Participation has often been described as the pragmatic core of the web 2.0 (cf. Münker 2009). According to this hypotheses social media reveal a historically new merging of aesthetic forms and social functions. Contemporary processes of participation hence cannot be separated from media metamorphosis and the analysis of the latter provides insights into the conditions and conventions of related social dynamics.
My talk will approach this dynamic interplay of technology, sociality and aesthetics by focusing on web memes. These memes can be described as transmedia objects: or relatively stable combinations of video footage, images, and text, »which emerge through grass-roots manner through networked media and acquire a viral character« (Goriunova 2013). That means they undergo processes of spatial dissemination and aesthetic transformation. But much more important than this loose formalistic definition of web memes is their pragmatic dimension. Memes become memes only if they are detected as such by aggregating, curating and archiving practices on platforms like knowyourmeme.com.
Due to this self-referentiality of web based communication, web memes not only short-circuit the production, distribution, and consumption of cultural artefacts in the social web and thereby structure the immense variety and almost sublime quantity of the digital archives, but also display how social entities develop. The morphogenesis of this media forms is inherently linked to the emergence of social structures built bottom-up. Collaborative producing, sharing and distributing, remixing and archiving media content in the environment of ubiquitous digital networks accumulate new socio-aesthetic assemblies. These social entities seem to be associated mainly by common practices and related affects rather than common ideas, goals, or representations (cf. Katz 1997). In a performative sense, it is more about doing symbols than being represented by them.
Since these collective imaginations produce imaginary collectives, they always carry political implications: The question is not, if collectives formed by and through the production, distribution and consumption of web memes can become political ones, but when? This question obviously aims at the moment of turnover, when participation in the broad since of media usage claims the promise of participation in the more radical sense of disrupting the distribution of the sensible and hence the conditions of »partak[ing] in ruling and being ruled« (Rancière 2001).
In this perspective Olga Goriunova (2013) has described the correlation between the bulletin board 4chan.org and the political (h)activism of Anonymous as becoming of political participation via web memes. While she is drawing upon Gilbert Simondon´s concept of (trans-)individuation, I want to confront and complement her thoughts with Gabriel Tarde‘s theory of imitation (1893) and social monads (1890). Tarde´s speculative sociology not only suits Simondon´s (1964) analogy of material, organic, psychic and social individuation. It moreover opens up a dimension of social contagion to describe the virtual political escalation of web memes. And it helps to revise the biological determinism of Richard Dawkins‘ (1978) memetics (cf. Schmid 2009), that builds the genealogic ground for the current revival of the meme-discourse in the web 2.0.