Democratic societies theoretically give people the ability to express themselves freely and engage in social discourse. Before social media, however, only the elite with some measure of social capital were heard through mainstream media.

 

As smartphone technology and social media platforms were developed, everyday people were better able to participate in social discourse, dispersing their "regime of truth from the bottom up." Internet memes became units of democratic expression and works of art in their own right, provoking emotional response and affecting discourse far beyond the digital sphere. They became important "texts" of cultural understanding, worthy of serious consideration, and today have evolved into vehicles of disinformation, as truth is constructed and debated by various "online experts." They present indecipherable nuggets of fact and fiction, and shape the body politic in many ways.

 

This site pays tribute to them as cultural unit of discourse, provides a record of the Know What I Meme? research and art exhibit held at Old Dominion University in 2019, and provides additional research related to memes by the author.