Ambient amplification: Memecry across platforms

This special-themed collection of Platforms & Society assembles conceptual and methodological reflections that foreground the background of today’s platform cultures. By emphasizing the two notions of “ambient amplification” and “memecry,” it shifts attention away from high-visibility events toward the surrounding riffs, adaptations, and remixes through which online engagement gains traction. It maps platform ecologies shaped by similar channels, shared links, and moving images, examines networked soundbites in their non-linear dissemination, and tunes into atmospheric “For You” pages where our capacity to relate is measured and manipulated as data. Finally, it explores how memecry surfaces in the stochastic reasoning of generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems, yielding oddly captivating outputs shaped by likeness and approximation. Rather than focusing on viral moments of peak intensity, the authors approach memes as relational modalities of ambient amplification. Across 10 interventions, the discussion moves from infrastructure toward culture and into the synthetic. This introduction situates the contributions and advances a critical framework for conceptualizing memecry through riffing—a process that extends beyond content-level pattern variation to encompass the affective interplay between user practices and algorithmic systems. A brief conclusion opens this framework for future interdisciplinary inquiry into the atmospheric shift of platform cultures, where vibe supersedes content as the primary memetic substrate.