Core Post 3 – Maggie Roberts

“It’s just a joke!”

This groan-inducing sentiment accompanied much of my teenage-life, growing up in rural-Ontario. Spouted from the mouths of mainly men (boys), and mainly white people, this proclamation attempted to cauterize the wounds forged by saying the most ridiculously racist/misogynistic/homophobic thing you have ever heard in your life.

This core memory of these boys comes to mind when reading the excerpts from Meme Wars (2022). Just as Elliot Rodger became “an ironic political hero” for online incel communities, this same irony “became a tool to hide one’s true [hateful] beliefs behind a veneer of jokes” (44 & 57). It is memes, a perceived form of entertainment media, which are the vehicle for this dangerous ideological perversion and “trojan horse” the porous boundary between joke and belief, fantasy and action.

In the book’s “Epilogue,” the authors posit memes as a “unit of culture that, like words or phrases in a language, can be used to transmit ideas through and across generations” (216). While they cannot be held responsible for all the failures of humanity, memes serve as an intricate case study into the process of image signification, designification and resignification. These foundational theories of cultural studies become even more complicated because memes are primarily disseminated via virtual channels, traveling distances and reaching a number of people so extreme that early cultural theorists were not considering.

We must then come up with a new tool kit to understand and address the interpolation of media images into harmful rhetoric via technological means. The ontological machinery that this growing phenomenon requires is in sight, being conceived of by previous theorists we have studied including Wendy Chun and Simone Brown. How are these memes spreading and who are they targeting? Public discourse and left-leaning media often cite Facebook and “Boomers” as the source of this misinformation. However, Donovan et, al. seems to suggest that these derogatory memes (and their imbued ideology) have another target: young people. In “Chapter 6: Unite the Right,” the authors examined the popular conservative persona and speaker Milo Yiannopoulus as having two primary platforms to spread his right-wing beliefs: “Twitter and college campuses” (138). My suggestion here is that perhaps the left—of which I am apart of—falls victim to this same myopic meme-ified thinking, reducing this rise in right-wing politics, media and technological artifacts as sprouting from a monolith, when in fact their tactics are far more complex and sinister.

References:

Donovan, Joan, Emily Dreyfuss and Brian Friedberg. Meme Wars: The Untold Story of the Online Battles Upending Democracy in America. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022.