The design of a platform determines the kind of content produced
Seong-Young HerFacebook allows users to post multiple photos in one post, hides parts of a large photo, flick through the photos one at a time and share the post with all of the photos.
This has led to the development of a new format of sequential memeing: rather than the traditional single-file practice, in which the unit of repost/share is an image or a video, users share a collection of images.
It’s a great example of how shaky the definition of ‘Internet meme’ as ‘a funny image or video clip’ really is. Are these photos each a meme, or do they compose a single meme through being viewed together?
I made these Siphonaptera (the Flea) images with no intention of posting each one independently.
If I were posting on an imageboard where I can only post one image per post, I might have replied to each previous post in order to join them into a single thread.
A primitive example of the same kind are combo threads on imageboards. You can see the Slowpoke example here.
The unit is made up of three image files over three posts, in one thread. It is a single image made up of three image-files. Is it one meme? Are these three memes that must accompany each other to be complete? Are there multiple ‘levels’ of memetic content at play in every instance of a shitpost?