Why Meme Magic is Real but Memes are Not: On Order Words, Refrains and the Deep Vernacular Web

In this short essay I want to suggest that there might be a better way to understand what we call memes. Departing from Tony Sampson’s critique that memetics doesn’t consider the medium, I’ll propose an alternative theoretical framework that considers how Internet vernaculars are shaped by the affordances of their milieus as well as how they are transcoded between them. In doing so I’ll use some ideas from Deleuze and Guattari and illustrate my points with examples drawn from 4chan’s imageboard subculture — popularly considered to be the source of many of social media’s most successful as well as its vilest memes.