From murky beginnings in obscure forums to widespread circulation on social media, internet memes in the form of images, videos, or text have quickly become one of the greatest sources of entertainment across the web. Yet, what may at the surface look like an innocent joke and a novel method of spreading ideas and culture, becomes—after a closer look at the origins and networked paths of the cultural objects in question— a much darker picture. For example, a look at the different aspects of digital labor involved (such as the creation of original content, the remix and re-use of that content original, and its dissemination), such as in text-heavy type memes with its roots on Black Twitter Black Twitter , a community of African-American users on the platform, reveal an unpaid army of black content creators, which drives the company’s revenue [link to article with more data as this is not the main focus]. This type of memetic content results in white social media users appropriating and in certain cases mocking African American Vernacular English (AAVE) in subsequent iterations. Memes that rely also on marginalized groups being ‘othered’ and mocked, such as in the Harambe meme and the viral video turned meme “Ain’t nobody got time for that” continue to push racist narratives on the web. And even when certain internet memes have no implicit oppressive content and are truly as innocent as a meme can be, they can still be co-opted by hate groups and used as hate symbols as in the case of Pepe the Frog Through these examples I will show that, true to their mimetic nature, memes mimic real-world oppressive systems and create new, more subtle forms of racism, sexism, and ableism as networked oppression (whether through unpaid labor, appropriation, and downright mockery).

This website contains different pages investigating different links and takes advantage of the digital media’s ability to link to different resources whether visual, or textual. Make sure to explore the the text by scrolling over certain words that may reveal hidden content.



Musings on Memes was created as part of a multimodal writing exercise on memes at the University of Connecticut by Fabio Ufheil. The project was supervised by Professor Clarissa Ceglio of the Digital Media and Design department as an independent study.