The Age of Armchair Activism: Social Media, Virality, and Memes for Sociopolitical Change

By kaitlynkaylee

  • Leonard Kleinrock Pioneers Packet-Switching

    A huge innovation in web technology, allows users to communicate with eachother through networks.

  • Richard Dawkins Coins the Term "Meme"

    in his book The Selfish Gene

  • USENET Forms to host news and discussion groups

  • Scott E. Fahlman creates the :-) emoticon to mark internet Jokes

    Members who participated on the bulletin-board system at Carnegie Mellon would on occasion descend into “flame wars”—long threads of communication that are hostile or openly aggressive to other users. Fahlman believed that many of these disagreements arose out of misinterpreted humor. His solution to this problem was to add a specific marker to the end of any message that was a joke.
    That marker was :-).

  • Tim Berners Lee Invents the World Wide Web

  • Darcy Dinuccu Coins the Term "Web 2.0"

    The term is meant to describe the changing landscape of the internet.

  • A Lesson in Virality: "Hamster Dance" Becomes one of the First Viral Internet Memes

    Deidre LaCarte, a Canadian art student at the time, made a GeoCities-hosted website as part of a contest with a friend to see who could generate the most online traffic. The website she created, popularly known as “Hamster Dance,” consisted of row upon row of animated gifs, each one depicting a hamster dancing. As of January 1999 the site had amassed eight hundred views, total. Once 1999 began, without warning or clear cause, the site began to log as many as 15 thousand views a day.

  • Myspace is Launched

  • Facebook is Launched

    By December, the site has over 1,000,000 users

  • Youtube is Launched

  • Facebook Goes Global

    Facebook becomes available in the UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand

  • Twitter is created

  • Chris Messina Creates the First "Hashtag" on Twitter

    The first hashtag was #barcamp

  • Website Know Your Meme is Launched

    The website uses wiki software to document various Internet memes and other online phenomena, such as viral videos, image macros, catchphrases, internet celebrities and more.

  • Facebook Becomes Most Popular Social Media Site

    Facebook becomes the most popular social networking site, surpassing Myspace which had been in first place since June 2006.

  • The Grass Mud Horse: China and Memes Against Censorship

  • The "It Gets Better" Meme and It's Viral Movement

  • The Arab Spring, Social Media, and Internet Memes

    Social networking websites such as Twitter and Facebook help activists organize an uprising in Egypt. The trend of using social networking websites to organize protests and demonstrations continues throughout 2011 in the Middle East and North Africa. Various governments attempt to shut down social media and internet access to crackdown on protest movements throughout 2011 to varying degrees of success.

  • Occupy Wall Street and Internet Memes

    The Occupy Wall Street Protests used several internet memes to spread it’s message across social media, including through the use of the 99% meme.

  • Kony2012 Movement and Virality

    The memetic spread of Kony 2012 caused mass awareness and media attention that would lead to several endorsements from people of authority or celebrity status for the Invisible Children campaign.