The thesis focuses on the online phenomenon of shitposting or creating and posting so-called shitposts, a type of online memes whose peculiarity is that they are deliberately presented as poor-quality, stupid, superficially made and meaningless. They are therefore presented as unworthy of posting online, but are posted anyway, which seemingly represents a special kind of paradox, especially given that they form an important part of Internet popular culture. The main goal is to establish a comprehensive and precise sociological understanding of shitposts and shitposting. My main proposition related to this is that shitposts function as a strong expression of a contemporary structure of feeling called metamodernism. Since online memes and shitposts are usually only vaguely and incompletely defined in both theoretical and general discourse, I first establish an exhaustive sociological definition of online memes as a genre and shitposts as its subgenre. I then present metamodernism as a response to the inadequacy of postmodernism and, using examples, argue for the similarity of the ambivalent logic behind both shitposts and metamodernism. Finally, I consider shitposts (and memes) in relation to art and conclude that we can view them as something I call (non)art, which is neither art nor non-art, but rather, due to its specific circumstances of production and consumption, functions as everyday, incidental, conversational creativity.
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