Abstract
This study examines so-called “ironic memes,” a seemingly inscrutable genre of memetic Internet content, as meaningful digital multimodal text. Considering Internet memes’ semiotic construction patterns and their social functions, this study connects these two concerns, asking: How is the provocatively “nonsensical” design of ironic memes organized and connected to the construction of (group) identities online? Adopting a digital ethnographic approach, we employ a combination of multimodal discursive methods in order to jointly analyze semiotic design patterns and the social actions underlying them. The analysis suggests that, despite their nonsensical appearance, ironic memes rely on distinct design strategies that contribute to the construction of (group) identities rooted in digital literacies. Specifically, ironic memes constitute generic hybrids where semiotic practices are associated with personas that are “less literate” in Internet memeing. Our findings indicate that digital literacies can feature as central in the construction of superdiverse identities through digital text-making and text-sharing.
Keywords
Introduction
The ubiquity of highly spreadable “memetic” (Shifman, 2014) content online has spawned a proliferation of academic work on Internet memes, which considers both their material composition (how memes are made) and their social function (what memes do). In compositional terms, Internet meming generally involves the systematic manipulation of digital content by users (e.g. see Burgess, 2008; Cannizzaro, 2016; Marino, 2015), whereby “template-like” structures recur in different meme iterations (Dancygier and Vandelanotte, 2017; Lou, 2017; Marino, 2015). Socially, memes appear to foster processes of community formation and feelings of groupness online (Literat and van den Berg, 2019; Miltner, 2014; Nissenbaum and Shifman, 2017; Varis and Blommaert, 2015).
As our social lives unfold in an online-offline nexus characterized by the emergence of increasingly diverse group identities around shared communicative practices like memeing (Blommaert, 2018; Blommaert et al., 2019), significant questions emerge about the relationship between memes as digital multimodal texts and the “niche” groups that materialize around them. This relationship has been granted little attention in previous scholarship. Therefore, this article aims to examine how specific meme design practices contribute to group identity construction, highlighting the dimension of digital literacies (Jones and Hafner, 2012) to better understand this connection between multimodal text-making and constructing identities online today. Empirically, this endeavor is based on a digital ethnographic study of a particular meme genre labeled “ironic memes.”
Ironic memes are provocatively inscrutable creations, describable as “digital memetic nonsense” (Katz and Shifman, 2017). While they are often incomprehensible to those unfamiliar with them, our analysis suggests that ironic memes are genre hybrids which index unskilled content creators (“normies”) with (supposedly) qualitatively inferior memeing sensibilities and, relatedly, “inferior” literacies. The appreciation of ironic memes thereby shapes an in-group identity for ironic memers, who, being “superior” in terms of literacies, recognize the perceived inferiority indexed in the memes’ design.
In what follows, we specify our approach as a study of digital multimodal text design and identity construction in times of superdiversity through the lens of New Literacy Studies. First, we situate our research focus within the context of meme scholarship (“Memes: between design and function” section) and present the study’s theoretical background (“Literacies and superdiverse identities” section). We then introduce the methods employed for our study of the subreddit r/ironicmemes (“Methods: digital ethnography and multimodal meaning-making” section). The resulting analysis explicates key design practices of ironic memes (“Making it ‘worse, on purpose’” section) and their identity-constructing dimensions (“Being ‘meme savvy’” section) to critically consider how emerging digital literacies relate to particular kinds of (group) identity formation (“Memeing literacies and (online) group identities” section). Finally, we succinctly summarize the study’s findings and reflect on its shortcomings (“Conclusion” section).
Memes: between design and function
Internet memes have been defined in a plurality of ways from different disciplinary perspectives, a thorough overview of which is beyond the scope of this article. Here, drawing on interdisciplinary meme scholarship, we view memes as digital artifacts with a multimodal makeup (see Dancygier and Vandelanotte, 2017; Lou, 2017, inter alia), which are made and disseminated online (see Knobel and Lankshear, 2007a; Shifman, 2014, inter alia) and are subject to various manipulations by users (see Burgess, 2008; Cannizzaro, 2016, inter alia) in largely systematic ways that result in the intertextual emergence of “meme genres” (see Marino, 2015; Wiggins and Bowers, 2015, inter alia). Following this definition, we treat memes as multimodal texts that exhibit patterns of (re)design and, as consistently shown in the literature, fulfill social functions in their online circulation.
Namely, from a sociocultural perspective, memes have been conceptualized as “contested cultural capital” (Nissenbaum and Shifman, 2017) around which in-group boundaries can be established, differentiating elaborated meme subcultures from “the mainstream” (Miltner, 2014). Memes thus foster phatic community bonds based on the shared appreciation of similar content, which may appear nonsensical to outsiders (Katz and Shifman, 2017) but becomes accessible to insiders through its intertextual dimension (Varis and Blommaert, 2015). Such boundary-shaping phenomena are consolidated by users’ “vernacular criticism” of memes, which sees, for example, memes as losing “value” once they have entered the mainstream and become popular among the masses of “normies” (Literat and van den Berg, 2019). This self-reflexivity surrounding memes often reveals a counter-mainstream cultural orientation, particularly around so-called “dank memes” (Granata, 2019; Pauliks, 2021).
As will be shown, such counter-mainstream cultural attitudes are relevant for the ironic memes we examine here; yet, our study’s focus lies more specifically on how these memes’ multimodal semiotic makeup, or “design” (Kress, 2010), intimately relates to their sociocultural function, particularly with regard to the construction of social identity niches around digital text-making. Co-examining meme design and function, Gal, Shifman, and Kampf (2016) have previously shown that the faithful or altered reproduction of memetic content reflects processes of collective identity construction, indicating conformist or subversive orientations. Focusing on dank memes in particular, Pauliks (2021) also scrutinizes the “pictorial practices” attested in the memes in order to elucidate how a counter-mainstream media ethos is upheld around them. Although users’ meme-related knowledge plays a role in Pauliks’ (2021) account, little attention has been paid to how memes as texts, through their semiotic makeup, manifest the importance of such knowledge—defined as “digital literacies” here—as a key dimension for constructing social identities today on a broader level.
This study thus systematically addresses the pivotal relationship between digital text design practices and group identity construction through a case study of ironic memes. In doing so, it brings to light the hitherto overlooked dimension of digital literacies as a cornerstone around which identities can emerge in times of superdiversity.
Literacies and superdiverse identities
The notion of “superdiversity” (Vertovec, 2007) is being increasingly used to capture the complexity of our online-offline social world, which is marked by unprecedented levels of mobility and translocal social engagement through digital media (Deumert, 2014). Research in this vein underlines that communities emerging today through common semiotic practices have porous boundaries and resist categorization on the basis of “thick” identity categories such as race, class or gender (Blommaert et al., 2019; Blommaert, 2018; Maly and Varis, 2016). This diversification, or “fragmentation of the social fabric” as a result of “multi-channel media systems” (The New London Group, 2000: 15), has led to “complex and overlapping” boundaries for any conceptualization of “communities” (p. 17). This vast diversification requires a focus on the many things people do together rather than what they statically are.
What people do together with regard to meme-making and meme-sharing can be captured under the moniker of “literacies” in the tradition of New Literacy Studies (Gee, 2015). Kress and Street (2006) define literacies as “social practices of representation” (p. vii, original emphasis). In this socially oriented view, literacy is not conceptualized as a singular phenomenon (cf. “reading and writing”), but as a plural (literacies) which refers to multiple forms of socially consequential semiotic behavior that individuals engage in throughout their life (Gee, 2004). As social life is, in turn, being increasingly mediated by digital infrastructure, a “natural offshoot” (Gee, 2015: 44) of this approach to literacy has been a focus on “digital literacies” (see Mills, 2010 for an overview). The term generally refers to the knowledgeable use of digital media “to creatively engage in particular social practices, to assume appropriate social identities, and to form or maintain various social relationships” (Jones and Hafner, 2012: 12, original emphasis).
On a surface level, then, the practices involved in memeing may be characterized as digital or “new” literacies (e.g. see Procházka, 2014) as they rely on relatively new digital tools. Still, “new” literacies feature innovation in more than just the technological “stuff” involved; they are also underlain by a new literacy “mindset” (Knobel and Lankshear, 2007b). Lankshear and Knobel (2006) suggest that the advent of digital technologies offering increased interconnectedness has wrought major social shifts, which have engendered a particular mindset associated with new literacies. This mindset differs from its more “traditional” counterparts along various dimensions, including a re-thinking of the value of texts and an understanding that the structure of social relations is changing as these can now emerge in digital space (Lankshear and Knobel, 2006).
This conceptualization of literacies as tied to mindsets is reminiscent of Gee’s (2008) capital-D “Discourses,” defined as the knowledge that needs to be “mastered” in the context of a certain literacy. Discourses encompass not only particular (multimodal) meaning-making patterns that one must master to be (seen as) “literate” but also patterns of beliefs, moral judgments, and use of various tools (like digital software), which are adhered to by individuals so that they may recognizably enact a socially ratified identity or “niche” (Gee, 2008: 161). The concept of Discourses thus also captures the social situatedness of literacy phenomena with regard to how they are anchored to particular beliefs/mindsets which also become tied to identity construction.
In our present study of (meme-making) literacies as identity-constructing elements in today’s online-offline world, identity is viewed as realized through communicative practices that individuals engage in as they move through a variety of online-offline norm-governed time-space configurations in their social lives (Blommaert, 2010; Blommaert and De Fina, 2017). This conceptualization from the angle of superdiversity aligns with the constructivist approach to identity already adopted in studies of memes, which treats identity as variable, reliant on recurring stylized social action, and marked by differences vis-à-vis in- and out-groups (see Wiggins, 2019, Ch. 7).
In this context, we explore how digital text creation and sharing can function as identity-constructing literacy practices. Specifically, we show how literacy is mobilized in meme-making and meme-sharing practices, thereby constructing the niche identity of “ironic memer,” and what such processes of identification entail. Our analysis comprises a bidirectional focus on text organization and social action, the conceptual and practical particulars of which are explained below.
Methods: digital ethnography and multimodal meaning-making
We approach the creation and consumption of digital texts as situated meaning-making practices crystallized in digital artifacts (ironic memes). The creation and consumption of ironic memes in relevant online spaces entail the existence of local norms for the deciphering, appreciation, and evaluation of these memes. These local norms are rooted in the ideas and assumptions that, together with design patterns, make up the Discourse (Gee, 2008) of ironic memeing. It is through this Discourse that the literacy practices surrounding ironic memeing acquire their social value and thus become recognizable as indexing social identities. In order to tease apart the social meaning of this text-based phenomenon in situ, and specifically, its identity-constructing aspect, this study adopted a digital ethnographic approach.
Digital ethnography allows for flexibility in data collection and analysis methods (Hine, 2017; Varis, 2015). This is advantageous given the phenomenological diversity emerging in what is loosely referred to as “the digital realm.” Informed by the traditional ethnographic ethos, a digital ethnographer does not limit the scope of data collection, data types or data sets prior to immersion within the research site. Only through immersion can one determine exactly what is significant to the members of the community themselves.
Given the material variability of the data (see the “Data collection” section), digital ethnography has been complemented through a social semiotic analytical view of multimodal artifacts (Kress, 2010) as well as analytical tools from a multimodal mediated perspective (Norris, 2004) to better understand identity construction through forms of mediated social action (see the “Analytical approach” section).
Data collection
The digital ethnographic endeavor generated the following data sets: (a) naturalistic observations of the primary research site documented in screenshots and field notes, (b) participant interviews, and (c) “external” resources concerning memeing. Data sources under (c) included outlets providing metapragmatic descriptions of online cultural practices (e.g. knowyourmeme.com) and the examination of available software tools that facilitate the production of the texts under discussion.
The primary research site was the subreddit r/ironicmemes. Ethnographic engagement spanned four months (March–June 2020), during which the subreddit grew from roughly 5,500 to 6,700 members. The choice of r/ironicmemes as a primary research site was largely influenced by its name, which explicitly frames its content as “ironic memes.” Due to the volume of data, a representative sample was determined for further analysis. The main criteria for the selection were: (a) recurrence of stylistic features and (b) the posts’ (un)popularity as evidenced by indicators of engagement (up/downvoting, comment extensiveness).
Eight semi-structured interviews were also conducted with subreddit members, including one moderator. Potential interviewees were selected on the basis of their activity on the subreddit (long-time followers, habitual posters). Interview structure was dynamically adapted to the users’ profiles (particularly in the moderator’s case), but interviews invariably focused on: (a) the users’ relationship with and view of r/ironicmemes, (b) their potential affinity for other online spaces where they enjoy (ironic) memes, (c) their descriptions of what defines ironic memes, and (d) their views on insider concepts that emerged as salient during our analysis (e.g. “cringe”).
Analytical approach
From a social semiotic perspective, meaning-making is a process of “design” drawing on a variety of semiotic systems, or “modes” (Kress, 2010). A social semiotic framework facilitates grounding one’s analysis on the arrangement of semiotic resources, or the “stuff” that is involved in meaning-making (Jewitt, 2015; Kress, 2010). The framework provides analytical tools to elucidate textual patterns of meaning-making practices articulated through multiple communicative modes. We thus drew upon social semiotic tools for the analysis of memes as textual artifacts which realize particular meanings through the organization of semiotic elements in a defined semiotic space/frame.
While a semiotic approach facilitates the analysis of the material composition of a multimodal text, a mediated perspective (Norris, 2011; Scollon, 2001) complemented textual analysis to approach social practices (textual alteration, posting, commenting, and so on) as forms of mediated social action. This approach is “practice-based” (Norris, 2004, 2011), placing an analytical focus on concrete communicative actions and their identity-constructing potential. 1
The mediated approach allowed us to consider the identity-constructing “frozen actions” (Norris, 2005) realized in particular digital artifacts. This concept captures how actions may be “embedded in objects” found in the environment (Norris and Makboon, 2015: 43) and “readily read off of [them]” (p. 47). In this sense, an ironic meme found on r/ironicmemes constitutes an object (a multimodal text) found in a particular environment (the subreddit), and the actions constituting its creation and its placement there are embedded within it.
Finally, given our view of text-making as a social practice, a more fine-grained approach to the role of the “rhetor” (Kress, 2010), the actor responsible for the text, was also needed. Goffman’s (1981) notion of “production format” problematized the traditional conceptualization of the speaker-listener, arguing that there can be multiple positions and/or roles being realized by a social actor in a communicative event, and proposing a distinction between three roles: “animator,” “author,” and “principal.” The first term refers to the person materially conducting the act of meaning-making. The author is “someone who has selected the sentiments that are being expressed and the words in which they are encoded,” and the principal is “someone whose position is established by the words that are spoken, someone whose beliefs have been told, someone who is committed to what the words say” (Goffman, 1981: 144–145). Goffman’s production format thus provided key tools for dissecting the role of the rhetor in this study.
Making it “worse, on purpose”
Our analysis focuses on two interrelated phenomena which recurrently emerged as significant in both the digital artifacts’ material composition and in the actions, practices, and ideologies of the social actors who constitute the community of users (meme producers and consumers) in this digital space. First, ironic memes feature design characteristics that exploit traditional meme genres, appropriating them and producing genre hybrids which are dubbed “worse, on purpose.” Textual norms are systematically undermined resulting in cryptic multimodal texts that are “less direct” and deny straightforward interpretation. These genre hybrids, which are instilled with “high cringe,” produce multiple identity elements through the indexing of social stereotypes tied to the literacy practices realized through “poor” design that is “worse, on purpose.” The result is a fragmentation of voice in the production format (Goffman, 1981). A principal persona is realized through the stylistic literacy practices of the author/animator, which index unskilled content creators (“normies”) whose literacies and sensibilities are qualitatively inferior. This imagined principal transcends strict identification through “thick” sociocultural categorization. Instead, it is the represented principal’s inferior literacy which is targeted and simultaneously indexed through the carefully curated multimodal digital artifacts.
In the following interview excerpt, r/ironicmemes moderator 42069lmaoxd explains that ironic memes differ from “regular” memes in how they are made.
In Excerpt 1, the moderator details typical traits of ironic memes. Some of these textual characteristics are exemplified in the following sections. In Figure 1, there is unnecessary or nonsensical word repetition featured across top and bottom text (“MOM TOMMY TOMMY”) and lack of punctuation (“MOM TOMMY,” “WONT”). Such characteristics correspond to the notion of “worse, on purpose.” Importantly, this feature is not restricted to the mode of written language. Intentional bad quality is also realized through poor picture cropping (Figure 1), where we have only a partial view of the represented participant (the Wallace mug).
“Wallace mug.”
Image-based “poor” renditions are also found in “pixel quality” (Excerpt 1). Figure 2 presents a so-called “deep fried meme.” Deep fried memes feature a visual effect whereby the image “is run through dozens of filters to the point where [it] appears grainy, washed-out, and strangely colored” (Know Your Meme, 2022a; cf. Granata, 2019; Pauliks, 2021). The popularity of such memes is linked to the existence of free online software programs that specifically produce this kind of visual manipulation (Narkevich, n.d.). Deep-frying memes is widely viewed as a practice of ironic memeing. Knowyourmeme.com catalogs the entry on deep fried memes as “Part of a series on Ironic Memes” (Know Your Meme, 2022a), while interviewee toryguns mentions that, when it comes to ironic memes, “it all started with deep fried memes.” In Figure 2, a picture of a bird with the overlain text “birb” in Impact font and the same title is disfigured through the use of the deep-frying effect, making for a “worse, on purpose” ironic meme appearance.
“Birb.”
Returning to Figure 1, the Wallace mug meme also displays deliberate unkemptness through the mode of layout. The submission’s title (“give me the wallace mug tommy” with three angry emojis) realizes a demand, represented as coming from the same character voicing a complaint in the rest of the meme. Specifically, an unknown character, supposedly underage and supervised by their mother, demands that “Tommy” give them “the Wallace mug” and also complains to “mom” that Tommy is not responding to the demand (top/bottom text). The title/main body distinction provided by the infrastructure of the webpage is thus mobilized in a novel way that could be viewed as “wrong” or “worse”: instead of presenting or commenting on the content of the textual unit as a whole, the title is a speech act performed by the same character who voices another speech act in the main body of the text. Coupled with intentionally imperfect lexical redundancy (seen in the repetition of the top text’s last word in the bottom text), the use of the mode of layout strays from expected compliance with the common practices of not unnecessarily repeating words and of titles being distinct from the internal discursive frame.
In summary, Figures 1 and 2 exemplify how a key characteristic of ironic memes, being “worse, on purpose,” is articulated across various traits which materialize across various modes. Crucially, these texts exemplify a process of genre hybridization, specifically genre appropriation. According to Mäntynen and Shore (2014), genre appropriation occurs when “an entire text appropriates the form of a text representing another genre in order to exploit the meanings related to a particular generic form for a particular purpose, often for an ironic purpose” (p. 747, our emphasis). Mäntynen and Shore illustrate this process with an example of a music review that takes the form of a cooking recipe for ironic purposes; notably, that text remains a music review despite “donning” the recipe genre.
In this sense, the memes examined here appropriate the generic form of Impact-font image macro memes. Figures 1 and 2 feature text in Impact font (imperfectly) split into top and bottom text, which is a generic staple of Impact-font image macro memes, a highly conventionalized meme genre 3 (Dynel, 2016). According to interviewee toryguns, “when ironic meme artists brought back the Impact font, it was a start of a new era for ironic memes.” The use of the Impact font is thus apparently a salient design practice for ironic memers.
Importantly, the memes in Figures 1 and 2 still function as ironic memes by virtue of merely appropriating the generic form and not meaningfully following the setup-punchline pattern that is typical of top and bottom text in image macro memes. In Figure 1, the top and bottom texts articulate the character’s complaint and appear to be arbitrarily split in a disruptive way. For example, the top text does not isolate a pragmatically distinct unit (the apostrophe “mom”), a fact which, paired with the lack of punctuation, renders the utterance difficult to read. This is further accentuated by the unnecessary repetition of “Tommy.” In Figure 2, the generic form is appropriated in even more novel terms as the top-bottom text division is scrapped altogether, and the linguistic text is placed only roughly toward the bottom of the image and kept to a minimum (“birb”). So, in the generic appropriation process, Impact-font memes’ top-bottom text division is only appropriated to be undermined again, which could be argued to add to the “worse, on purpose” trait of ironic memes. This points to the moderator’s observation that ironic memes are “just a joke over an image” as opposed to following the formula of “statement, image, punchline” (Excerpt 1).
This manipulation of formulas through genre appropriation, particularly in a way that makes the end product appear “worse, on purpose,” also contributes to ironic memes being “less direct” (Excerpt 1). Ironic memes are not designed as straightforward visual jokes (cf. Dynel, 2016) that simply follow recognizable generic patterns. Instead, they are generic hybrids, which twist existing genre conventions and are thus difficult to understand for the uninitiated observer. This function of ironic memes comes through more evidently when examining memes that fail to follow ironic meme norms, such as the meme in Figure 3.
“What now?”
Figure 3 presents a meme posted on r/ironicmemes, which is a normative instantiation of the “disappointed black guy” meme genre (Know Your Meme, 2022b). The meme follows the established generic form: In the top half of the composition, a situation is presented (on the left) that warrants a happy reaction, conveyed through a close shot of a participant smiling (on the right); in the bottom half, there is a situation that warrants disappointment (left), and a still of the same participant expressing disappointment accompanies it (right). In this case, the meme refers to the practice of using the Windows Task Manager feature to terminate unresponsive software, which is a last-resort solution when applications being run on Windows do not respond. In the bottom left panel, a screencap of the Task Manager feature itself being unresponsive is presented, which warrants disappointment. Notably, this situation could also be described as “ironic” since it refers to losing one’s last-resort solution: Ironically, something done when all else fails is itself failing. This contrast between expectation and actual events makes this a case of situational irony (Colston, 2017). This might have prompted the user to post the meme in r/ironicmemes, but as evident from the responses the meme received (Figure 4), members in this space understand the term “ironic” as entailing something different.
“What now?” comments section.
This submission is ostensibly rejected by members of the community. For one, this is exemplified in its low upvote score (9), where 25% of the votes were downvotes. The submission is also commented upon, which is not particularly common in the subreddit. Figure 4 shows that all four comments agree on the inadequacy of the post, with one suggesting that the user who submitted the post is “lost” by providing a link to a subreddit where screenshots of out-of-place posts are shared (first comment). According to the second comment, this content does not fit r/ironicmemes, which the user would have known if they would have browsed the subreddit first. The user is thus in the “wrong subreddit” (third comment). According to moderator 42069lmaoxd, such unfitting posts are deleted from the subreddit, which probably occurred here as this post was no longer retrievable by the end of the observation period.
The meme in Figure 3 is considered unfit for r/ironicmemes as a result of its normative reliance on an established generic form, which does not produce a genre hybrid. The fourth commenter on the submission remarks that memes in r/ironicmemes “are supposed to not make sense” (Figure 4), which again underlines how generic hybridization in ironic memes renders them “less direct” (Excerpt 1). This is a result of how generic norms are systematically undermined, making the final product fundamentally different. Interviewee toryguns stresses that ironic memes are characterized by being inscrutable and something that his uninitiated friends would not understand. Similar observations are echoed by other interviewees, who tell of nonsensical appearances (“nonsense”) that can be enjoyed ironically because ironic memers are “against meaning itself.” To Horizon_n3bula, ironic memes are a “parody” of “traditional memes,” as the latter have “actual comedic properties” and are “straightforward.” This effect of generic manipulation and the interpretive inaccessibility of final textual products is a particularly salient characteristic of ironic memes.
Being “meme savvy”
Being “worse, on purpose” and “less direct” are two traits that appear to be paramount and are realized through particular semiotic choices. “Less direct”-ness is essentially a consequence of “worse, on purpose” renditions. The latter’s examination is particularly revealing when the creation of these memes is viewed as the result of an array of mediated actions taken by their creators. These actions can be seen as contributing to the authors’ identity construction (Scollon, 1998), and they are realized in the frozen action that a meme posted on the subreddit constitutes.
The memes examined are multimodal textual creations that are shared in a relatively small subreddit. Design requires the use of a third-party software program, suggesting that these authors are well-versed in memeing as they know how to make memes and share them in appropriate environments. This environment (r/ironicmemes) in particular is described with the title tagline “When the meme man memes a lil’ harder,” implying that the creators are memeing more intensely in some way, or perhaps more expertly. Thus, the unkempt appearance through poor cropping, low image quality or stylistic redundancies seems paradoxical. However, this unkemptness is constructed intentionally for effect.
Hybridization also points to the creators’ familiarity with various meme genres. Creators use their knowledge of other meme genres, suggesting that they are well-versed enough in online culture to know, for example, what Impact-font image macro memes are. Producers of ironic memes were, thus, probably consumers and/or creators of older memes.
Various identity elements (Norris and Makboon, 2015) are produced through these specialized literacy practices: the literate Internet user, skilled (image) content creator, and avid memer. The unkemptness found in the memes further accentuates the skilled content creator identity element, providing insights into stylistic intentions: purposeful imperfection. This deliberate imperfection then produces an “unskilled” persona as the principal (Goffman, 1981) of these texts. “Worse, on purpose” is paramount, and identity elements produced through these texts are contingent on the appropriate indexing of an “unskilled” principal persona through semiotic choices.
The representation of “unskilled” principals is interrelated with the notion of “cringe,” and most participants cited cringe as an important concept in ironic memeing. According to Massanari (2015), an orientation of content toward cringe is typical of the cynicism that characterizes more “fringe” subreddits. The notion of cringe refers to the feeling of embarrassment that a viewer experiences for represented participants (Massanari, 2015). Massanari mentions various categories of cringe content, one of which concerns teenagers being shown behaving immaturely, where embarrassment for the viewer stems from seeing the teenagers’ naiveté.
Cringe is distinctly relevant to ironic memes. Their purposely poor design indexes a particular kind of principal; namely, an immature user whose memeing practices are the source of cringe—something that ironic memers purposely aim to evoke (see Excerpt 2). Toryguns explains that ironic memes are about “taking the piss out of cringe kids.”
[. . .]
In Excerpt 2, r/ironicmemes moderator 42069lmaoxd describes ironic memes as a mockery of what is perceived as qualitatively inferior memes found on sites like 9gag or Facebook, echoing sentiments expressed by other interviewees. This judgment of inferiority is based on being “meme savvy,” and it is articulated through the notion of cringe. The moderator describes three categories: (a) non-cringey memes, which are universally liked; (b) “normie memes” found in spaces like Facebook or 9gag, which “meme savvy” users hate as they evoke a degree of cringe for them; and (c) “high cringe” memes, which are appreciated ironically. Ironic memes come about by “adding another layer of cringe” (Excerpt 2) to normie memes. In fact, cringe is also described by other users as a “goal” of ironic memes (godisdeadlmao) and something purposefully manufactured (Ssh4m4n).
The dislike for normie memes appears to stem from ironic memers’ refined tastes. As user toryguns explains, ironic memes are based on now-dated material and make fun of “the shit that we used to find funny that is now cringe.” Ssh4m4n also notes that ironic memes “sarcastically use overused/old jokes.” “Meme savviness” relies on being more up-to-date about what cutting-edge, non-cringey memeing is. This temporal dimension, then, is to be understood in terms of experience with memes: Keeping up with the newest thing is seen as qualitatively superior, cutting-edge memeing, and a user who achieves this status enjoys cringe ironically (see also the mention of r/cringetopia in Excerpt 3).
Excerpt 3 illustrates that the quality of memes is defined on the basis of originality (“all memes come from there”) but can ultimately be disputed on the grounds of the perceived identity of those making the memes (4chan “neckbeards”). Similar observations are made by other interviewees, who view ironic memes as being based on somehow cringe content created by “cringe kids” (Horizon_n3bula) or 50-year-old Facebook users (Ssh4m4n). The actions taken by users in creating ironic memes (and hence the artifacts in which the actions are embedded) constitute a kind of identity work that is shaped in relation to the users’ social habitus, a position formulated by Norris (2005: 195) as follows: Individuals choose many of their actions on a moment-by-moment basis, yet, we can argue that their choice often is limited by their internalized perceptions, social and cultural norms, and social histories, which are all intertwined in an individual’s identity construction.
More specifically, through their familiarity with negatively perceived identity types (e.g. cringe kids, neckbeards), attained through their socialization in/knowledge of various environments, ironic memers design texts in ways that differentiate them from content associated with disliked identities. The construction of the ironic memer identity is partly through opposition to other, negatively perceived identities. This is achieved through their design practices: where normie memes would follow formulas and be straightforward, ironic memes undermine established generic forms by appropriating them. In this way, ironic memers instill high cringe in their creations. As frozen actions, ironic memes are artifacts where we see crystalized digital text design actions that deliberately put a twist on normie content, thus becoming differentiated from it and indexing a different identity. Notably, this ironic memer identity is something positive—“meme savvy” users (42069lmaoxd), “ironic meme artists” (toryguns), people who have “talent in making memes” (godisdeadlmao)—whereas normie identities are linked to qualitatively worse content and mocked. Consequently, it seems that literacies are the key differentiating factor between ironic and normie memers.
Memeing literacies and (online) group identities
The multimodal analysis of design practices and the interview data reveal that digital literacy practices are paramount for identity construction surrounding ironic memes. Ironic memes are hybrid texts hosting various discursive personas wherein two distinct Discourses emerge. There is the normie principal, whose work is cringey, juxtaposed with the “ironic meme artist” (toryguns) distinguished through their superior knowledge of Internet culture and digital literacy practices. Discourses of normie meming and Discourses of meme savviness are thus simultaneously present in a single semiotic space.
Ironic memers index normie memeing through their “mastery of a secondary Discourse” (i.e. literacy; Gee, 2008: 176). In acquiring the ironic memeing Discourse, one has been socialized through and, in a certain sense, “surpassed” normie Discourses, which allows one to mock “the shit [they] used to find funny” and to “relive” those memes “but ironically” (toryguns). The generic hybridity, then, is also Discourse hybridity, as ironic memers mix distinct Discourses in their creations. Since Discourses and their concomitant literacies are rooted in individuals’ social histories, rich and varied traces of ironic memers’ socialization are simultaneously present. Given the mobility and complexity that characterizes individuals’ social practices in the current stage of globalization (Blommaert, 2010, 2018), such genre/Discourse hybridity is unsurprising (Mills, 2010), especially when dealing with multiple digital (and therefore translocal) sites of socialization.
Most importantly, Discourses defining normies and ironic memers are based on (imagined) individuals’ digital cultural practices and they also materialize as digital cultural practices (multimodal texts). What differentiates a normie from an ironic memer are “new” literacies (Lankshear and Knobel, 2006), acquired through socialization in affinity spaces (Gee, 2004), which may be entirely dependent on digital technologies. The differences pertain to literacy practices, and that is how a normie can be identified as diversely as a 50-year-old Facebook user (Ssh4m4n) or a “Fortnite kid” (Horizon_n3bula). While stereotypes appear to play a central role, the normie identity type is primarily defined in terms of what people like and know how to do online. Sometimes, this stereotype relates to how people’s digital lifestyle correlates with their online-offline identity more generally (e.g. being 50). Still, such stereotyping overall exemplifies the new literacy mindset (Lankshear and Knobel, 2006) underlying memeing as a new literacy: Social relations can also be constructed on the digital plane in very “real” ways.
Furthermore, ironic memes are explicitly “less direct” and are purposely designed in ways that make them inscrutable to casual onlookers not vested in the relevant literacies. They thereby constitute “digital memetic nonsense” (Katz and Shifman, 2017), constructing a community boundary between in- and out-group as commonly attested in meme subcultures (Miltner, 2014; Nissenbaum and Shifman, 2017). Importantly, the phatic bonds thus created also echo elements of the new literacy mindset, such as the prioritization of “relationship over information broadcast” (Knobel and Lankshear, 2007b: 21).
All in all, considering their counter-mainstream orientation, the ironic memes explored in this study exemplify characteristics of “dank memes” as described by Granata (2019) and Pauliks (2021). Their generic hybridization through the “worse, on purpose” strategy in fact echoes Pauliks’ (2021) description of dank memes as relying on “deliberately deformed” templates and deep-frying. Ironic memers as creators are also similar to the “meme connoisseurs” of r/MemeEconomy (Literat and van den Berg, 2019) in their rejection of the mainstreamized and in their exultation of authenticity as “value” in memeing, as also seen on 4chan (Nissenbaum and Shifman, 2017).
Still, regardless of the memers’ labeling or the memes’ generic categorization based on recurrent stylistic features, ironic memes as studied here reveal that digital text creators can construct group identities revolving around digital literacies, which are shaped by the users’ histories of socialization online, and this all is reflected in the texts themselves as material artifacts. As our findings show, the construction of social boundaries today can be analytically examined starting with the scrutinization of online digital texts, in which one can find, embedded therein and thus readable, traces of social actors’ learning histories in today’s online-offline world.
Conclusion
In trying to elucidate how digital multimodal text design practices and identity construction intersect in so-called “ironic memes,” we have had to limit the scope of our present examination, leaving a number of key questions unanswered. For example, the denomination “ironic” has been treated here as a descriptive term used by memers for their content and has not been examined in terms of how it relates to the notion of (online) irony as studied in humor-related literature (cf. Gal et al., 2022). Furthermore, our approach has programmatically been localized, meaning that the generalizability of our findings across memes plausibly labeled “ironic” in other sites besides r/ironicmemes remains an empirical question. Future research could address these standing issues, while also expanding on our findings concerning the cultural dynamics defining in- and out-groups around (ironic) memeing literacies.
In the end, this examination of ironic memes as digital cultural artifacts reveals the construction of identities based primarily on differences in digital literacy histories (ironic memers vs normies), and how emergent (online) group identities can be encapsulated in the design of the texts that users within the in-group create. Ironic memes do not only actively contribute to social typification based on playful online practices but are themselves digital textual artifacts that suggest complex histories of socialization through digital media.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
