Communicating with Memes

Reviews / Votes

This stunning book is destined to become a classic. Comparable to Harold Innis' intellectual precision and Marshall McLuhan's global imagination for the electronic era, Grant Kien is the master thinker of today's digital era. Brilliant with theory and deep across the history of ideas, the readability index of this book is a solid ten. Communicating with Memes will be taught and debated with the same long-lasting influence as Wiener's Human Uses of Human Beings and Baudrillard's Simulacres et Simulation. -- Clifford G. Christians, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign In Communicating With Memes: Consequences in Post-Truth Civilization, Grant Kien provides a wide-ranging tour de force for understanding memetic communications, its virality through social media, and its implications for identity, sociality, politics, and contemporary life. This is a must read for students and faculty in Communications, Media Studies, Cultural Studies, Science and Technology Studies, Sociology, and many other fields. -- Angharad Valdivia, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Memes are, in many ways, a new language permeating our lives. Whole conversations appear as animated GIFs, talk show hosts talk about the latest meme craze, and meme templates serve as anything from work and relationship commentary to political criticism ("hold my beer"). Kien is able to trace not only how contemporary digital memes began, but also what they might mean and how this language can serve as a way to open cultural dialogue and shut it down through fake news, manufactured social crisis and moral panics, and barely veiled reinscriptions of dominance, power, and privilege. This theoretical text is also grounded in history and case studies, making it a fascinating critical engagement with this new, rich language. -- Ted Gournelos, Rollins College