In December 2012, the exuberant video ‘Gangnam Style’ became the first YouTube clip to be viewed more than one billion times. Thousands of its viewers responded by creating and posting their own variations of the video: ‘Mitt Romney Style, ‘NASA Johnson Style,’ ‘Egyptian Style, ‘ and many others. ‘Gangnam Style’ (and its attendant parodies, imitations, and derivations) is one of the most famous examples of an Internet meme: a piece of digital content that spreads quickly around the Web in various iterations and becomes a shared cultural experience. In this book, the author investigates Internet memes and what they tell us about digital culture. She discusses a series of well-known Internet memes, including ‘Leave Britney Alone, ‘the pepper-spraying cop, LOLCats, Scumbag Steve, and Occupy Wall Street’s ‘We Are the 99 Percent.’ She offers a novel definition of Internet memes: digital content uIn a remarkable integration of environmental science, biology, meditation, and creative expression, Olsen, a dancer who teaches in the environmental studies program at Middlebury College, offers a guide to a holistic understanding of person and place. Part workbook, part exploration, Body and Earth considers the question of how we can best, most responsibly inhabit both our bodies and our planet. Olsen displays an easy command of fields as diverse as geology, biochemistry, ecology, and anatomy as she explores the ways in which our bodies are derived from and connected to the natural world. But Body and Earth is not just a lesson, it is also an investigation. Arranged as a 31-day program, the book offers not only a wealth of scientific information, but also exercises for both exploring the body and connecting with place; illustrations and works of art that illuminate each chapter’s themes; and Olsen’s own meditations and reflections, connecting the topics to her personal history and experience. Olsen insists that neither body nor landscape are separate from our fundamental selves, but in a culture which views the body as a mechanism to be trained and the landscape as a resource to be exploited, we need to learn to see again their fundamental wholeness and interconnection. Through hard data, reflection, exercises, and inspiration, Body and Earth offers a guide to responsible stewardship of both our planet and our persons.nits with common characteristics, created with awareness of each other, and circulated, imitated, and transformed via the Internet by many users. She differentiates memes from virals; analyzes what makes memes and virals successful; describes popular meme genres; discusses memes as new modes of political participation in democratic and nondemocratic regimes; and examines memes as agents of globalization. Memes, the author argues, encapsulate some of the most fundamental aspects of the Internet in general and of the participatory Web 2.0 culture in particular. Internet memes may be entertaining, but in this book the author makes a compelling argument for taking them seriously.