Pop culture emerged in the first decades of the twentieth century as a reaction to the restrictive social traditions of colonial America. It spread quickly and broadly throughout the bustling urban centers of the 1920san era when it formed a partnership with technology and the business world. This coalition gave pop culture its identity, allowing it to thrive and form alliances with artistic and literary movements. But pop culture may have run its course with the rise of meme culture. This publication revisits the social, psychic, and aesthetic roots of pop culture, suggesting that meme culture has fragmented its historical flow, thus threatening to bring about its demise.
Memes and the Future of Pop Culture
Marcel Danesi
Abstract
Keywords
1Introduction
2Origins
3The Protestant Ethic
4The Roaring Twenties
5Theorizing Pop Culture
6Technology and the Marketplace
7Literary-Artistic Bricolage
8Carnival, Archetype, and Mythology Theories Revisited
9Sociobiology and the Theory of Memes
10Meme Culture
11The Simulacrum
12Meme Culture versus Pop Culture
13The Communal Brain
14The Global Village
15The Corso and Ricorso of History
16The Tetrad
17The Future
References
Marcel Danesi, Ph.D. (1974), FRSC (1998), University of Toronto, is Professor of Semiotics and Linguistic Anthropology. He has published extensively in both fields, including most recently Understanding Media Semiotics (Bloomsbury, 2018) and Language and Mathematics (Mouton de Gruyter, 2016).