Category
Articles filed under Irony.
Post-ironic memes are great because they are meaningful. Meaningful memes bring us closer to the dream of the timeless meme, just like early comics artists who aspired towards serious literature with an ostensibly unserious medium.
The following is my take on doing the same for online subcultures. I do this by clarifying the definitions of three highly popular terms used on the Internet to describe different kinds of subcultural participants, and clarifying the concept of the ironist in the context of online subcultures.
The Ironic Meme Movement was a reaction against the mainstream co-option of the subcultural products of the underground; an attempt to create incorruptible inside jokes. The Ironics employed defensive strategies which paralleled that of the punks against the commercialization of their own subculture. Like the punks, they failed.
Revised model of the four quadrants model of irony.
On some parts of the Internet the term ‘normie’ is used to define anyone who does not fully comprehend the humour and language of certain communities. A normie is usually seen as someone who has a social life outside of the Internet, and who does not know, or care, about its obscure customs. In this particular case, the term is as much an accusation as a label, expressing disdain toward anyone who is unaware of the growing community of Ironic memes.
I have been developing a theory of Internet Memes, through which I hope to operationalize memetics for the scientific analysis of Internet Meme culture. Here is a case study I used to test and develop some of my models.
Memes are not just art they are art-concepts, necessarily materialized cybernetically. This means their analysis must always be two-tiered, firstly, memetic; secondly, aesthetic.