Limor Shifman

Limor Shifman initially worked in theater and media as a writer, producer and presenter. Her work researched the history of Israeli humor and popular culture for the Department of Children and Youth, Israel Public Television.{{Cite web |title=OII {{!}} Five Research Fellows Join the Oxford Internet Institute |url=https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/news/five-research-fellows-join-the-oxford-internet-institute |access-date=2023-01-11 |website=www.oii.ox.ac.uk |language=en-GB}} Shifman completed her doctoral work at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem's Department of Communication and Journalism{{Cite journal |last1=Shifman |first1=Limor |last2=Katz |first2=Elihu |date=October 2005 |title='Just Call Me Adonai': A Case Study of Ethnic Humor and Immigrant Assimilation |url=http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/000312240507000506 |journal=American Sociological Review |language=en |volume=70 |issue=5 |pages=843–859 |doi=10.1177/000312240507000506 |s2cid=143447712 |issn=0003-1224|url-access=subscription }} where she maintains a professorship. After completing her dissertation, in 2005 she became a research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute. Since the late 2000s, her work shifted from the history of Israeli humor and television research to what she eventually would call Internet memetics.

After the decline in interest of memetics in anthropology, Shifman provided a text for why memetics should be redeveloped within a media and communication-oriented framework.{{Citation |last=Shifman |first=Limor |title=Memes in digital culture |date=2014 |url=http://worldcat.org/oclc/929971523 |publisher=MIT Press |isbn=978-1-4690-6325-6 |oclc=929971523 |access-date=2023-01-11}} In this text she defines internet memes to be the following:

(a) a group of digital items sharing common characteristics of content, form, and/or stance, which (b) were created with awareness of each other, and (c) were circulated, imitated, and/or transformed via the Internet by many users.

Further, she outlines content as "both ideas and ideologies", form as "the physical incarnation of the message", and stance as "the information memes convey about their own communication." Stance is about how actors (e.g. people) position themselves in relation to content and form of the media as well as those who might be addressed by the message. Prior to Shifman, few researchers defined memes with communication-oriented development.{{Cite book |last1=Lankshear |first1=Colin |url= |title=New literacies : changing knowledge and classroom learning |last2=Michele |first2=Knobel |publisher=Open University Press |year=2006 |isbn=033522010X |edition=2nd |location=Buckingham [England] |oclc=}}

In defining memes this way, she notes that the earlier memetics research struggled in distinguishing memes from meme-vehicles, and suggests that attempting to do so was a failed project. She cites Susan Blackmore as providing the metaphysical outline which inspired her memetic concept, arguing that much of memetics prior to her conception was either behaviorist- or mentalist-driven, taking sides in arguing that memes were respectively accounted for as material behavior or as a theory of cognition. She rejects these two sides and opts for what she calls an "inclusivist" approach, which denies that the memetic research can cleanly dissect memes into a cultural idea and its medium. She credits Blackmore as being the only other popular memetics researcher who does the same. By empirically connecting memes to digital media, Shifman provided theoretical developments in memetics which diverge from earlier interests. As such, Internet memetics often avoids strong associations with historical arguments from cultural anthropology, theory of mind, and philosophy of biology. Instead, they operate across several theoretical paradigms of sociology, communication, and media.{{Cite journal |last=Lewis |first=Kevin |date=2016-06-07 |title=A Review of Memes in Digital Culture |url=http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/10/2/000243/000243.html |journal=Digital Humanities Quarterly |volume=010 |issue=2 |issn=1938-4122}}

Shifman's theorizing in Internet memetics has been mentioned in journals such as Internet, Communication, & Society,{{Cite journal |last1=Ask |first1=Kristine |last2=Abidin |first2=Crystal |date=2018-06-03 |title=My life is a mess: self-deprecating relatability and collective identities in the memification of student issues |url=https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2018.1437204 |journal=Information, Communication & Society |volume=21 |issue=6 |pages=834–850 |doi=10.1080/1369118X.2018.1437204 |hdl=11250/2592260 |s2cid=148874422 |issn=1369-118X|hdl-access=free }} New Media & Society,{{Cite journal |last=Moreno-Almeida |first=Cristina |date=June 2021 |title=Memes as snapshots of participation: The role of digital amateur activists in authoritarian regimes |journal=New Media & Society |language=en |volume=23 |issue=6 |pages=1545–1566 |doi=10.1177/1461444820912722 |s2cid=216440970 |issn=1461-4448|doi-access=free }}{{Cite journal |last1=Smits |first1=Thomas |last2=Ros |first2=Ruben |date=2021-10-08 |title=Distant reading 940,000 online circulations of 26 iconic photographs |journal=New Media & Society |volume=25 |issue=12 |language=en |pages=3543–3572 |doi=10.1177/14614448211049459 |s2cid=242254797 |issn=1461-4448|doi-access=free }}{{Cite journal |last1=Ragnedda |first1=Massimo |last2=Addeo |first2=Felice |last3=Laura Ruiu |first3=Maria |date=2022-03-12 |title=How offline backgrounds interact with digital capital |journal=New Media & Society |language=en |pages=146144482210826 |doi=10.1177/14614448221082649 |s2cid=247430308 |issn=1461-4448|doi-access=free }} and Social Media + Society.{{Cite journal |last1=de Saint Laurent |first1=Constance |last2=Glăveanu |first2=Vlad P. |last3=Literat |first3=Ioana |date=January 2021 |title=Internet Memes as Partial Stories: Identifying Political Narratives in Coronavirus Memes |journal=Social Media + Society |volume=7 |issue=1 |pages= |doi=10.1177/2056305121988932 |s2cid=232765397 |issn=2056-3051|doi-access=free }}{{Cite journal |last1=Caliandro |first1=Alessandro |last2=Anselmi |first2=Guido |date=April 2021 |title=Affordances-Based Brand Relations: An Inquire on Memetic Brands on Instagram |journal=Social Media + Society |language=en |volume=7 |issue=2 |pages= |doi=10.1177/20563051211021367 |s2cid=235724927 |issn=2056-3051|doi-access=free }}

Internet memetics research is more specific than research in "Internet Memes." For example, many studying Internet memes argue they are developing different theoretical interests, such as pragmatics {{Cite journal |last=Dynel |first=Marta |date=2016-01-29 |title="I Has Seen Image Macros!" Advice Animals Memes as Visual-Verbal Jokes |url=https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/4101 |journal=International Journal of Communication |language=en |volume=10 |pages=29 |issn=1932-8036}}{{Cite journal |last=Wiggins |first=Bradley E. |date=2020-11-17 |title=Memes and the media narrative: The Nike-Kaepernick controversy |url=https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/ip.00032.wig |journal=Internet Pragmatics |language=en |volume=3 |issue=2 |pages=202–222 |doi=10.1075/ip.00032.wig |s2cid=201510255 |issn=2542-3851|url-access=subscription }} or semiotics.{{Cite journal |last=Cannizzaro |first=Sara |date=2016-12-31 |title=Internet memes as internet signs: A semiotic view of digital culture |url=http://ojs.utlib.ee/index.php/sss/article/view/SSS.2016.44.4.05 |journal=Sign Systems Studies |volume=44 |issue=4 |pages=562–586 |doi=10.12697/SSS.2016.44.4.05 |s2cid=53374867 |issn=1736-7409|doi-access=free }}{{Cite book |last=Wiggins |first=Bradley E. |url=https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1079399708 |title=The discursive power of memes in digital culture : ideology, semiotics, and intertextuality |date=2019 |isbn=978-0-429-49230-3 |location=New York, NY |oclc=1079399708}}{{Cite journal |last1=Smith |first1=Alexander O. |last2=Hemsley |first2=Jeff |date=2022-08-09 |title=Memetics as informational difference: offering an information-centric conception of memes |url=https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/JD-07-2021-0140/full/html |journal=Journal of Documentation |language=en |volume=78 |issue=5 |pages=1149–1163 |doi=10.1108/JD-07-2021-0140 |s2cid=252163642 |issn=0022-0418|url-access=subscription }} Despite these theoretical distinctions in interest, many of these authors cite Internet memetic theory as having overt similarities in empirical interests to Shifman.

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