Afraid to Dive

A year has passed since the last time I wrote about memes. In this article I try to explain (mostly to myself in a form of self-reflection) what happened and what has changed, as well as what will happen next. Past Perhaps, it'd be best to start with what this blog was created for. Obviously, its very purpose is to transmit my ideas and to search all kinds of interesting things. Web culture, memes, classification, etc. — it was all about sharing something I knew myself and something I wanted to share. Yet, I've never had any audience and barely "advertised" what I did, hence you can call this blog a sort of personal story, as pretty much everything I do across the web. However, the memes stood aside, as it was really important to me to understand what they are and puzzle out that essential part of the web culture. Roughly speaking, I tried to play memeologist. This went on for a couple of years, as I was developing own meme theory, trying to solve memeological pr...

It is obvious that the internet has long been neither a means nor even a tool, but an extension of real life: the whole virtual world is at hand and in the blink of an eye. Indeed, the internet, if not dramatically changed, but at least affected almost all spheres of life, from economics and social interactions to culture. The latter, apparently, is of particular interest to this blog, and I would like to address this issue again, especially because, in a sense, this is my final work on web culture. No Boundaries Before realizing what weblore is, it is necessary first to understand the history of folklore and culture as such. Folklore is known to be an oral folk art characteristic of a traditional society. Thus, folklore belongs to folk culture, usually classified along with high and mass culture. Urbanization has brought what the Russian folklore researcher Sergei Neklyudov calls post-folklore . Virtually, it is "folklore" born in an urban environment: songs, urban leg...

Is it?

It has been a year since the very first article in this blog, so now I want to summarize all the work done and note the modern condition of memeology, its problems, and the memeologists out there. I am also glad that Afraid to Dive has become a transmitter of my ideas, and today is a great chance to report on it once again. Problems Memeology has a number of problems and gaps, which prevent its spread both among ordinary people and among researchers. Nevertheless, the issues of memeology should be sought in memetics, more precisely in the very definition of the term "meme", "a unit of cultural information". It happens that memes are an extremely interesting, but still an abstract concept. They had been suggested in order to explain the processes of cultural evolution and draw analogies with the biological development of life on Earth, but raised even more questions. Obviously that diversity and dynamism of culture don't tolerate such ideas, which lets many...

How often do you hear about that accidental reference you made? How often do you stumble upon the mentions of certain works in the cinema, video games, and literature? I bet that often enough, since the modern "storytelling industry", being a part of the entertaining pop culture machine, is built on the references and intertextuality, and these "inner messages" are no longer something special or new. Reference is a simplified name of reminiscence , one of the forms of mention, along with the quote. Reminiscence implies an appeal to the images of the past in art, expressing in such forms as an allusion, an homage or a tribute, and prototyping. A quotation without specifying the author can belong to the reminiscence, but it is more something like an intermediate stage. Since reminiscence does have a creative nature, its elements have always been found in human, mostly informal communication: examples are idioms, catch phrases, folk characters, and the folklore...

In our rapidly and constantly developing world everything is changing, gaining new forms and meaning. Starting from the second half of the 20th century, when society became a prisoner of postmodernism, deconstruction turned into a necessity, the only opportunity not to tire of the endlessly circulating flows of information which loses its relevance and starts bothering us in days or even hours. The permanent rethinking, mocking, and hunting for new meaning is a vent of our society of artists-consumers living in the conditions of permanent revisionism. Since all phenomena of culture are subject to deconstruction, such elemental force as memes, is no exception. In fact, meme deconstruction is no different from deconstruction in art and in a general sense implies a process of transferring a composition or its part into a new context or environment, where all the contradictions arise, and thus the phenomenon acquires a new meaning, moving away from previous ideas. There are two kind...

Many have heard of such a thing as Homestuck , the legendary web comic, a real Internet phenomenon rich in artistic content, an infamous community, as well as a confusing and dramatic history of relationships, both between characters and authors. Today, on April 13th, this web beast turns 10 years old. Its creator, Andrew Hussie, is quite an extraordinary man who brought many ideas of varying degrees of madness to life, but few know that he was one of the very first ironists. But what kind of ironic memes in those times can we talk about? Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff Usually the birth of ironic memes is considered by the appear of Dank Memes or Coaxed Into a Snafu. However, origins of ironic memes lie deep, back in 2009, precisely in the Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff webcomic. On March 17th, Hussie published his first attempt of such a work in order to parody the 'Higher Technology' comic, posted on Penny Arcade forums. He managed to mock amateur low-quality webcomics, using such...

Video memes are one of the turns in the evolution of Internet memes, which often offers slightly more than the usual images. Basically, they are more interactive and complex, containing both visual and audio information. Such memes can be "screen versions" of picture memes or be completely original. Although the first video memes appeared long before the creation of video hosting sites and were mostly in the form of .swf animations (for example, Numa Numa), they found their new place with the creation of YouTube in 2005. It should be said that I don't compile a list of all the memers in general; I will talk about those whom I am aware of. Also, YouTube is not a center of all the video memes, and there are many of them on the platforms like Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and much more, but the most of video memes are eventually being uploaded to YouTube. Montages which have many genres and microgenres have become one of the most popular video memes by the personal form. F...

Few can deny that Discord is one of the brightest discoveries in the field of online communication right now. It has replaced the inconvenient and faceless Skype and combined the comfortable and practical Slack interface with multi-functionality, thus becoming the unofficial master of the chats, a symbol of informal communication. By positioning itself as a chat for gamers, it, however, lost this label among "knowledgeable" people and became the common heritage, the folksy chat, from users to users. The company's strategy is that they don't take themselves too seriously, following the friendly and playful image of an "Internet-frequenter" which is used everywhere, from Twitter posts to changelogs inside the chat. What else is included in the Discord's formula of success, beyond the obvious server system, interactive bots, the mascot, and so on? It's something sociocultural, something that makes the communication process unique. Culture The firs...

What do you know about the Internet in China? I think that at least it is isolated from the outer web via the Golden Shield Project. It means that the Chinese online culture is different than the Western one, being more hermetic. Thanks to its impermeability, the digital world of China is unique and teeming with distinctive phenomena, and therefore is valuable to research. I have interviewed u/Elmwow who told me about the Chinese memes. Hello! Thank you for agreeing to the interview. First you need to know is that I’m not so far away from you: I’m from Russia, so I will reveal the situation with memes in our country, and there will be some cultural exchange. I hope it will be cool! Sure, me too. So, I'll start from afar: what's up with the Internet in China? You have the Golden Shield Project, including a powerful firewall that forces people to use internal services, right? Something similar to that. We can’t view something like YouTube, Reddit, Twitter etc...