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This thesis considers Internet memes from a media-ecological perspective in order live up to the eco-systems of digital cultures where memes emerge, mutate, and thrive. In this framing, memes need to be understood in relation to the users, platforms, media, infrastructure, and references that create and circulate them. This requires a media archaeological examination of the Internet platforms mainly used for the sharing of memes. Each platform has their own specific characteristics leading up to different habitats of Internet memes: understanding the habitat of memes as systemic shifts the focus to its dynamics over static and linear narratives. A critical posthuman perspective building upon the monism of vital materialism as well as process philosophy aims to deconstruct the Western philosophical tradition of subject-object-dichotomy in favor of an ethico-onto-epistemology understanding all beings—animate and inanimate—as living. From this point of view, the force of life traverses all beings needs to be understood as a Spinozian conatus vitalizing all matter. In contrast to a form of flat ontology, critical posthumanism acknowledges the differences in agency across beings and emphasizes the embodiment of life. It is easier to imagine life not as an attribute to acquire (being alive or not), but a verb in its doing—life becomes living. In this regard, life is mediated through living beings that come together in a distinct body for the duration of their lifespan. The same is true for memes: on the Internet, life is remediated through memes. A meme emerges when previously unrelated sympoietic agents, such as an image and a line of text, come together. The logic of memetic processes such as object labeling, image manipulation or copypastas expose the underlying sympoietic mechanisms as cooperative, growing, and contingent. An agential understanding of memes also allows for an understanding of the history of digital cultures, where memes can take on the role of communicators facilitating the exchange of online communities. Often likened to an Internet language, memes give structure and vocabulary to communication while simultaneously restricting the flows of exchange, for example, through the creation of in-and-out-groups excluding certain communities. Finally, understanding memes in relation to users and platforms as a whole shines a light on how global phenomena are processed online: in this regard, memes serve as a starting point to reflect on our behavior, not just online, but in liability toward living among our own creations.
