Memes on digital social networks as learning objects of the cyberculture: from viralization to education

Abstract

In december of 2012, the Gangnam Style video became the first youtube clip to reach over one billion views. Many of its viewers reconfigurated the original production broadcasted on the website, creating and sharing their own takes on the video, replicating this material through social networks. This way, each viewer demonstrated their own creative ability and capacity to develop a new visual content, based on the music and video presented in Gangnam Style. This kind of replication it’s a good example of what a meme in cyberculture looks like. From this, countless other videos and contents that surfaced online went viral. At at the same time, they have been reproduced in a different social and cultural context of the original content. This peculiarity gave memes the capacity to modify the sense and meaning of the early content that each individual appropriated in their material, including their social experience, throughout, collaborative and discursive production. Therefore, through a bibliographic research this article seeks to discuss the memes, as objects of learning, authorship and collaborative production in cyberculture on social networks.