An analysis of the “Meme Obituary”, 2016–2026.
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?
