In December 2012, the exuberant video "Gangnam Style" became the first YouTube clip to be viewed more than one billion times. Thousands of its viewers responded by creating and posting their own variations of the video--"Mitt Romney Style," "NASA Johnson Style," "Egyptian Style," and many others. "Gangnam Style" (and its attendant parodies, imitations, and derivations) is one of the most famous examples of an Internet meme: a piece of digital content that spreads quickly around the web in various iterations and becomes a shared cultural experience. In this book, Limor Shifman investigates Internet memes and what they tell us about digital culture.

Shifman discusses a series of well-known Internet memes -- including "Leave Britney Alone," the pepper-spraying cop, LOLCats, Scumbag Steve, and Occupy Wall Street's "We Are the 99 Percent." She offers a novel definition of Internet memes: digital content units with common characteristics, created with awareness of each other, and circulated, imitated, and transformed via the Internet by many users. She differentiates memes from virals; analyzes what makes memes and virals successful; describes popular meme genres; discusses memes as new modes of political participation in democratic and nondemocratic regimes; and examines memes as agents of globalization.

Memes, Shifman argues, encapsulate some of the most fundamental aspects of the Internet in general and of the participatory Web 2.0 culture in particular. Internet memes may be entertaining, but in this book Limor Shifman makes a compelling argument for taking them seriously.

2012年12月，热情洋溢的视频 "江南Style "成为第一个被观看超过10亿次的YouTube视频。数以千计的观众通过创造和发布他们自己的视频变体--"米特-罗姆尼风格"、"美国国家航空航天局约翰逊风格"、"埃及风格 "和许多其他风格。"江南Style"（以及随之而来的模仿、模仿和衍生）是互联网备忘录最著名的例子之一：一段数字内容通过各种迭代在网络上迅速传播，成为一种共同的文化体验。在这本书中，利莫尔-希夫曼研究了互联网备忘录以及它们告诉我们的数字文化。

希夫曼讨论了一系列著名的互联网备忘录--包括 "别管小甜甜"、喷辣椒的警察、LOLCats、Scumbag Steve和占领华尔街的 "我们是99%"。她为互联网备忘录提供了一个新的定义：具有共同特征的数字内容单元，在相互认识的情况下创建，并由许多用户通过互联网进行传播、模仿和改造。她区分了备忘录和病毒；分析了是什么让备忘录和病毒成功；描述了流行的备忘录流派；讨论了备忘录作为民主和非民主政权中政治参与的新模式；并研究了作为全球化媒介的备忘录。

希夫曼认为，备忘录概括了互联网的一些最基本方面，特别是参与性的Web 2.0文化。互联网备忘录可能具有娱乐性，但在这本书中，利莫尔-希夫曼为认真对待它们提出了令人信服的论点。