Living Through It: Anger, Laughter, and Internet Memes in Dark Times (original) (raw)
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Internet memes are the most pervasive and malleable form of digital popular culture (Wiggins 2019: vii). They are a way a society expresses and thinks of itself (Denisova 2019: 2) used for the purpose of satire, parody, critique to posit an argument (Wiggins 2019, see also Ponton 2021, this issue). The acts of viewing, creating, sharing and commenting on memes that criticise or troll authority figures have become central to our political processes becom[ing] one of the most important forms of political participation and activism today (Merrin 2019: 201). However, memes do not communicate to us in logical arguments, but emotionally and affectively through short quips and images that entertain. Memes are part of a new politics of affectivity, identification, emotion and humour (Merrin 2019: 222). In this paper, we examine not only what politics memes communicate to us, but how this is done. We analyse memes, some in mainstream social media circulation, that praise and criticise the au...
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This paper seeks to examine the impact of Internet memes and humorous viral content on power relations in South Asia using the case study of Pakistan. This question is important because the debate regarding the role of new media and the Internet in politics – either characterising it as a democratising force or as an additional arena for state surveillance and performativity – suggests that it is an important space in which interactions between the state and its constituents must be understood. Considering this, the paper assesses how the proliferation of Internet memes and other humorous viral content on this terrain affects the relationship between actors within public spheres in South Asia with respect to three socio-economic cleavages. The first of these cleavages is relates to the digital divide, the second is generational, and the final one relates to literacy. The paper will begin with a conceptual analysis of literature on humour and memes generally and the key trends and de...
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