Ugly and old: Six key characteristics of memes

e article provides a concise overview of internet memes in the respect of being among the most prominent sociosemiotic phenomena of the last two decades, highlighting their importance for textual and socio-cultural dynamics. e text then focuses on some of their fundamental characteristics in relation to their nature as collective and serial practices, both from an aesthetic standpoint and in terms of the logic that drives them and their evolution through various internet paradigms. Memes are discussed in terms of ugliness, beauty, momentum, fragmentation, comparison and retrieval. e article concludes by addressing the widespread metabolization of the memetic logic in the contemporary media ecology, taking TikTok, where one can find no proper memes but many memetic phenomena, as a textbook example.