Digital Commons Network^™

The Abstraction Of Meaning In The Digital Landscape And The Communities That Form There, Genevieve Gilliland

Masters Theses

Computer-mediated technologies are changing how we communicate; the boundaries between oral, visual, and verbal communication, already difficult to distinguish, has blurred, becoming a construction with its own grammar and diction. One such visual/verbal-mixed unit of communication is the internet meme, an image, text, video, or performance meant to be circulated within digital communities. This open-ended medium begs for rhetorical study in this evolving digital landscape. Preceding scholarship that has blended the field of rhetoric with internet memes has tended to focus on a study of circulation (Mills; Taecharungroj and Nueangjamnong; Guadagno, et al.) or the use of specific forms and …