Tanushree (Core Post #2)

Donovan, Dreyfuss, and Friedberg’s Meme Wars: The Untold Stories of Online Battles Upending Democracy in America, encourages its readers to think about the central place memes have come to occupy in both cultural and political formations. A look into a complex cultural and technological phenomenon, the authors allow us insight into the recent history of right wing, and alt-right, attempts at social movement building online. 

The absence of the body’s imbrication with technology, which has been so central to work on the digital, seemed absent from the author’s conversation. This was particularly explicit in the divide the authors seemed to institute between the “wires” and the “weeds”. I was tempted for a moment, to look into the idea of memes and the viral nature of their proliferation, and consider the idea that somehow the circulation of these images was generating a certain kind of affect, which propelled those who shared them to see them as a kind of call to action. I was reminded here of Anna Munster’s exploration of virality as contagion, wherein she links the force of the viral video to Guattari’s marshaling of “vitality affects”, and “molecular vitalities”, and attempts to understand how affect can go viral. Munster argues that the “sticky” nature of these digital objects, can be attributed to movements of  and movements within networks - the viral transmission of these videos takes place through an “affective-socio-technical relationality” (Munster 2013, 122). This implies a coming together of the vitality of the clip, its “refrain” or repetition through a particular platform, and its multiplication through other networks and platforms (Munster 2013, 104-107, 122).

Munster makes virality seem innocuous at times, but as Donovan et all demonstrate, there is something more sinister at work. It would be interesting to consider the role of big data and algorithms in the nature of virality, and this also leads me to wonder if the messaging of memes is at all precognitive? The authors argue that memes resonate within certain communities because of a shared history or an experience, which is unrecognizable to anyone outside the group (Donovan et all 2022).The meme image (or phrase) taps into an established set of cultural and linguistic codes.  It almost functions as a calling card to a political affiliation, allowing people with similar allegiances to identify each other. Given that our online presence implies a constant harvesting of data, our “For You Page” only displays content that the algorithm considers relevant to our interests. Memes too, therefore, circulate within what the authors call an “algorithmic echo chamber”. Given this framework, it is impossible to argue that a viral meme is innocuous, or we can only consider its force and not interrogate its genealogies.