what will history make of this strange green creature that we spent twenty-five years reproducing, distorting, mocking, and venerating?

shrek has had an eternal afterlife in digital culture. the joke is that it’s shrek. ironic megafandom works on meta and absurdist levels turns but nevertheless turns into sincere consumption through the power of belonging aka. friendship in the form of meme making and sharing. you make things real by sharing it with others, this is why posting matters. folklore etc.

Curated links from Idil: essays, music, videos, images.

People on the internet have been eulogising meme culture for at least a decade. Yet memes persist. They remain useful to social groups, marketers, political actors and financial speculators, as a form of creative expression and a mechanism for producing and circulating content. Their tone, style and grammar change, but their underlying affordances remain consistent. Template-based remixability, combined with rapid and inexpensive circulation, makes memes adaptable to personal, political and commercial purposes.

So why does the idea that memes are “dead” continue to resurface among users, writers and critics?