This blog post is an accompaniment to the podcast episode “Exploring Multimodality” by The Orange Soda Club. In this podcast, Nika Music, Hannah Stumpf, and I delve into the topic of multimodality and how it shows up everywhere in our daily lives. Towards the end of the podcast, I make the bold claim that “meme culture is the epitome of multimodal content on Social Media.” In this post, I want to dig deeper into the role of multimodality in memes, by exploring how they come to be, using a small case study of the recently trending “Sue Sylvester” meme, and discussing the concept of “transmedia circulation”.
The Definition of a Meme
Before we dive in, I think it’s important to establish a definition for “memes”. After all, the word has been around for much longer than the internet content it is now most often used to refer to. Originally coming from the Greek “mimēma”, meaning ‘imitated thing’ (think of a mime player), British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins modeled it on the word “gene” in his book “The Selfish Gene” (1976) as a concept that would allow him to discuss evolutionary principles in explaining the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena. In a later interview, Dawkins stresses he only ever introduced this concept to “downplay the gene as the only unit of natural selection”. He never intended for the word to be used for theories of human culture, but he is glad others have done so.
What is it, then, that most people now refer to when using the word “meme”? Google gives two definitions. The first is the one by Dawkins, but the second is: “an image, video, piece of text, etc., typically humorous in nature, that is copied and spread rapidly by internet users, often with slight variations.” In a broad sense, this understanding still fits with Dawkins’ original definition of memes being bits of culture that are easily (and rapidly) spread and shared. In this short video, Dawkins himself explains his original definition, and how our current understanding of the term still fits:
How do Memes Come to be?
Now we know memes are pieces of (humorous) pop culture that are rapidly spread by internet users. One thing that remains hard to grasp, however, is how memes originate, and how some become popular while others don’t. The short answer is: some of these questions remain unanswered, specifically ones about predicting popularity. Certain formats might be very popular for a while, but–seemingly at random–a new type of format could originate at any moment. This makes sense when you keep in mind that the definition of a meme says absolutely nothing about the content. Therefore, anything can (and most likely will at some point) become a meme on the internet. I bring this up to point out that my exploration of memes can NEVER be exhaustive. So whenever I say something about a pattern in current or past memes, please keep in mind I’m never referring to ALL memes, just noticeable trends. The purpose of this post is to specifically explore the role of multimodality in memes. With this in mind, let’s take a look at how (some) memes come to be.
Frequently, a meme starts with a fragment of a piece of popular media that somehow finds its way to the forefront of the rapid flow of constant online chatter. Sometimes this happens because it is a clip/picture/fragment of something that just took place, and is thus relevant to the moment, for example, Ellen DeGeneres’ famous Oscar Selfie. However, there are other instances where the piece of media is years (sometimes even decades) old before becoming a trending meme online. In those cases, it is often either a new comment on the old piece of media or an entirely new practice that involves it.
Have you clicked on the hyperlink for “(sometimes even decades)” yet? If not I encourage you to take a look at it as it will allow me to further explain this point.
Did you realize you were just part of a popular meme practice? If not, allow me to explain: “Rickrolling” is a meme practice dating back to 2007, using one of youtube’s first “music videos” of the 1987 song “Never Gonna Give You Up” by Rick Astley. Already, you can see how big of a role multimodality plays in meme practices. The act of Rickrolling is done by misleading someone into clicking on a hyperlink that brings them to the audio or video of Rick. For an extensive explanation of this particular meme practice, check out this article on knowyourmeme.com–one of the many websites that have developed around the documenting and understanding of memes.
But I digress. We’ve established memes come from pieces of popular media, regardless of how old the original material is. Often, these pieces of media are uploaded to platforms such as Twitter as either short clips or pictures with subtitles (these allow the user to refer to what’s being said without the need for video). Another popular format involved in social media and meme practices are animated GIFs: a web image format that can display a succession of frames. “The blinking guy” (see below) is a perfect example of a popular meme GIF. Ödül Gürsimsek (2016) explains how content users “make use of … GIF literacy to use them appropriately in fitting contexts such as reactions, appropriation, humor, or commentary.”
The piece of content, paired with original commentary by the user that posted it, makes the beginnings of a meme. However, to become a (popular) meme, a spread must follow, often hand-in-hand with variations to the origin. To showcase how this happens, we will take a close look at the evolution of the recently trending “Sue Sylvester” meme.
“I am going to create a meme that is so multimodal”
Sue Sylvester is a character in the TV-Show “Glee” (2009-2015), labeled by Buzzfeed as “a teen musical-comedy-drama-fever-dream” (2020). In season 1 episode 7, Sue, the coach of the cheerleaders played by Jane Lynch, vows to destroy the school’s Glee club by sowing divisions in the team, saying “I am going to create an environment that is so toxic”.
According to Know Your Meme (2020), the meme began circulating in its original form in July 2020, when user @elmotumbokon posted the following tweet:
It was mildly popular for a while in the summer, with users finding humorous applications for the original quote. But a few weeks ago it took off in popularity, spawning entirely new variations that included a new mix of erasing letters or replacing the words to fit the joke, and eventually even incorporating new visual elements.
What follows is a visual journey through this evolution. (I collected screenshots to both avoid the risk of tweets disappearing as well as make the collection process easier. The background color is the result of Dark Mode being turned on/off. Usernames and dates of posting were always kept.)
As I mentioned, initially the meme involved finding funny captions for the original image, such as by comedian Jaboukie Young-White:
At some point, people started branching out the versatility of this meme, by blacking out certain words of the quote…
…or even individual letters.
Some users pointed out this seemed to be an evolution of the “Go Piss Girl” meme that was popular earlier this year and was “a trend that went so abstract it’s impossible to explain” (Murray, 2020). Where the Sue meme diverged from this meme, though, is that people started adding new words/phrases to fit their jokes.
As you can see, this involved a highly multimodal process of combining not only the text of the captions but also text inside the image to create a meme. As the meme increased in popularity users started making more specific jokes, as you could assume most other users now knew the context. Name any specific group you can think of and there was probably a Sue meme for it:
After a while, an even more elaborate variation arrived when people started adding new visual elements to the original image to further make their point/increase the humor.
To conclude this short overview, it’s important to note that one of the reasons it is deemed so popular is its longevity. Most memes become popular by spreading incredibly quickly but disappear just as fast. This makes the fact that the Sue meme has remained prevalent for half a year quite unique. As Richard Dawkins mentioned: memes, too, involve natural selection.
Of course, anything that becomes too popular also generates backlash. And certainly, plenty of users expressed being exhausted by seeing the meme everywhere or even critiquing its status as a meme altogether. But the fact remains that it spread far and wide, and is instantly recognizable to many internet users. Yet, there is one aspect to the multimodality involved in this (for both this particular meme as well as meme culture as a whole) that I want to highlight. Because it’s not just the creation of memes that made me regard it as the perfect example for multimodality on social media. It is also how they spread, especially between platforms.
Transmedia Circulation
As should be evident by now, a key characteristic of (good) memes is their ability to spread (far and fast). Different social media platforms have different functionalities that play a role in this: Twitter has retweets (with or without extra comment by the user), Facebook has a share button, Tumblr has reblogs, Instagram has stories, etc. However, one of the things I find most fascinating is how content moves from one platform to another.
The significance of transmedia circulation in the multimodality of Social Media is perhaps best described by Adami and Jewitt (2016) who say: “Digital technologies afford text creation through ‘copy-and-paste’ across media; as a result, visual artefacts are easily assembled, bricolaged, edited, manipulated and reused, from one media to another.” Put differently, what the word is referring to is when a piece of media is taken from one source and recontextualized and shared again, whether on a different platform or on the same.
For example, Instagram (and other social media to a lesser extent) is full of so-called “meme pages” that are exclusively devoted to posting memes, but often in the format of screenshots from other social media. See for example the original tweet of a Sue meme, on Twitter, as well as a post on Instagram:
This is a fairly straightforward example, but you can imagine that copying and recontextualizing can become way more intricate among different platforms. Some TikTok users record themselves reading out screenshots of tweets. One user did exactly this to comment on the Sue meme:
Far not everything originates on Twitter. Many screenshots also come from Tumblr and Reddit. And Twitter’s image uploading function doesn’t include an easy option to add text, unlike Instagram or Snapchat. Therefore, users will alter the image using one app, but then save it to their phone and it to another, like Twitter.
All of this transmedia circulation has an impact on meme culture. As Adami and Jewitt (2016) say: “Their [online content] forms are appropriated and transformed, together with their meanings. Ownership is brought into question and, through circulation and appropriation, what ownership and authorship mean in social media becomes more and more uncertain.” I also mention this in my podcast, but Chas Steinbrugge is one of the people trying to change this. Not only is he trying to popularize proper citations for memes with his “TrigoMEMEtry” Instagram page and his website memecitations.com. He also posts a screenshot of a chat convo with the original poster to ask their permission when he shares a tweet on Insta. Here is an example of a Sue meme he shared.
These blurred lines of ownership pose many questions for further research, but for now, I just wanted to point out how complex social media practices make this. Especially when you consider that countries like the USA have fair use laws while places like the EU don’t. Unfortunately, I’ve run out of space for things to talk about. So it’s time I wrap up this post.
In Summary
Though, as mentioned at the start, I am only able to explore a tiny part of meme culture in this blog post, I hope I have been able to show you how memes are all particularly multimodal in their own way. Each meme might use different modes–stills from TV shows, GIFs, audio bits, or even plain text tweets–but they all utilize multimodality in both their content AND their spreading. By explaining transmedia circulation, I was able to hint at just the tip of the iceberg of the intricate practices of the creation and spreading of memes across social media platforms. I would like to end this blog post–which in itself comes at the end of a highly confusing, arguably “toxic”, and all together draining year–with the following tweet that I think ultimately sums up what I find the beauty of meme culture:
As a little bonus, I created a slideshow for you to enjoy some (33) of my favorite Sue Sylvester memes. Including ones I couldn’t incorporate in the post. The second slide is of my own creation. Enjoy!
I hope you found this exploration as fascinating as I did. If you haven’t already, be sure to check out the podcast and other blog posts by my group mates, which I have listed below:
Nika’s post on Literacies in Multimodality
Nika’s post on Multimodality in Education
Hannah’s post on Conversations On Social Media
References
@allreactionvidz (2020, September 14). I am going to create an environment that is SO toxic. Sue Sylvester/white woman with short blonde hair in pink adidas tracksuit on GLEE reaction video meme pic.twitter.com/J6ZBERgxF7. Twitter. https://twitter.com/allreactionvidz/status/1305595756204765191.
@elmotumbokon (2020, June 28). sue sylvester when she’s going to create an environment that is so toxic pic.twitter.com/RWtsZFpRv6. Twitter. https://twitter.com/elmotumbokon/status/1277070609672003584.
Adami, E., & Jewitt, C. (2016). Special Issue: Social media and the visual. Visual Communication, 15(3), 263–270. https://doi.org/10.1177/1470357216644153
Dawkins, C. R. (1976). The selfish gene. Oxford University Press.
D’Mello, G. (2019, September 25). Guy From Viral ‘Blinking Guy’ Meme Is Using His GIF To Raise Awareness For Multiple Sclerosis. IndiaTimes. https://www.indiatimes.com/technology/news/guy-from-viral-blinking-guy-meme-is-using-his-gif-to-raise-awareness-for-multiple-sclerosis-376442.html.
Gürsimsek, Ö. A. (2016). Animated GIFs as vernacular graphic design: producing Tumblr blogs. Visual Communication, 15(3), 329–349. https://doi.org/10.1177/1470357216645481
I’m Going To Create An Environment That Is So Toxic. Know Your Meme. (2020, December 10). https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/im-going-to-create-an-environment-that-is-so-toxic.
McCullough, S. (2020, December 3). 34 Sue Sylvester “I Am Going To Create” Memes That Are So Ridiculously Hilarious. BuzzFeed. https://www.buzzfeed.com/salimahmccullough/sue-sylvester-meme-twitter.
Murray, I. (2020, December 2). Why the Sue Sylvester meme is so popular. indy100. https://www.indy100.com/ents/i-am-going-to-meme-sue-sylvester-b1764032.
Pauly, A. (2020, April 17). That Viral ‘Gossip Girl’ Meme, Explained. HYPEBAE. https://hypebae.com/2020/4/gossip-girl-meme-blair-serena-blake-lively-leighton-meester-instagram-twitter-explained.
Rickroll. Know Your Meme. (2020, December 14). https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/rickroll.
Tenbarge, K. (2019, November 18). Meme theft has become the norm. This high schooler is trying to change that with ‘credit flexes’ from Elon Musk and Lil Nas X. Insider. https://www.insider.com/trigomemetry-meme-account-instagram-credit-flex-elon-musk-lil-nas-2019-11.
Thomas, S. (2014, March 5). Ellen’s selfie at the Oscars unleashes memes mayhem. https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/movies/ellens-selfie-at-the-oscars-unleashes-memes-mayhem-20140305-346uj.html.
Video Sources
@exhausted.boi, carlo. (2020). i would like to thank the twitter gods for this #greenscreen #fyp. TikTok. https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMJbH648s/.
Cotter548. (2007, May 15). RickRoll’D. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHg5SJYRHA0
OxfordUnion. (2014, February 26). Richard Dawkins | Memes | Oxford Union. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BVpEoQ4T2M
Science Insider. (2015, October 28). Real Meaning Behind The Word “Meme”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iHZi-z7H4o
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