Yet more memes: a political slant

Until a week ago, I had never even heard of a meme. Now they’re plastered all over Facebook, clogging up my newsfeed with their wittiness. Are they anything more than the latest Facebook fad? The answer lies in the politics.

Liberal democracies pride themselves on allowing citizens to make rational, informed choices based on the world around them. For this to happen, there must exist a free press with the ability to scrutinise the vehicles of the state.

But the recent scandal at News International – revealing the nexus between a media elite and our politicians – has shown this to be little more than a cosy fiction. Rupert Murdoch, along with a cabal of media tycoons, have been allowed to set the political agenda, determining what is talked about and even shaping the way people approach certain issues.

Memes are hardly about to solve this problem overnight. Yet they are symptomatic of a wider trend: the rise of social media, a forum where users generate their own content and where information is disseminated more widely. The result is a more meaningful dialogue, one that more accurately reflects the hopes and fears of people, rather than simply a function of whatever News International decides to publish.

What memes contribute to this dialogue is their simplicity. A cursory glance at one, and you understand why they work: you chuckle both at the parody itself and the realisation that someone else feels the same way about an issue. Until now, this solidarity has been the preserve of literature and cartoons. But crafting and reading an article take time; depicting David Cameron in a condom isn’t easy either. Memes, by contrast, are both straightforward to make and easy to understand. Any person from any walk of life can enter quickmeme.com and conjure a scathing 5-word critique of the coalition government’s planned reforms of the NHS.

In other words, memes hold the power of literature condensed into a single graphic. They can elicit norm-defying responses, prompting people to challenge their staid conceptions of power. Or, you know, they can just be funny.