Raphael Thys
From signaling to organizing, memes as mobilizers in the age of viral media
To meme or not to meme? That is the grand yet seldom-asked question. In the age of viral media, memeing is implied as a cornerstone of online communication. So the question is not so much whether to meme but rather how and to what end?
Memes are powerful units of cultural ephemera. Conveying complex meaning and sentiment in a minimum of space, they have the ability to illustrate, inform, encode and signal anything from information to allegiance. As memes replace traditional cultural artifacts, they act as easily digestible vessels of social commentary and personal expression, serving as instrumental aids for social and political participation. They are a central vehicle of online communication and increasingly, a source of social currency.
And they are everywhere: in family group chats, on newsfeeds and even referenced in political campaigns. Beyond packing humor and social commentary into a shorthand, easily-digestible format, memes are the culmination of sociopolitical and linguistic drift — valuable tools and vessels of culture. Sometimes there is no better way to get a point across than with a meme. They enable people to convey complex ideas, and all of the social and cultural implications tied to them, in sometimes even one-word utterances.
But before we go any further, to answer the big question and demystify this seemingly novel form of communication — what is a meme?
Given that memes offer a degree of fluidity for any variety of messaging purposes, context is key in determining meaning. Some act as symbols and some present unhindered templates for messages to be conveyed, but the sheer fluidity of memes would not be possible without the infinite audiences social media provides — a feature referred to as the “context collapse.”
Context collapse refers to the flattening of multiple audiences into a single channel. It’s a sociological term that describes how users interact in spaces with possible infinite audiences online as opposed to the limited and controlled audiences we interact with in real life.
Context collapse in social media specifically refers to the idea that social networking channels nullify social and cultural context, setting a new standard for audience interaction. The unfettered audience of any given media platform can interpret, appropriate and spread memes, facilitating the evolution of those symbols and their applied meaning as they pass through different groups of users.
“Meaning is contextually specific, and what something means in one in-group, it does not mean in another in-group,” explains Citarella. This notion of context collapse factors heavily when regarding the evolution of memes like Pepe the Frog, for example, who was co-opted by the alt-right in 2015 but repurposed in 2021 as a symbol of resistance during the Hong Kong protests or reclaimed by American leftists on Twitch.
“If you were to visit /poll/ you would find the racist Pepes, but if you were to visit another group, you would find Pepe meaning very different things. And the question that throws all of this up in the air is the context collapse of social media,” explains Citarella. “The thing that we are really trying to map is kind of a technical question of social media, because we know the social aspect where the symbol only has meaning to the specific context of the group that it’s disseminated in.”
The same templates would not be made available to and travel through usage by different groups if not for context collapse. When memes are introduced to increasingly mainstream platforms (and therefore audiences), once-niche symbols and images that were only localized to usage by a particular audience or subculture can now be adopted or co-opted by any group of people.
Such as different memes can carry various meanings depending on the knowledge or subcultural alignment of the consumer in line with the in-group out-group divide, context collapse allows memes that are intended for a particular audience to flow freely into the ether, landing on whomever happens to scroll by. When you’re using professional jargon with co-workers, for example, you have control over who has access to that situation when talking face-to-face or even over the phone. But when you’re communicating with a co-worker on a Facebook page, an infinite number of social groups could bear witness to that interaction. So that jargon could make it to a mom or uncle or roommate — people who may not have all of the insider context to interpret the message.
So ultimately, the context collapse of social media levels the exchange of information.
The versatility of memes calls for a fluid, context-dependent understanding of traditional cultural symbols and emblematic imagery that once had fixed meaning. Simultaneously, because context matters, the symbols themselves may no longer hold as much weight as the channels in which they are disseminated.
But arguably, the infinite audiences that social media provides is a key feature in allowing internet memes to be what they are and serve the versatile functions they do.
“For something to become a meme, you need people watching the thing, you need people talking about the thing, you need people then remixing the thing and making it their own, adding their own iterations and applying it to new contexts,” adds Milner.
In the end, all elements bring us back to context.
In the age of social media, the notion that symbols are fixed is rendered void. Memes serve as a vessel for social commentary and culture, while channels for communication act as a surrogate for social movements.
“The memes are symbols,” explains Milner. “They’re kind of empty vessels in the sense that people put into them what they see in them, and how people understand them is really what matters … There is some kind of cultural artifact, some kind of content, some kind of text, some kind of whatever. And that resonates with people, and then they spread it, and, as they spread it, new people make it their own.”
The adoption or appropriation of memes by different groups can package complex narratives in easily digestible formats, heavily influencing socio-political outlooks and engagement. These internet-made symbols convey complex social commentary — and the representative imagery associated with a particular movement — using minimal space.
Like with any social commentary, context provides a whole lot of essential information to understanding the core of a message, but communication channels influence the message from a structural perspective. The medium, largely, is the message. Content, subculture and technological base are intrinsically tied, as platforms greatly determine what types of content can exist and flourish in each space.
Our social sphere is defined by a lack of separation between online and offline culture. Memes have far-reaching implications for socio-political structure, as recognizable images replace words on protest signs and one-word utterances replace paragraphs of text without losing that complex and layered meaning to the in-group. They’re fun, they’re funny, but memes are also incredibly powerful.
New fluidity in the age of social media is key to understanding the ever-changing chain of social and political movement and progression. While symbols were once localized to groups, movements and ideologies, today those symbols — in the form of memes — constantly evolve with the cultural spaces that carry them.
"THE LEFT CAN'T MEME"
“Memes are not just a political thing. They're not just an extremist thing. They're everywhere. And I think what sort of extremists realized maybe earlier than anyone is that you could use memes as part of an effective radicalization strategy,” explains Roose, the Times columnist. “If you just couched your most extreme beliefs in memes and humor — if you weren't an angry cross-burning white supremacist but you were like a jokey online neo-Nazi — you could become more palatable to people who may have otherwise been turned off by your style.”
“A picture's worth a thousand words. And, you know, having been as scholarly as I had to be to go to Harvard and the excellent schools I attended prior to that in New York City, I don't have the patience to read minutiae anymore,” said Gilbert. “Sometimes when your brain is full, you just want something that's pithy with an image, and an idea. And that's what this all boils down to, is the amount of information that I study is overwhelming … A meme kind of just says it all, when you're just tired from everything, you know. And so they pack a punch, and I share a lot of them, even on LinkedIn, on Pinterest.”
Memes act as potent units of sociopolitical messaging, coding meaning and vast swaths of information in a minimum of space. There’s no denying that memes are one of the most important tools in an internet-era radical’s artillery of mediums, but Roose’s investigation aptly illustrates just how that path materializes. And the people who engage in this communication are hardly homogenous.
“It’s one thing to have [Gilbert] narrate the story of how she got into QAnon, but it’s really illuminating to actually see it. Her Facebook page was sort of telling the story in real-time. You can see how she went from Democrat to Jill Stein voter who was disillusioned with the Democrats, to getting more into countercultural figures and sort of hacktivists — people like Julian Assange and Edward Snowden,” explained Roose, recalling his interviews with and writing on Gilbert’s meme sharing on Facebook.
“Part of the ethos of these communities is that you’re supposed to do your own research — that you’re not supposed to blindly accept things that are filtered through the mainstream media,” added Roose. “People in QAnon trust the grainy memes that their friends are posting more than the things that are being said on the evening news. And it’s almost like … the worse something looks, the less polished it is, the more likely it is to be true, because it’s coming from this alternate universe of researchers and diggers and people who assemble shards of internet rumors and old screenshots and Wikipedia pages. It’s like this forbidden knowledge that they’re accessing. And to them, that feels more real than the people in suits on the news reading off a teleprompter.”
Ultimately, memes are tools. They can illustrate, they can bind and they can certainly indoctrinate. Encoding ideology can be a powerful pipeline as we’ve seen historically for thousands of years. The only difference is that the source, characters and format are now digitized and ready to share at a click of your mouse.
So what does this mean for us as internet users?
We have the collective bargaining power to shift and influence conversations, conventions and educational emphasis. By wielding the power of memes, through humor and niche, highly-referential content-sharing, we can incentivize the people in our circles to become 'hip' to the things we care about. We have the power to change everything — it just takes conscious and intentional information-sharing and posting habits.
By educating ourselves about the power of memetic content and the algorithms that attempt to standardize and commodify how we interact on the world wide web, we can manipulate outcomes to achieve what we want.
Maybe you just share silly memes on Facebook because they're cute or funny or a nice break from the weight of the real world. Or maybe you share memes to signal where you stand and what you care about. Intentional sharing can be revolutionary, though. Don't underestimate the power of the medium — because the meme is the message.