Enoughness, accent and light communities: Essays on contemporary identities

 

67 

extraordinarily creative in reorganizing, redirecting and applying memic 

resources over a vast range of thematic domains, addressing a vast range of 

audiences while all the same retaining clear and recognizable intertextual links 

to the original memic sources. This fundamental intertextuality allows for 

combined memes, in which features of different established memes are blended 

in a “mashup” meme. Figure 8 shows such a mashup meme: 

 

 

Figure 8: Keep calm and remove the arrow from your knee. 

We see the familiar template of the “Keep calm” meme, to which a recognizable 

reference to another meme is added. The origin of this other meme, “then I took 

an arrow in the knee”, is in itself worthy of reflection, for it shows the essentially 

arbitrary nature of memic success. The phrase was originally uttered by 

characters from a video game “Skyrim” (Figure 9). The phrase is quite often 

repeated throughout the game, but this does not in itself offer an explanation for 

the viral spread of the expression way beyond the community of Skyrim gamers. 

 

Figure 9: Skyrim scene “Then I took an arrow in the knee” 

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68 

 

The phrase became wildly productive and can now be tagged to an almost 

infinite range of different expressions, each time retaining a tinge of its original 

apologetic character, and appearing in mashups, as we saw in Figure 8. 

What we see in each of these examples is how memes operate via a combination 

of intertextual recognizability and individual creativity – individual users adding 

an “accent” to existing viral memes, in attempts to go viral with their own 

adapted version. The work of resemiotization involved in such processes can be 

complex and demanding. Mashup memes, for instance, involves elaborate 

knowledge of existing memes, an understanding of the affordances and 

limitations for altering the memes, and graphic, semiotic and technological skills 

to post them online. The different forms of resemiotization represent different 

genres of communicative action, ranging from maximally transparent refocusing 

of existing memes to the creation of very different and new memes, less densely 

connected to existing ones. 

Two points need to be made now. First, we do not see such resemiotizations, 

even drastic and radical ones, as being fundamentally different from the “likes” 

and “shares” we discussed in the previous section. We have seen that “likes” and 

“shares” are already different genres characterized by very different activity 

patterns, orientations to addressees and audiences, and degrees of intervention 

in the original signs. The procedures we have reviewed here differ in degree but 

not in substance: they are, like “retweets”, “likes” and “shares”, re-

entextualizations of existing signs, i.e. meaningful communicative operations 

that demand different levels of agency and creativity of the user. Second, and 

related to this, the nature of the original sign itself – its conventionally 

understood “meaning” – appears to be less relevant than the capacity to deploy it 

in largely phatic, relational forms of interaction, again ranging from what 

Malinowski described as “communion” – ritually expressing membership of a 

particular community – to “communication” within the communities we 

described as held together by “ambient affiliation”. “Meaning” in its traditional 

sense needs to give way here to a more general notion of “function”. Memes, just 

like Mark Zuckerberg’s status updates, do not need to be read in order to be seen 

and understood as denotationally and informationally meaningful; their use and 

re-use appear to be governed by the “phatic” and “emblematic” functions often 

seen as of secondary nature in discourse-analytic literature. 

Conviviality on demand 

But what explains the immense density of such phatic forms of practice on social 

media? How do we make sense of the astonishing speed and scope with which 

such phatic forms of communion and communication circulate, creating – like in 

the case of Gangnam Style – perhaps the largest-scale collective communicative 

phenomena in human history? The explanations, we hope to have shown, do not 

necessarily have to be located in the features of the signs themselves, nor in the 

specific practices they prompt – both are unspectacular. So perhaps the 

explanations must be sought in the social world in which these phatic practices 

make sense. 

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69 

In a seminal paper, Alice Marwick and danah boyd (2010: 120) distinguish 

between email and Twitter. They have this to say on the topic: 

“(…) the difference between Twitter and email is that the latter is 

primarily a directed technology with people pushing content to persons 

listed in the “To:” field, while tweets are made available for interested 

individuals to pull on demand. The typical email has an articulated 

audience, while the typical tweet does not.” 

The statement demands nuancing, for we have seen that even minimal forms of 

activity such as “sharing” involve degrees of audience design – the seemingly 

vacuous identity statements we described above, lodged in social media 

practices, are always directed at some audience, of which users have some idea, 

right or wrong (cf. Androutsopoulos 2013). Imaginary audiences are powerful 

actors affecting discursive behaviour, as Goffman and others have shown so 

often (e.g. Goffman 1963), and Marwick and boyd’s early statement that “Twitter 

flattens multiple audiences into one” – a phenomenon they qualify as “context 

collapse” – is surely in need of qualification (Marwick & boyd 2010: 122). The 

intricate social-semiotic work we have described here certainly indicates users 

having diverse understandings of audiences on social media. Different social 

media platforms offer opportunities for different types of semiotic and identity 

work, and users often hold very precise and detailed views of what specific 

platforms offer them in the way of audience access, identity and communication 

opportunities and effects (cf. Gershon 2010). 

At the same time, Marwick and boyd are correct in directing our attention 

towards the kinds of communities in which people move on social media. In spite 

of precise ideas of specific target audiences and addressees, it is certainly true 

that there is no way in which absolute certainty about the identities (and 

numbers) of addressees can be ascertained on most social media platforms – 

something which Edward Snowden also made painfully clear. In addition, it is 

true that lump categories such as Facebook “friends” gather a range of – usually 

never explicitly defined – subcategories ranging from “real-life friends” and close 

relatives to what we may best call, following Goffman again, “acquaintances”. 

Goffman (1963), as we know, described acquaintances as that broad category of 

people within the network of US middle class citizens with whom relations of 

sociality and civility need to be maintained. Avoidance of overt neglect and 

rejection are narrowly connected to avoidance of intimacy and “transgressive” 

personal interaction: what needs to be maintained with such people is a 

relationship of conviviality – a level of social intercourse characterized by largely 

“phatic” and “polite” engagement in interaction. Acquaintances are not there to 

be “loved”, they are there to be “liked”. Facebook is made exactly for these kinds 

of social relationships (van Dijck 2013), which is perhaps also why a discourse 

analysis of Facebook interaction reveals the overwhelming dominance of the 

Gricean Maxims, that old ethnotheory of “polite” US bourgeois interaction (Varis 

forthcoming). 

But let us delve slightly deeper into this. The communities present as audiences 

on social media may be at once over-imagined and under-determined: while 

users can have relatively precise ideas of who it is they are addressing, a level of 

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70 

indeterminacy is inevitable in reality. This means, in analysis, that we cannot 

treat such communities in the traditional sense of “speech community” as a 

group of people tied together by clear and generally shareable rules of the 

indexical value and function of signs (Agha 2007). Indexical orders need to be 

built, as a consequence, since they cannot readily be presupposed. Virality, as a 

sociolinguistic phenomenon, might be seen as moments at which such indexical 

orders – perceived shareability of meaningful signs – are taking shape. The two 

billion views of Gangnam Style suggest that large numbers of people in various 

places on earth recognized something in the video; what it is exactly they 

experienced as recognizable is hard to determine, and research on this topic – 

how virality might inform us on emergent forms of social and cultural 

normativity in new and unclear large globalized human collectives – is long 

overdue. 

 Some suggestions in this direction can be offered, though. In earlier work, we 

tried to describe “light” forms of community formation in the online-offline 

contemporary world as “focused but diverse” (Blommaert & Varis 2013). Brief 

moments of focusing on perceived recognizable and shareable features of social 

activity generate temporary groups – think of the thousands who “liked” 

Zuckerberg’s status update – while such groups do not require the kinds of 

strong and lasting bonds grounded in shared bodies of knowledge we associate 

with more traditionally conceived “communities” or “societies”. In fact, they are 

groups selected on demand, so to speak, by individual users in the ways we 

discussed earlier. People can focus and re-focus perpetually, and do so (which 

explains the speed of virality) without being tied into a community of fixed 

circumscription, given the absence of the deep and strong bonds that tie them 

together, and the absence of temporal and spatial copresence that characterizes 

online groups.  

A joint “phatic” focus on recognizable form or shape offers possibilities for such 

processes of groupness, while the actual functional appropriation and 

deployment of signs – what they actually mean for actual users – is hugely 

diverse; the infinite productivity of memes – the perpetual construction of 

memic “accents” – illustrates this. Here we begin to see something fundamental 

about communities in an online age: the joint focusing, even if “phatic”, is in itself 

not trivial, it creates a structural level of conviviality, i.e. a sharing at one level of 

meaningful interaction by means of a joint feature, which in superficial but real 

ways translates a number of individuals into a focused collective. Note, and we 

repeat, that what this collective shares is the sheer act of phatic communion (the 

“sharing” itself, so to speak), while the precise meaning of this practice for each 

individual member of the collective is impossible to determine. But since 

Malinowski and Goffman, we have learned not to underestimate the importance 

of unimportant social activities. Memes force us to think about levels of social 

structuring that we very often overlook because we consider them meaningless.  

This neglect of conviviality has effects. In the superdiversity that characterizes 

online-offline social worlds, we easily tend to focus on differences and downplay 

the level of social structuring that actually prevents these differences from 

turning into conflicts. Recognizing such hitherto neglected levels of social 

structuring might also serve as a corrective to rapid qualifications of the present 

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71 

era as being “postsocial” – a point on which we disagree with Vincent Miller. 

There is a great deal of sociality going on on social media, but this sociality might 

require a new kind of sociological imagination. We will look in vain for 

communities and societies that resemble the ones proposed by Durkheim and 

Parsons. But that does not mean that such units are not present, and even less 

that they are not in need of description. 

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Document Outline

• TPCS_139.pdf
• Enoughness essays