UC Irvine

This dissertation examines how digital culture evolves through memes—cultural units that circulate, transform, and accrue symbolic meaning online. While existing research has largely emphasized virality, political communication, and diffusion, this project focuses on understudied forms of replication, obfuscation, and affective performance that define emerging meme ecologies. Across three empirical studies, I investigate how users merge, manipulate, and emotionally engage with memes to negotiate belonging, cultural fluency, and symbolic status. Drawing from theories of cultural production, performativity, and affect, I integrate computational, qualitative, and interpretive methods to analyze diverse modes of meme transformation. Chapter 1 uses social network analysis to explore meme merging, showing that mergeability depends on a meme’s medium flexibility and established recognizability, revealing how creativity online is shaped by hierarchies of accessibility and cultural competence. Chapter 2 rethinks meme classification, highlighting the need for a framework that accounts for temporal evolution, semantic drift, parody, and user experience—treating memes as unstable social objects whose forms and meanings shift over time. Chapter 3 examines affective expression of user engagement with these objects, demonstrating that emotion itself functions as symbolic capital through which users perform expertise and belonging within platform-specific publics. Together, these studies show that memes evolve not only through viral diffusion but also through reduction, ambiguity, and emotional calibration. Cultural value online emerges through interpretive labor—the ability to recognize and feel appropriately within shared codes. By centering these processes, this dissertation advances a sociological understanding of digital meme culture as stratified, affectively organized, and symbolically mediated, offering new directions for research tracing how meaning, recognition, and participation are produced across platforms and over time.