Are Memes Relevant to Studying Printed or Digital Texts?

The larger version of this question is really, ‘do we need to have a good working knowledge of what memes are in order to usefully expand a sense of our audience, our IB students?  Does such knowledge have some relevance to such new textualities as fan fiction and texts published online using various composition strategies?’

It’s interesting that, in the last revision of the Language A courses,  various forms of digital texts were suggested as one of the options schools might use in Part 4 of the Literature course; but, for the most part, only graphic novels have been taken up with any frequency.

I honestly don’t know the answer to the proposed question, but a set of short videos produced by the New York Times, called ‘Internetting with Amanda Hess’, got me thinking about it again. A few years ago, a Greek writer and IB teacher, Theodore Chiotis, composed a very helpful section on digital texts for one of the OUP course guides, and I have turned to it a number of times for useful clarification.

The Amanda Hess videos are fairly political and nationalistic in their approaches, and, while I think some of them—the one on beauty, for example—might be useful to incorporate in your classes, I’m not sure all of them have global or classroom relevance.  Still, her lively examination of certain memes might interest you.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/11/21/arts/internetting-with-amanda-hess.html