Grief and loss are difficult and even more if you live in the alternative reality of the president. Memes are one way of coping and they require our attention if we want to understand future strategies of the far right.
On the day of President Trump’s Inauguration, Jessica Starr was recorded screaming in angst at the thought of Trump becoming the United States’ next Commander in Chief. The New York Post went out of their way to make Jessica the face of the liberal “snowflake” — a pejorative term for someone melting down. Over the last several years, Jessica’s image has been used in far-right meme spaces and in the miasma of message boards where Trump supporters revel in their appreciation of a leader who would truly upset the opposition.
This election is not over when we find out who wins, but what we do over the next several years.
There was literally a candidate on the ballot that had a vision for a healthy future for the country. One that foresaw a need for accessible healthcare for everyone, a distributive model of economy that would uplift so many. A pandemic revealed innumerable weaknesses in the US superstructure and yet, the electorate dumped that candidate for the more stabile, more approachable, more classically political candidate.
And here we are, on election day, making a civic choice between a leader who refuses to lead in any meaningful way, and another candidate with decades of political experience. And somehow, it’s a toss-up.
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2020 has shifted how we use our internet and amid the chaos, social media has a responsibility to provide collective safety
We are currently embedded in digital chaos with nowhere to go. The walls of the echo-chambers have concretized over the last decade and most people enjoy the comfort of our their own ideas on repeat like a glitched playlist. Meanwhile our critical thinking skills have reduced to passivity. The digital structure resembles a reality, but is an environment of informational chaos and mental waste. We now live among the litter of our feeds which have finally accumulated so much digital detritus that it is spilling into our real world. …
Video creators have so much power when it comes to producing content that bends what we would objectively call a narrative style. Being a video producer means that you are in control of your audience — you control the eyes, the time, and the mind of the viewer. The tools we have access to, from iMovie to Adobe Premiere, are more powerful than we often think. We have control in our timelines to produce any possible conceptual outcome. Our cameras are not just devices to mimic our human eyes, but to bend the ability of what we can do. …
VR missed several opportunities, but this is the biggest yet
The first time I put on my headset and walked around in VRChat, the avatar-filled virtual reality multiworld, I accidentally interrupted a small gathering of friends. They were meeting in a small cabin on one of the hundreds of worlds hosted on the platform. As far as I could tell, this particular world only had one cabin surrounded by a flat, low-resolution landscape and bordered by water. As I explored the virtual space, I could hear the voices of the attendees in the cabin stop their conversation and look out the window at me. I was fairly noticeable since I…
We’re losing our collective minds out there in the in-there land. Indoors and self-isolating, we’ve rediscovered some of the tools we’ve come to know as burdensome as friendly reminders of our connection to others. In addition, there’s been a huge uptick in creative content that’s been attributed to the cloistering. Some of it is the usual fare, some of it is mild reworking of old jokes, and some are creative interventions to the new way of being digital.
Living digital and being socially isolated means that we can mindlessly scroll our feeds or we can participate in the environment. …
When Elisa started her Instagram account 3 years ago, she used the platform to help fellow travelers learn the more intricate details about her home city of Rome, Italy. Elisa’s account, @RomeInside, has over 35,000 followers and she provides tips and insider cultural information about the city of Rome. She covers food, culture, music, city sights, archaeological sites and art exhibits. In the more recent past, she’s used her account to keep her audience informed about the current countrywide quarantine and civilian lockdown during the global Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic. …
A few months after 9/11, I wrote in my journal that I was afraid that Iraq had nuclear weapons. I wrote it in response to sensational (and false) news report that inspired a forever war. I was a sophomore in college. My friends and I had seen the terror attack on New York City from our dorm windows. We watched the scene unfold on television and in real life simultaneously. I still distinctly remember the abject uneasiness that came from the attacks especially from the information cycles that followed. The intense discomfort of what happens next — will there be…
It’s now fairly clear we are in a protracted meme war until (and possibly forever after) the election. Trump’s army of memelords, edgelords, memers, and memesmiths have been at it since the day he rode down his golden escalator; Bernie’s dank stash of leftist memes have created a formidable opponent in 2019 and the early part of 2020 as the Democratic Primaries and Caucasus have accelerated the competitive rhetoric. Then, on Wednesday, February 12th, Bloomberg, with all his (arguably infinite) income waded into the battle, recruiting over a dozen meme accounts to push pro-Bloomberg, ironic memes to their 60 million…
Memes are the surplus of culture. Online memes exist in a state of constant creation, flowing outward from communities, pages, accounts, and memelords, ready to be amplified by influencers, referenced by your family, or shared by your friends. However, political memes act more like the exhaust from a factory — more appear when the systems are working harder.
Four years ago, Trump’s rise to prominence was amplified by a simple meme message, a piece of nostalgic reductionism to be worn as headwear or printed on stickers. The meme was so efficient, it was adapted directly into conservative culture and deployed…
Jamie Cohen
Digital Culture Expert. Cultural and Media Studies PhD. Co-author of the first peer-reviewed article on Pepe the frog. Teaches Media Studies at Queens College
