“Friends don’t let friends skip rat day”

Abstract

Building on literature detailing the use of internet memes online, this chapter analyzes the repetition of memes offline in the everyday face-to-face conversations of Millennial friends in their late twenties, who appropriate texts from memes to serve particular functions in their talk. When these speakers encounter interactional dilemmas due to epistemic (knowledge) imbalances, they make references to internet memes, which allow the epistemic territory of talk to shift to a topic to which at least most of the speakers have epistemic access. These epistemic shifts underlie the construction of play frame laminations, allowing for different structures of participation and conversational involvement around shared knowledge of the memes, which serve for group identity construction. At the same time, this chapter highlights how the references to internet memes in particular invoke various cultural stereotypes. This chapter contributes to understanding how intertextual references to different forms of media can resolve interactional dilemmas in conversation by shifting epistemics and laminating frames, ultimately reinforcing a group identity based on shared knowledge.