The Biggest Meme. Harlem Shake Ten Years After

This chapter reconstructs the history of the biggest meme in history, Harlem Shake, ten years after its viral explosion, and proposes a semiotic analysis of it. Today’s hyper- and post-social (as well as hyper- and post-memetic) media world is the result of phenomena of this kind. Challenges, parodies, dances and lip-syncs that emerged in the viral content cultures and spread beyond all expectations thanks to the ecologies of social media have given rise to a whole new platform, TikTok, which embodies the affirmation of a new paradigm in communication and content production. In an era of increasingly rapid consumption of images, videos and more generally what semiotics defines as texts, to go back to Harlem Shake, the Big Bang of a new way of conceiving textuality as practice can help us better understand fragments of the present and anticipate where we are heading in the near future.