Internet memes, digital cultural heritage of humanity?
Yes, but not according to UNESCO’s definition. It’s time to rethink it.
The Spanish edition of this article can be read here.
I. Introduction
There are currently 4.388 billion Internet users in the world — equivalent to 57% of the world’s population — who spend an average of 6 hours and 42 minutes of their time every day browsing the World Wide Web — about two sevenths of their day (Kemp, 2019). These figures reveal that the use of the Internet has already become part of the daily life of many people around the world. People use the Internet to work, study, find information, entertain, communicate, make financial transactions, etc. All these activities carried out in a specific space — cyberspace — produce memories, shape ideologies and influence the way in which individual and collective subjects renegotiate their identity over time.
That is why, taking into account the great impact of online interactions on people’s lives during the 21st century, UNESCO (2004) drafted in 2003 the Charter on the preservation of Digital Heritage, which aims to “the perservation of digital heritage” so that “it remains accessible to the public” for the benefit of “current and future generations” (pp. 74–75). This heritage, consisting of “digital materials” such as “texts, databases, still and moving images, audio, graphics, software and web pages” (UNESCO, 2004, p. 75), is according to UNESCO (2004) under “threat of loss” (p. 74), mainly due to the advancement of both information and communication technologies, and to the adaptation and reconfiguration of their uses over time, which is why it should be preserved.
One of the many digital objects that fall under the description of UNESCO’s Charter is the Internet meme. Memes both circulate and are used in multiple ways by Internet users today: for humorous or social satire purposes, for communication, as a form of social protest, as marketing instruments, as works of art, etc. Both the multiplicity of uses, and the wide dissemination of this cultural artifact, have made it an integral and even core part of contemporary digital culture, to the extent that it has managed to build virtual communities exclusively off its generation and use (Shifman, 2014).
Next, we reflect upon the following question: can Internet memes be considered digital cultural heritage? If so, under what terms? In order to find a possible answer, let’s begin by first contrasting the notion of cultural heritage as social action/cultural process of Denis Byrne and Laurajane Smith with that of digital heritage of UNESCO and the National Library of Australia. Subsequently, based on the previous notions, and in light of the concept of “presentist historicity regime” by François Hartog (2007), we will give a short account of two recent patrimonialization attempts of Internet memes by Internet user communities, so we can decide whether it is necessary or not to reformulate the official definition of digital heritage.
II. The ideas of cultural heritage and digital heritage
Traditionally, cultural heritage has tended to be associated with archaeological sites or material cultural artifacts, which are attributed a certain “significance or meaning [that] is intrinsic to or inherent” in space or an object, something that Byrne (2008) calls “the principle of inherency” (p. 160). This principle has been frequently used by the materialistic strand of cultural heritage inspired by the empiricism and post-structural thinking of archaeologists, architects and historians commissioned by government authorities to carry out “significance or values assessment” regarding potential heritage objects or sites (Byrne, 2008).
In this materialistic view of heritage, heritage sites or objects are ‘reified’, that is, objectified by the principle of inherency, so they can be subsequently inventoried and made “available for conservation” (Byrne, 2008, p. 159). According to Byrne (2008) reification practices can be explained by “the tendency of capitalist societies to commodify things” (p. 159). Capitalism promotes the infinite accumulation of capital, which adds a monetary exchange value to the use value of products; this process, over time, naturalized the accumulation of goods as a morally acceptable practice and as more important than people’s practices, ideas and well-being. Eventually, this notion of accumulation of goods integrated to states’ nation-building projects in the form of “cultural capital,” which “included those old places and objects which now were regarded as a form of property belonging to the nation” (Byrne , 2008, p. 159). The creation of this national heritage through a regime of futuristic historicity, allowed nation-states in the nineteenth century to unite their population under their nation project, endowing them with an imagined sense of community and a shared accumulated history, all which was justified with the idea that the future that was envisioned with the materialization of said project would be beneficial for all (Hartog, 2007).
The materialistic view of heritage has received strong criticism from heritage researchers such as Denis Byrne and Laurajane Smith, who among other things observe: 1) heritage is not reduced to a site with meaning inherent to its material dimension, but rather, should be considered as “what goes on at these sites”, as “a cultural process that engages with acts of remembering that work to create ways to understand and engage with the present” (Smith, 2006, p. 44); in other words: meaning does not depend on an immanent quality of the object or site, since such meaning is socially constructed; so, in the end, it is essentially intangible (Smith, 2006). 2) Heritage is “dissonant”, in the sense that its meaning is not univocal, imposed only by official heritage managing authorities, but is inherently conflicting and renegotiated by the different social groups that associate with it; that is, heritage is not built only as an official top-down discourse, but also as part of collective memory or grassroots interactions, by individuals who resignify their experiences with such heritage in the present (Smith, 2006; Hartog, 2007; Byrne, 2008 ). 3) Finally, heritage is neither static, nor is it anchored to a single site or object, since, on the one hand, its significance depends on the interactions and experience of subjects situated in the present with the object/heritage site and its historical narrative, and on the other, it serves as a cultural landscape made by interactions and experiences lived within a set of locations associated to each other (Byrne, 2008).
These criticisms have given rise to new models of cultural heritage, which leave behind material immanence, to focus heritage value on the study of meanings associated with practices exercised on the material or symbolic dimension of objects and places. One of these models is Byrne’s (2008) cultural heritage as social action, and the other Smith’s (2006) heritage as a cultural process.
The first model proposes to understand cultural heritage as “socially constructed” in the sense that “they derive their meaning, and often even their physical form, from the actions and imaginations of people in society” (Byrne, 2008, p. 155).
The vision of heritage focused on social praxis understands, 1) the physical dimension of heritage as an interconnection of locations based on subjective experiences; 2) considers that heritage is constantly renegotiated in the present through individuals social practice — or agency — ; 3) treats heritage as a sign with the ability of representing local culture (which is also changing); 4) accept that heritage is defined from an emic perspective, not just etic; 5) recognizes heritage “as a resource in the on-going project of creating our identity” (Byrne, 2008, p. 169), which in turn serves as a tool to consolidate and make visible social identity when it is threatened by an external agent.
The second model, similar to the previous one, conceives heritage as a cultural process: “heritage is something that is done in places”, is “a range of activities that include remembering, commemoriation, communicating and passing on knowledge and memories, asserting and expressing identity and social and cultural values and meanings“ (Smith, 2006, p. 83).
Heritage as a cultural process includes, according to Smith (2006), 1) the idea that ‘heritage has to be experienced to be heritage, and moreover, is experience itself’ (p. 47); 2) that it is a form of exercising “cultural capital that may be invested in to help identify a person’s membership to a particular social group or class” (p. 49) and as “a legitimizing discourse in constructing and maintaining a range of ‘identities’”(p. 50); 3) “heritage is a mentality, a way of knowing and seeing”, which gives it an “intangible” essence but always related to some material or symbolic reference (p. 54); 4) the view of heritage as “a cultural tool” that helps in the building and consolidating of collective memory through the recreation of meanings “through reminiscing and remembering” (p. 65); 5) that heritage “is a performance of remembering […] explicitly social and framed by the exchange of meaning and memory”, aimed at a diffuse audience that ‘spectacularizes’ it for the gloating of individualistic narcissism (p. 67); 6) is always carried out in a heritage place, a place produced by the accumulated experiences that individuals have of it, and serves as a “physical anchor” that “also allows us to negotiate a sense of social ‘place’ or class/community, [… and] a sense of belonging” (p. 75); and 7) heritage is intrinsically dissonant, as it “is created by interpretation”, and these interpretations “do not always find consensus” between subjects (p. 80) in this sense, we can understand heritage as process of struggle for hegemony over meaning of what classes/social groups represent in relation to their past.
As mentioned in the introduction, the notion of digital heritage comes from the definition provided by UNESCO’s Charter and from the one also developed by the National Library of Australia, an institution hired by UNESCO to draft the necessary guidelines and techniques for the preservation of digital heritage, which must be followed by member states.
For UNESCO (2004) digital heritage is defined as
“cultural, educational, scientific, and administrative resources, as well as technical, legal, medical and other kinds of information created digitally, or converted into digital form from existing analogue resources” (p. 80)
These resources can be digital objects of all kinds, provided they are of “lasting value and significance” (p. 80, italics are mine). UNESCO recognizes that digital objects can be ephemeral due to growing technological obsolescence, and it is precisely this characteristic that makes them vulnerable to fall into oblivion, so they must be preserved at all costs.
On the other hand, the National Library of Australia (2003) reiterates what UNESCO says in its Guidelines when it states:
“Not all digital materials need to kept, only those that are judged to have ongoing value: these form the digital heritage” (p. 23).
It also considers the existence of eleven types of digital heritage: electronic publications, semi-published materials, activity records, scientific data, educational materials, software tools, unique unpublished materials, electronic manuscripts, entertainment products, digitally generated artworks and documentary photographs, as well as digital copies of three-dimensional material objects (p. 30). Now, although Internet memes do not seem to fully fit within any of the types outlined in this paragraph, it is important to clarify on the one hand that, the National Library of Australia (2003) recognizes that “Over time, new types of digital heritage can be expected to emerge” (p. 39) —during the first years of the new millenia, Internet memes were not as disseminated as they are now in the second decade of the 21st century — and, on the other hand, UNESCO (2004) accepts that digital objects are part of a “wide and growing range of formats” (p. 75). So it is clear that the definition of digital heritage used by both institutions remains broad enough to accept new digital objects.
Additionally, the National Library of Australia (2003) proposes in its Guidelines, six basic criteria to determine whether or not a digital object should be considered as digital heritage (p. 75): 1) its usefulness for the audience for whom it is made heritage, 2) the worth or value of the object — which can be derived from evidence, information, aesthetic factors, innovation, historical association, intrumentality or its cultural significance — 3) the material form-value relationship, 4) the function-value relationship, 5) the context-value relationship and 6) the taxonomic clarity of the features of the digital object. Audience, type of value and clarity are the three axes on which the differentiation between a digital object and digital heritage rests.
Now, this definition of digital heritage, at the outset, proposes three basic ideas:
- Digital heritage is any object which has been digitally produced at its origin or, preferably, that exists in the material dimension but has been digitized for preservation.
- Digital heritage must have a certain value that remains in time, that is, it must have static value.
- Digital heritage is built as cultural capital valued from an eminently etic perspective, after which the assimilation of its value among certain audiences is promoted.
Next, we will discuss why this definition of digital heritage is problematic in the light of criticism coming from the vision of heritage as a social action/cultural process, exemplifying it with recent attempts to resignify Internet memes as digital heritage by some Internet users.
III. The heritage-making process of the Internet meme as a collective digital memory
Let’s start defining what a meme is. Richard Dawkins (1993), who coined the term meme in the 1970s, defined it as a cultural transmission unit (p. 259). According to Dawkins (1993) a meme is reduced to the essence of an idea, which continues to replicate from one person to another; what is not part of the essence of the idea, that is, the differences between the idea/meme of the first subject with respect to the second, will not be part of the meme (p. 269). Limor Shifman (2014) updates the meaning of meme contextualizing it to contemporary digital culture, she defines it as
“(a) a group of digital items sharing common characteristics of content, form, and/or stance; (b) that were created with awareness of each other; and (c) were circulated, imitated, and/or transformed via the Internet by many users” (pp. 7–8).
So we can say that an Internet meme can be any digital object that is imitated and circulated according to certain popular trends, which is sometimes even modified by Internet users, such as an image, a video, a sound, a text, etc., or the combination of these.
Internet memes have a multiplicity of uses, among which are the reaffirmation of certain stereotypes and social imaginaries closely linked to subject’s identity construction process over time, and sometimes they can refer directly to historical events or events that remain in a social group collective memory, as it happens with memes used for social and political protest purposes (Shifman, 2014). This particular use of Internet memes as symbols that preserve memory is particularly evident in viral memes such as Bert is Evil, Gangnam Style, Pepper-Spraying Cop or We Are the 99 Percent (Shifman, 2014), which reference respectively: the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack, Korean interpreter PSY single’s worldwide success in 2012, the student repression of November 18, 2011 at the University of California Davis, and the Ocupy Wall Street protest of 2011.
On the other hand, presentism, the regime of historicity — or way of articulating the past, present and future in historical narration — that Hartog (2007) considers dominant today, is the daily production of the past and future of those who, day after day, have certain needs and value immediateness (p. 141), and it is the framework within which Internet memes are produced and circulated today. Memes are precisely a reflection of that need to live in a continuous present, which is why few memes tend to keep their popularity for long periods of time, they are biased products of presentism, of the media economy of the present (Hartog, 2007, p. 141).
According to Hartog (2007), the presentist historicity regime also generates a concern for conservation, for the search of one’s roots and identity derived from the denial of time (p. 143).
Thus, as time passes too quickly and the present is the only thing that matters, social identities and structures begin to see their foundations and mutual borders as diffuse, which naturally produces cultural clashes; hence the importance of resorting to collective memory as a source of communion and demarcation of cultural boundaries.
This phenomenon has manifested itself in the culture of Internet memes. Internet sites, such as knowyourmeme.com, are evidence of netizens’ concern about trying to preserve a history of Internet memes made from the collective memory of different groups of Internet users. Others, such as the Classical Art Memes or the Instituto Nacional de Bellos Memes — INBM Facebook pages, are efforts to transfer material cultural heritage to the field of digital culture, in order to achieve a preservation of its formal dimension, but resignifying its dimension of content (with a small humorous touch).
Another effort in this regard is the opening of museums dedicated to the preservation of memes, which constitutes what Pietrobruno (2013) calls a form of “social archiving”(as opposed to official heritage-making practices by institutions such as UNESCO). The Meme Museum in Mexico City, inaugurated on December 7, 2018 is a clear example of this concern to preserve memes and make them accessible not only within the virtual world, but also in the physical world (El Universal, 2018; Rees, 2018).
Finally, the effort of academics who begin to consider the possibility of treating Internet memes as cultural digital heritage through a critical analysis of “contemporary museological practices”, in relation to UNESCO’s conservation mandate, cannot be ignored. (Rees, 2018). These academics also provide the necessary epistemological framework to consider digital platforms such as YouTube as unofficial digital archives of collective memory, which “safeguard expressions by communities that are not officially recognized” as intangible cultural heritage (Pietrobruno, 2013, p. 1272 ).
These efforts made by communities of Internet users, aimed at the social heritage-making of Internet memes — whether carried out intentionally or not — is a clear response to the insufficiency of the concept of “digital heritage” offered by both UNESCO and the National Library of Australia; in what sense? Let us return to the three basic ideas of digital heritage that we extracted earlier.
First, UNESCO’s official notion of digital heritage perpetuates the materialistic vision of heritage we talked about earlier, as it reduces heritage to objects that possess some intrinsic value, objects that can be inventoried. This vision is very reductionist, as it completely ignores the pragmatic dimension of Internet memes. Memes are much more than just digital objects with formal characteristics and content: they are circulated, imitated and transformed by users. This process of circulation in social media, imitation through digital copying, and transformation through the use of graphic design software and user creativity, involves experiencing the process of (re)production of the meme, the action of imbuing it with social practices, of performatively recalling events or ideas. All these processes go far beyond a meme’s objective/material dimension, and are manifested in the reception of memes by user audiences on the Internet (which can be critical or positive, and manifest through reproduction or as comments), and in the preservation practices already mentioned before; that is, they transcend towards the subjective/experiential dimension.
Internet memes are more than mere objects, they are what one does with them. In fact, if no social action is exercised on the meme (circulation, imitation, transformation), by definition, it ceases to be a meme.
Second, both UNESCO and the National Library of Australia consider that the presence of static value of in a digital object is essential for it to be considered as digital heritage. This practice of essentialization, coming from the reification already mentioned above, does not correspond to what Internet users consider as digital heritage. Internet memes are polysemic cultural artifacts, they will say different things to different audiences by virtue of whether or not they share the cultural codes with which they were created. Additionally, we have discussed how cultural heritage cannot be static in any way since its current meaning always depends on people’s collective memory of and on the present context from which they are recovering it. And this is precisely what happens with Internet memes: they are by definition transformable and unstable, due to their transitory and volatile nature.
Finally, UNESCO’s notion of making etic digital heritage and then trying to force its assimilation into society, is surely destined to fail, at least in the case of Internet memes. This is because cultural heritage, as we said before, is a tool that can be used to legitimize identity discourses, and is a cause of dissonance. This implies that digital heritage cannot include only the official and institutional discourse of what is considered a valuable Internet meme, but it must also take into consideration that memes are continually resignified as representative signs of multiple communities’ (virtual or not) identities, communities that will dispute their ownership. In addition, given that cultural heritage is produced through practice, it is naive to pretend that such heritage can be established in a univocal way, leaving out the experiences and uses that users themselves give it, users who are the ones who will, in the end, assert heritage its value according to their personal narrative.
IV. Concluding remarks
Through our analysis of the notions of cultural and digital heritage, and the brief review of some attempts by communities of Internet users to make Internet memes a form of digital heritage, we have been able to perceive that the concept of “digital heritage” offered by UNESCO is insufficient when it comes to its application to Internet memes, at least for the following reasons:
- It reifies Internet memes, completely ignoring their pragmatic dimension.
- It ignores that Internet memes, like many other types of digital content and practices, are inherently prone to change.
- It does not correspond to heritage-making tendencies people are following because it is not interested in applying an emic perspective.
Therefore, can Internet memes be considered as digital heritage? The answer is yes, but not according to the official definition of the term, only from the perspective of cultural heritage as praxis. That is why, before continuing selecting and defining what digital heritage is and what is not, the term should be reviewed.
V. Works cited
Australia National Library. (2003). Guidelines for the preservation of digital heritage. United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. Recovered June 8th, 2019, from https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000130071
Byrne, D. (2008). Heritage as social action. In G. Fairclough, R. Harrison, J. Schofield, & J. H. Jameson (Eds.), The Heritage Reader (pp. 149–173). New York: Routledge.
Dawkins, R. (1993). El gen egoísta. Las bases biológicas de nuestra conducta. Barcelona: Salvat Editores, S.A.
El Universal. (December 6th, 2018). Abren museo del meme en la CDMX. El Universal. Recovered June 8th, 2019, from https://www.eluniversal.com.mx/cultura/abren-museo-del-meme-en-la-cdmx
Hartog, F. (2007). Regímenes de historicidad. Presentismo y experiencias del tiempo. (N. Durán, & P. Avilés, Trans.) México, D.F.: Universidad Iberoamericana, A.C.
Kemp, S. (2019). Global Digital Report 2019. Kepios Pte. Ltd. Singapur: We Are Social, Hootsuite. Recovered from https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2019-global-digital-overview
Pietrobruno, S. (2013). YouTube and the social archiving of intangible heritage. New Media & Society, 15(8), 1259–1276.
Rees, A. J. (2018). What does that meme? Collecting and curating memes in museums. Recovered January 15th, 2020, from https://medium.com/mcnx-london/what-does-it-meme-when-social-media-becomes-part-of-the-museum-collection-1f10d18fb095
Shifman, L. (2014). Memes in digital culture. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Smith, L. (2006). Uses of heritage. New York: Routledge.
UNESCO. (2004). Charter on the Preservation of Digital Heritage. Records of the General Conference, 32nd Session. Volume 1: Resolutions. pp. 74–77. Paris: United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. Recovered June 9th, 2019, from https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000133171.page=80
