How Chuck Norris Facts gave birth to the modern meme

The Norris Facts phenomenon came along at the exact moment when memes were emerging as what internet expert and historian Colin Lankshear calls "a new modern literacy." Lankshear is a professor and researcher from New Zealand who has lectured all over the world. He and his late wife, Michelle Knobel, wrote a slew of academic papers in the 2000s studying the rise of memes. They made the case that memes are an essential form of modern communication and that memes will sink political campaigns, shape the way we think about certain products and, of course, be instrumental in sports discourse for decades. They argued that for the foreseeable future, there's poetry, fiction, nonfiction, academic writing, business writing ... and memes. (View Highlight)