Aura farming with memetic communication: framing celebritism through memetic layers and the DIONS Nexus of Cyberstudies

Examining the viral transformation of 11-year-old Rayyan Arkan Dikha from Togak Luan dancer at an Indonesian boat race festival to the global Internet meme “The Reaper” provides unique insight into how one becomes a memetic celebrity. Using Tilton's analytical model of memetic content can help explain how some aspects of an event and person are communicated digitally while relevant cultural context tends to dissolve through narrative flattening. The DIONS Nexus of Cyberstudies (encompassing digital communication, Internet culture, online communities, the network society, and scalable selves) becomes the integrative framework used in this study for understanding why certain performances achieve viral velocity. By using the eight Internet celebrity personality types model, which is organized by presence-based and authority-based logics, Dikha can be positioned as a memetic celebrity whose fame arrived involuntarily through platform-mediated extraction. Scholars who examine Dikha’s case carefully can see what it means when cultural events go through a narrative flattening process and what artifacts are created after that happens. The final argument constructed from this case study points to the need for critical media scholarship to move beyond describing these dynamics to advocating for platform architectures that center consent, attribution, and cultural context over engagement metrics.