Visual Memes as Neutralizers of Political Dissent

Abstract

This paper explores the role of visual memes as neutralizers of contested past and present narratives of occupation and dissent by focusing both on the memetic structure of Occupy as well as on the digital visual memes associated with this movement. It examines the emergence of the term "occupy" as a meme in and of itself -Occupy Wall Street spurred Occupy Chicago, Occupy Oakland and even Occupy Sesame Street and Occupy North Pole as well as the "We are the 99%" meme that has come to define Occupy. Through the trope of the meme, this paper further conceptualizes revolution as both return and rupture made possible by viral civil and political dissent. It argues that there is a notable distinction between physical participation in the Occupy Movement and virtual participation through the reworking of Occupy's memes. Whereas the first modality serves as an active disruptor of the political normative imaginary, the second works in precisely the opposite fashion, in its reconstitution of a common-sense dominant image of the political.

The Influence-Network Model of the Photojournalistic Icon

“…As the image spread through social media (primarily Twitter) hours after its original publication on a Turkish news site, about 17% of the shared images from the news event appropriated the iconic image in cartoons, memes, and other formats (Vis & Goriunova, 2015). Photojournalistic icons get their multiple lives online when they become Internet memes: images that share common elements of content, form, and stance and use the original image as a template to create new meaning (Hristova, 2013(Hristova, , 2014Milner, 2013;Shifman, 2014aShifman, , 2014b. These images can serve as "memetic photos" (Shifman, 2014b, p. 89), images that invite memetic creativity for a variety of reasons: They may display a visual incongruence that begs for resolution or repetition in other contexts, they may freeze an unfinished action or a tense moment that provokes creative responses, or they may display an absurd situation or a funny facial expression that gets reappropriated in other compositions that already have existing content (Shifman, 2014a(Shifman, , 2014b.…”

“…With such an enormous influx of images uploaded and circulated among traditional and nontraditional media outlets, the “Golden Era” of the iconic image has come to an end (Dahmen & Miller, 2012). The providence of contemporary news icons has also changed: It no longer traces back exclusively—as it has for decades—to the professional institution of legacy media, thus making the production of present-day photography, including icons, more democratic and widespread (Borenstein, 2009; Hristova, 2014; Mortensen, 2016). The “news media” are no longer a tiny band of elites.…”

How do Internet memes speak security?

“…Clinton, in Revesz 2016). Despite this, academics in the IR field are only just beginning to theorise the meme phenomenon (Hamilton 2014, Hristova, 2014, Särmä 2014, Nagle 2017).…”

“…Some scholars have noted that many memes directly address issues related to IR scholarship (Hamilton 2014, Särmä 2014, Hristova 2014, Mina 2014). Hamilton concludes:…”

THE MILLENIAL GENERATION, HADITH MEMES, AND IDENTITY POLITICS: The New Face of Political Contestation in Contemporary Indonesia

“…The use of meme in politics has also attracted scholarly inquires of several scholars, such as its use as a medium to voice political aspiration (Hristova 2014;Bebić, et al 2018;Morimoto 2018;Kulkarni 2017). In the case of an election, the use of memes drastically increases, such as what happened to the presidential election of the United States (Heiskanen 2017;Ross and Rivers 2017;Moody-Ramirez and Church 2019).…”