Profus with a nod to the codes of popular culture, the collective work So that you still memes: Thinking about our identities through the prism of digital memes none the less belongs to the university universe. If the collective’s intention to contribute to the development of a French-speaking literature dealing with this phenomenon proves to be laudable, it could hardly be used for its own benefit by a majority of “prosumers” – a contraction of “producer” and “Consumer” – of memes, the popularization part being limited to the general presentation of the book.
By defining themselves by the possibility offered to everyone to circulate and reshape, according to their inclinations, any idea or fragment of culture, memes create a new form of folklore. In this regard, omnipresent on social networks, these creations combining texts and images are emblematic of the participatory dimension of popular culture in the Internet age.
To account for the evolution of the phenomenon, the texts of the work are ordered in an almost chronological manner, from the origin of the concept of meme as defined by the biologist Richard Dawkins in the 1970s until the ‘impact of his digital offspring on contemporary political and community engagement. Numerous repetitions and the variable scope of the various contributions, however, hinder the emergence, at the end of the reading, of a truly coherent panorama of the way in which we live with memes.
For example, following two chapters devoted to the political use of memes, the text which deals with the impact of algorithms breaks with the collective perspective of the precedents to adopt an individual point of view. As it is a question of the tendency of algorithms to isolate users in echo chambers, it would have been easy to maintain continuity between texts, for example by deepening the probable interference of these tools in production and circulation. memes that aim for social change.
Also, academically, a large proportion of each text is devoted to defining and contextualizing the conceptual tools used. This has the effect of considerably weighing down the reading when the precautions taken are numerous. Let us note all the same the presence of an exhaustive bibliography, up to date and abundantly cited throughout the work.
Finally, in his introduction, the co-director of the book Stéphane Girard underlines that “ […] natural languages (French, English, Spanish, Russian, etc.) […] are probably the most efficient form of viral transmission […], because the most complete, complex and intrinsic to our species ”. In this vein, to deal with a phenomenon whose existence is based on virality, the work would have benefited from being redacted from the opaque turns which empty the language of its evocative power.