Abstract

The study is a preliminary study to conceptualize memes as information resources for literacy education in information environment changed with digital revolution. The study is to explain the context and reality of memes in order to promote the utilization of memes as information resources. The research questions are as follows: First, what topics are ‘memes’ studied with? Second, what things are captured and studied as ‘memes’? The study conducted frequency and co-occurrence network analysis on 145 domestic studies and contents analysis on 73 domestic studies. The results are as follows: First, memes were mainly studied in the fields of ‘humanities’, ‘social sciences’, ‘interdiciplinary studies’, and ‘arts and kinesiology’. Studies based on Dawkins’ concept of memes (around 2012), studies on introducing the concept of memes to explain the spread of Korean Wave content (around 2015), and independent studies of memes as a major research topic in cultural sociology (around 2019) were performed. Second, memes are linguistic. Language memes (L-memes) are 102 (37%), language-visual memes (LV-memes) are 23 (8%), language-visual-musical memes (LVM-memes) are 21 (8%). Keyword ‘language meme’ ranked high in frequency, degree centrality and betweenness centrality of co-occurrence network. In other words, memes are expanding as a unique information phenomenon of cultural sociology based on linguistic characteristics. It is necessary to conceptualize meme literacy in terms of information literacy.