Know Your Meme and the homogenization of web history

Abstract

As memes circulate and spread throughout different Web communities, their meanings are continually changing. In the last decade, the website Know Your Meme (KYM) has become popular among researchers, educators, and day-to-day Web users to understand memes and their meanings. KYM is a frequently cited resource among Web researchers, and as a result it has become instrumental in establishing dominant histories of memes on the Web. Though KYM remains an invaluable resource, it is often cited with minimal context, and an uncritical reliance on KYM’s definitions may overlook the polysemy of many memes. Accordingly, this paper uses a discursive interface analysis of the KYM website along with examples of incomplete meme definitions to demonstrate how the website constructs itself as a cultural authority to define and classify memes. Given that memes themselves are artifacts of Web history, I argue the overreliance on KYM as an authority on memes and their history can contribute to the homogenization of Web histories. However, this paper acknowledges that KYM can still be a useful resource and to that end, offers recommendations for how researchers might better introduce and contextualize KYM within their own work.

Keywords:

• Memes
• web histories
• Know Your Meme
• historiography
• internet culture

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Lori Lopez and Jeremy Morris for their feedback and guidance on the initial drafts of this article. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their time and for providing insightful comments which helped improve the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ben T. Pettis

Ben Pettis is a PhD student in Media and Cultural Studies in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research interests include internet culture and histories in the form of memes, social media, and the day-to-day activities that represent an individual user’s relation to a platform.