/forum are notorious for
their resistance to traditional morality (Knuttila 2011), this, combined with a
Figure 14: Scumbag Steve original meme example, crisis meme example and reflexive crisis meme example.
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lack of a voting system, means that a very wide range of ideas are potentially
available to be picked up as meme template elements. On the other hand, the
aggregate up and down votes on Reddit or digg act as simplistic community
standard governors of the spread of meme series and individual instances.
As in any popularity contest, popular ideas tend to pull towards reproduc-
tion of at least the Reddit or digg communal morality. Reddit users are also
particularly partial to creating and sharing Rage Comics and Advice Animals,
memes forms that comment on social and moral standards. Special purpose
meme creation sites, such as Meme Generator, allow for anonymous genera-
tion of both new and existing image macros. Such sites track popularity of the
use of their generated memes to indicate their popularity. Meme Generator,
for example, presents image macros in tiers from the most popular ‘God Tier’
through to the least popular ‘Fail Tier’, but such sites do not themselves have
an ongoing community in and of themselves. Currently, social media plat-
forms such as Facebook and Twitter act more as distribution infrastructure for
image macros found in other meme collections or generated from meme crea-
tors, rather than as sites for the generation of the image macros themselves.
However, the flows of meme generation and distribution are in constant flux,
as they are for any social media use, so charting these flows will remain an
ongoing empirical issue.
Image macro crisis memes are folk productions produced as responses to chal-
lenging events based on thematic and structural templates of popular image
macros. The theme and structure of the original online memes lend themselves
to finding new instances of related content. At the same time, the theme and
structure are open to replacement of elements, evolution of elements and recom-
bination of elements. For those in the know, a given instance takes some of its
meaning as another – and possibly a next – in a series or category. Crisis memes
thus draw their power, as do all memes, from a combination of timeliness, time-
lessness and seriality. These features are especially relevant to crisis memes,
which are produced and consumed in the heat of an emergent social crisis, which
is new but also another instance of a crisis that has been experienced before.
Crisis memes could be critiqued along the lines of much other popular
culture: that as responses to crisis, crisis memes are frivolous and ghoulish
attention seeking rather than reasoned discourse, and that they are inherently
culturally divisive because they are linked to the infrastructure of affluent soci-
eties. Such critiques, though, are tired, misplaced and/or miss the point of
what we can learn from crisis memes.
As with the products of popular literature, film, television and radio before
them, crisis memes clearly do not represent forms of reasoned discourse that
would conform more readily to, say, Jürgen Habermas’s (1989) public sphere
ideal of civil society. Reasoned discourse is a worthy ideal but to privilege it is
to repress the many other methods, rationales, rituals and practices of commu-
nication that make up social life. While their actual civility might be question-
able, crisis memes are nevertheless an important manifestation of civil society
because they show people to be interested in taking an evaluative public posi-
tion. To echo Axel Bruns’s concept of ‘produsage’ (2008) and Lawrence Lessig’s
concept of ‘Remix’ culture (2008), they represent a reinvigorated, active and
unconstrained public voice that sidesteps the constraints of traditional media
opinion generation and distribution. Indeed, media based on the Internet
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Crisis memes
267
infrastructure afford far broader, more interactive and more intertextual expo-
sure to the representations and expectations of civil society than could be dreamt
of in Habermas’s philosophy. The question for future research, then, is not
whether crisis memes should be judged as responses against idealized reasoned
discourse, but what their place is in twenty-first-century civil society. Future
research should consider a number of issues along this line. Whether and how
do members of various cultural groups treat templatable digital resources such
as crisis memes as newsworthy, sharable, even resistible accounts for current
social circumstances? What do individuals achieve – socially, personally and
more widely – by creating, or perhaps simply passing along, particular memes
in particular platforms? In what contexts are memes passed from platform to
platform and how are they popularized and distributed within platforms?
Another critique that could be made of crisis memes is that they reinforce
cultural imperialism and the digital divide. It is by now axiomatic that differ-
ences in affluence correlate directly with differences in infrastructural access
to digital affordances (Compaine 2001) and that western culture dominates
most Internet culture just as it dominates much of traditional media. This
could be said of virtually any practice based on communication technology, so
again it would seem that the critique is, at least, not well focused. In-groups
have always demonstrated their cohesion through restricted code – group-
specific words and ideas (Bernstein 1964) – and we should not be surprised to
see this occur on the Internet. Clearly the in-jokes and associated templating
knowledge needed to both understand and create crisis memes hold far more
meaning for the Internet cognoscenti than the millions of Internet users who
have no idea of meme history, and the billions more who have never seen
them. Better questions for future research would revolve around the relation-
ship between templatability and the relative visibility of cultural power. For
example, G. Lakoff and M. Johnson’s (1980) distinction between ‘live’ and
‘dead’ metaphors rests on the notion that at some point templatable objects
(of which metaphors are one kind) reify their origins. Given the searchable
nature of digital objects, crisis memes (and other templatable digital objects)
could well provide units for investigating the point-to-point processes of reifi-
cation. Alternatively, the promiscuity of crisis memes could provide important
clues as to how aspect of Internet culture are crossing national, class and other
traditional boundaries, and expanding previously bounded methods and
contexts for expression about current social circumstances.
It was argued above that crisis memes represent a reinvigoration of an
active and unconstrained public voice. The freedom of expression that is
characterized by crisis memes, through, often depends on unlicensed use
of copyrighted materials. While this should ostensibly be fair use, any use
of copyrighted materials is facing challenges from increasingly strict copy-
right regimes such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)
(Electronic Frontier Foundation 2011). During early 2012, controversy erupted
over the possible introduction of two overly restrictive US copyright bills, Stop
Internet Privacy Act (SOPA)/Protect Internet Privacy Act (PIPA). SOPA/PIPA
were especially problematic because their proposed response to allegations
of copyright violation was to shut down the Domain Name Server (DNS)
links to allegedly infringing websites, making them invisible to most users.
Websites that served allegedly infringing material would thus be forced into
the economically infeasible position of moderating every post for possibly
infringing material. While such a draconian regime protects the interests of
certain members of the content production industries and their lobby groups, it
AJPC_2.2_Rintel_253-271.indd 267 10/18/12 7:14:55 PM
Sean Rintel
268
clearly has massive impact on freedom of expression for individuals. Lawrence
Lessig (2008) has long argued that overly restrictive copyright regimes wither
creativity, taking us from a read/write culture to a read only culture. Similarly,
in a TED talk discussing SOPA/PIPA, Clay Shirky (2012) argued that unless
Internet users stand against future incarnations of restrictive copyright
regimes, the Internet could end up promoting a consumption-only culture.
One such future incarnation is the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership
(TPP), which effectively seeks to extend DMCA-like regimes to a range of
international partners, including Australia (Electronic Frontier Foundation 2012).
The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s report on the leaked 10 February 2011
draft chapter on intellectual property indicates that the TPP treats ideas as
property to be jealously guarded. The problem with such a regime is that it
includes many property rights and infringement provisions for corporations
and governments, but few to no positive rights for individuals or the free flow
of ideas.
Even frivolous and ghoulish popular culture objects such as crisis memes
are important manifestations of freedom of expression. As such, Internet
users should be lobbying for more positive individual fair use and sharing
rights to facilitate such expression. The ‘Creative Commons’ project is one
part this process, but ultimately we need to go further. Going further will
require that all stakeholders become better educated about the relationship
between copyright, technology and Internet culture. Not only do Internet
users themselves need to better understand the regulatory framework in
which they operate, but legislators need to better understand how the
demands of restrictive copyright might be at odds with the Internet’s technical
infrastructure and Internet cultural practices.
The author would like to thank the editor and an anonymous reviewer for
insightful comments that substantially improved the final manuscript. An
initial draft of the ideas and data for this paper appeared in The Conversation
on 15 August 2011.
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2: 2, pp. 253–271, doi: 10.1386/ajpc.2.2.253_1
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Crisis memes
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Dr Sean Rintel is a lecturer in Strategic Communication at the University
of Queensland, Australia. He specializes in how the affordances and
constraints of interactive communication technologies affect language,
social action and culture.
Contact: School of Journalism & Communication, The University of
Queensland, Brisbane, QLD 4072, Australia.
E-mail: s.rintel@uq.edu.au
All images in this article were anonymously created and are in the public
domain.
Sean Rintel has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was
submitted to Intellect Ltd.
AJPC_2.2_Rintel_253-271.indd 271 10/18/12 7:14:55 PM
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