"Meme-ing Electoral Participation," European Journal of American studies (original) (raw)
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Binders Full of Election Memes: Participatory Culture Invades the 2012 U.S. Election
Civic Media Project, 2015
Participatory culture handed the 2012 U.S. presidential election season a bumper crop of political memes. These “election memes,” largely in the form of image macros, took sound bites from the candidates’ debates and speeches and turned them into “digital content units” of political satire “circulated, imitated, and/or transformed via the Internet by many users,” to paraphrase Limor Schifman’s definition of “internet meme” (2013, 177). Image macros like the lolcat, feature bold text on top of an image, often a “stock character,” and like all Internet memes are “multi-participant creative expressions through which cultural and political identities are communicated and negotiated” (Ibid.). This case study focuses on three popular image macro-based election memes that came out of the 2012 US presidential election cycle: “Fired Big Bird,” “Binders Full of Women,” and “You Didn’t Build That,” and argues that sharing such memes is a valid form of political participation in the style of what Tommie Shelby calls “impure dissent” (forthcoming).
2013
Statements made during each of the presidential debates in the 2012 election cycle sparked an outpouring of responses via social media. Many of these responses took the form of often-humorous "memes" -remixed images, hashtags, and the like -which rapidly spread via online social networks. A small but growing field of literature indicates such so-called Internet memes are a social phenomenon of a participatory media culture, with implications for identity building, public discourse, and critique of traditional media institutions. Additionally, while memes have their origin in sub-cultural spaces of the Internet, they have received a growing amount of attention in mainstream media outlets. Previous research has shown that press coverage framing of new technologies can influence the way such technologies are diffused and used. A presidential election is arguably one of the most important events on which members of the press in a democracy such as the United States report, with implications for the direction of the country for the next four years. The present study is a preliminary study of how mainstream press and broadcast coverage frames Internet as a form of civic participation in a Web 2.0 culture. Results of the preliminary study do not suggest mainstream media are acting as opinion leaders for the diffusion of memes as a type of civic participation. Suggestions for future research in this area are offered.
Meme-ing Electoral Participation
European journal of American studies
Internet memes have emerged as the lingua franca of the modern campaign. USA Today i I also believe… that it is through the reappearance of this knowledge, of these local popular knowledges, these disqualified knowledges, that criticism performs its work.
2019
The present thesis examines an internet meme, an image and a caption commenting on it, which appears on social média and produces countless derivatives through imitation, remix and rapid diffusion by participants. This thesis adopts a transdisciplinary analytical perspective to study netizens' remixing practices during the 2012 and 2016 presidential campaigns in the USA. The data is explored through the lenses of remix with continuai shifts in theories and approaches, moving across disciplines and experimenting with différent perspectives. The research implements various methods and qualitative modes of enquiry from political discourse analysis, American history and cultural studies, textual linguistics, genre analysis, social semiotics, cognitive linguistics, visual rhetoric, remix studies, theoiy of carnival and scenography. Throughout the entire thesis, 1 highlight the pivotai relationship of genre, discourse and text revealed in internet memes. Chapter Genre of internet meme...
Lingue e Linguaggi, 2019
– This paper analyses US political memes relating mainly to the Obama and Trump presidencies as an illustration of a subgenre shaped by today’s mobile culture, and thus part of the rise of new forms of digital textuality. In particular, the study explores the connection between technology, participatory culture and the entrenchment of memes as a multimodal genre within political discourse. The illustration of the diffusion of this political meme subgenre as a grass roots phenomenon, generated and distributed through social media, is illuminated by the article’s focus on the often ironic comments it makes about US politics. By reconstructing the evolution of digital memes in this period and illustrating and exemplifying the textual processes that give this political subgenre its unique forcefulness, the article concludes that digital memes have embraced textual forms – based on mass media and shared authorship – that are certainly informal and often offensive, but which also testify ...
Analysis of Facebook Meme Groups Used During the 2016 US Presidential Election
Social Media + Society
Using content analysis, this study examines how citizens may use memes to share grassroots political ideas in a social media group setting during elections. Specifically, it offers a glimpse at the types of meme-related Facebook pages that emerged during the 2016 presidential election with an emphasis on representations of the two front-runner candidates—Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Generally, Facebook-meme pages and profile photos of both candidates were negative in tone with Trump more likely to be framed in terms of his hairstyle and facial expressions and Clinton in terms of the email scandal and her relationships with people. Political party and gender differences between these two candidates contributed to variations in representations. Study findings are important as they offer a look at grassroots use of memes during a major election and provide a general overview of Facebook user depictions of the two politicians.
Husnayain Business Review
Purpose - This paper seek to determine the role of political-themed memes on social media in criticizing political policies in the United States (US) in 2016–2019. This period was beginning with the 2016 US presidential election and continuing through Donald Trump's presidency. The use of memes has become a popular medium for expressing US public opinion on policies and political issues that occur in the US. Expression of opinion in the form of praise, support, or criticism was channelled through memes that are created and disseminated on social media. The method used was qualitative, with data sources from books, journals, and official US media. Findings - this study describes memes as an alternative means of representing US public opinion in a light and interesting way. However, the use of memes can only be used as a form of taking a stance on the development of political situations and policies through social media. Novelty - Political instruments that have developed in the m...
The transition between traditional politics to social media has given rise to new spaces, forms and languages for political communication. Visual aspects have been crucial in this process and political parties have tried to integrate them into their web presence. Those images are carefully selected in order to have an impact and foster engagement on Twitter, especially in the form of memes. This paper therefore analyses the use of images in the digital discourse of Spanish political parties on Twitter. Content analysis is used as the preferred research method to study how such visual content was used by the main political party accounts –typology of images, communication strategies, main hashtags, impact, etc – during the 2015 State of the Nation Debate in Spain. Likewise, content analysis was complemented with the thematic tagging of graphics memes by analysing the meanings of the text (image and text). Our work has revealed significant differences in the use of memes by political parties in the Spanish Parliament. The paper also highlights Twitter accounts with high memetic potential.
Memes and their impact on politics
2018
It comes as no surprise to today’s generation that memes play an extremely important part in everyday life. Ranging from mere entertainment purposes in the form of funny images with relating text, to serious forms of message conveyance, these phenomena are something extraordinary. Therefore, the aim of this paper will be none other than to dissect and examine just what makes memes what they are – a source of both entertainment and knowledge. The methods used to achieve this will be in-depth analysis of meme archetypes, syntactic and grammatical analysis, and questions answered by third parties. This leads to the thesis statement: Memes have a major impact on the political field, especially in the current generation.