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.

The Memes are Winning

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. And frankly, I’m still not convinced that they aren’t a repetitive, self-obsessed cry for attention. (The joke will become apparent later).

Still, I shouldn’t be surprised. Facebook and indeed social media in general always move ahead of my electronic proclivities. As soon as I’ve mastered the latest gimmick, the next arrives. Only the other day, I finally grasped the Guardian Online, and the tactics required to project the idealised journalistic profile to my ‘friends’. You know the feeling. The one where you flick through your ‘article history’ to discover that most of the articles are either banal or sex-related. And then the guilt which induces you to hurriedly click on a series of more serious articles so you can purport to also care about ‘the issues’. And go to Cambridge.

Then, all of a sudden, along comes a meme. My first thought: why is this all about ‘me’? Surely it would be more efficient simply to write me². In any case, the memes are spreading, and fast, feasting off Cambridge stereotypes.

Naturally Homerton and Johns have fared worst of the colleges. The former may as well not be in Cambridge. And the latter, well, most people wish that it wasn’t. But enough college-ism. Clearly everyone’s special in the Cambridge community. Unless you study education.

Finally, a quick quibble with the memes I’ve seen: all to often, despite their generalisations, they’re undeniably right. In fact, the frequency of their correctness is beginning to undermine my belief in my own independent agency.

My only serious observation is that memes alter the discourse, offering an easier, faster, and more striking avenue for sharing in-jokes and parodying the institutions around us. If you are a fan of empowerment, then you should enter quickmeme.com