Affect and memes: Ambiguity abounds

On the one hand, affect drives people to post, like, share, and engage on social media so that affect is key to the circuits of monetisation. On the other hand, affect does not necessarily map onto clearly identifiable emotions, being rather an issue of immediately felt, and possibly conflicting intensities. For their part, memes involve a fair share of ambiguity in how they are shared and interpreted and the shapes that their variations take. Zooming in on this unpredictability, this text addresses ambiguity as less of a problem than as an analytically productive lens into studies of memetic circulation across platforms.