Albin Wagener, “The Postdigital Emergence of Memes and GIFs: Meaning, Discourse, and Hypernarrative Creativity”, Postdigit Sci Educ, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-020-00160-1
Abstract: The use of memes and GIFs has a significant influence on interactions in social networks and online forums. As productions or utterances, these modes of communication benefit from thorough research works, notably led by Shifman, thus impacting many different scientific fields—such as linguistics, semantics, and communication studies. This situation is linked to the recent emergence of memes and GIFs, and also to their complex intertwining of discursive, visual, and videographic signs, thus leading to a polysemic communicative phenomenon. In this paper, I wish to show how memes and GIFs work by analyzing scientific studies and looking at the digital dynamics in online interaction, and on the possible impact on the offline world, in a postdigital perspective. The aim is to propose an approach based on the communicational role played by memes and GIFs, and also to underline the fact that they do represent a new form of human discourse, enriched by cultural references, popular culture and individual, and collective creativity.