Fake News by Melissa Zimdars

Author:Melissa Zimdars
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: electoral politics; Trump; post-truth; mass media; deception; journalism; propaganda; media studies; fact-check; misinformation; spam; click bait; viral; alt-right
Publisher: MIT Press

Memes as Stitching Device

Memes are central to that process of citizen engagement in politics (both positively and negatively) because they act as a stitching device. Memes stitch in several ways. First, memes stitch together different media platforms. The form of a meme means it can easily migrate across media platforms, traversing between sites such as Reddit, Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, and many others.8 This means that memes are easily woven into political narratives, adding poignant political messaging to social networks. Based on the affordances of memes and their iterating and reciprocating potential, a larger political and ideological narrative can be stitched between platforms.

Second, memes stitch together narrative and ideology. Memes, as metonym, make salient and intensify political discourse. As a part standing for the whole, memes can provide jolts of affect resulting in cohesion around political ideology in the most efficient of ways, thus solidifying the political. This often happens through capitalizing on everyday, emergent digital vernacular adapted to politics, which Cole Stryker calls “visual vernacular” as the “language of memes.”9 When placed in the context of political campaigns and when serving the interests of candidates or political ideology, memes amass a political vernacular—a shared cultural register to stoke and weaponize memetic fires.

In the lead-up to the 2016 election, for example, some of the memetic cultural vernacular that emerged around candidate Trump included “Pepe Trump,” being “redpilled,” or “Can’t stump the Trump.”10 Memes are “strands of populist discourse,”11 but within the context of campaigns those strands are stitched together into calcified, weaponized political ideology. Memetic politics were so mainstream and part of the 2016 campaign that candidates and their families responded and propagated memes during the course of the campaign themselves. For example, Donald Trump Jr. posted a meme to his Instagram page in response to Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” comment.12

This political meme (figure 15.1) is doing the work of signaling to an audience of campaign supporters an understood cultural vernacular laced with political ideology. Notice the usage of a “friend” and the humor / popular culture referencing of the image as a form of “plausible deniability” to shield from potential blowback, while fully embracing “Pepe Trump” next to then candidate Trump. When humor is added to memes, citizens can spread memes by hiding behind the humor as a form of plausible deniability—in a way other mediated forms of ideology or campaign messages wouldn’t as easily spread (such as a campaign speech or policy position statement).

Figure 15.1

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