Shifting Identities Within Internet Memes

The notion of the meme began with Richard Dawkins’ media-gene metaphor before a further propagation and refinement by psychologist Susan Blackmore. Removed from this original contextualisation, within today’s colloquial understanding of ‘Internet memes,’ one important aspect relating to Dawkins’ original metaphor is still relevant. The Internet meme as a unit of cultural exchange, in order to survive, has to reproduce. With this in mind I will explore examples of memes that function and spread primarily through a process of image-media led reproduction and
subsequent mutation. This is a contemporary, intuitively anxious process that has drawn association with Soviet Film-maker Dziga Vertov’s ‘visual bond’ concept of media led social bonding