The Situation Room icon and its Internet memes: Subversion of the Osama bin Laden raid and fragmentation of iconicity in remix culture.

Abstract

The Situation Room photograph, which shows President Barack Obama and cabinet members watching the Osama bin Laden raid in 2011, remains the dominant official image of the event. Within hours of its public release, scores of Internet memes of the famous picture offered alternative interpretations of what had taken place in Pakistan during the military mission, often contradicting the president’s positive description of the operation. This qualitative interpretative study argues that many of the memes that proliferated through cyberspace symbolically subverted the bin Laden raid, disrupting and challenging its celebratory framing by the administration. The study highlights potential competition that Internet memes might pose to institutional accounts of the past and to icons themselves, suggesting possible fracturing of iconicity in remix culture.

Distant reading 940,000 online circulations of 26 iconic photographs

“…Boudana et al (2017) studied 34 different memes of the same image. Mielczarek (2020b) looked at “dozens” of memes of the situation room photograph. Olesen (2018) looked at a sample of 20 different versions of the Alan Kurdi photograph.…”

“…Memeification (Jensen et al, 2020) of photographic icons is seen as the most extreme manifestation of this process. According to recent scholarly work, memes can collapse the “original historical and biographical contexts” of an iconic photograph (Merrill, 2020: 115); they threaten to destroy its original meaning and, as a result, its “political and ethical significance” (Boudana et al, 2017: 1228); they decontextualize the iconic image and “divorce [it] from the political” (Ibrahim, 2016: 585), “poach[ing]” the original meaning of the icon and “supplement[ing] it with new interpretations that typically deviate from the main narrative behind the famous image” (Mielczarek, 2020b).…”

“…Although it was fully developed around 2000 (Brink, 2000;Hariman and Lucaites, 2001;Perlmutter, 1998), when the advent of digital media was already clear, the concept of the iconic photograph has often been connected to the dominance of top-down mass media, such as the newspaper, the illustrated magazine, and television, in the three decades after the Second World War (Boudana et al, 2017;Hariman and Lucaites, 2018b). More recently, scholars have begun to debate the effects of digital media on the creation, selection, distribution, reception, and meaning of iconic photographs (Boudana et al, 2017;Dahmen et al, 2018;Durham, 2018;Hariman and Lucaites, 2018b;Ibrahim, 2016;Merrill, 2020;Mielczarek, 2020b;Mortensen, 2017;Olesen, 2018). Calling into question the "pre-digital typology of iconic images" (Mielczarek, 2020b), those scholars investigate what happens to older iconic photographs when they are circulated online and how digital media impact the formation and dissemination of new iconic images.…”

“…More recently, scholars have begun to debate the effects of digital media on the creation, selection, distribution, reception, and meaning of iconic photographs (Boudana et al, 2017; Dahmen et al, 2018; Durham, 2018; Hariman and Lucaites, 2018b; Ibrahim, 2016; Merrill, 2020; Mielczarek, 2020b; Mortensen, 2017; Olesen, 2018). Calling into question the “pre-digital typology of iconic images” (Mielczarek, 2020b), those scholars investigate what happens to older iconic photographs when they are circulated online and how digital media impact the formation and dissemination of new iconic images. While answers to these questions vary, scholars agree that the digital circulation of digitized and born-digital iconic pictures often leads to the “trivializing” (Boudana et al, 2017), “decontextualizing” (Mortensen, 2017), “eroding” (Dahmen et al, 2018), “fracturing” (Mielczarek, 2020a), or “collapsing” (Merrill, 2020) of the original contextual meaning of iconic images.…”