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Binders Full of Election Memes: Participatory Culture Invades the 2012 U.S. Election

Authors:

Abstract and Figures

Participatory culture handed the 2012 U.S. presidential election season a bumper crop of political memes. These “election memes,” largely in the form of image macros, took sound bites from the candidates’ debates and speeches and turned them into “digital content units” of political satire “circulated, imitated, and/or transformed via the Internet by many users,” to paraphrase Limor Schifman’s definition of “internet meme” (2013, 177). Image macros like the lolcat, feature bold text on top of an image, often a “stock character,” and like all Internet memes are “multi-participant creative expressions through which cultural and political identities are communicated and negotiated” (Ibid.). This case study focuses on three popular image macro-based election memes that came out of the 2012 US presidential election cycle: “Fired Big Bird,” “Binders Full of Women,” and “You Didn’t Build That,” and argues that sharing such memes is a valid form of political participation in the style of what Tommie Shelby calls “impure dissent” (forthcoming).
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Binders(Full(of(Election(Memes:((
Participatory(Culture(invades(the(2012(U.S.(Election1(
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Erhardt'Graeff'
MIT'Center'for'Civic'Media'
erhardt@media.mit.edu'
November'18,'2014'Final'Edit'
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P-/@,-$=!R)'.#&5!122g5!The%Wealth%of%Networks:%How%Social%Production%Transforms%
Markets%and%Freedom5!d-L!X#C-/M!R#,-!4/&C-$7&%*!"$-775!
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j&0-)!".-/)9-/)/5!Journal%of%Information%Technology%&%Politics!H=!3gGo3l35!
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... Memes emerged in the political mainstream in the US 2004 and 2008 US Presidential elections. Graeff highlights the power of memes as 'cynical' forms of political participation that offer space and power to networked communities (Graeff, 2015). Graeff invokes 'impure dissent' 2 to argue that memes are not an explicit form of civil disobedience against the state, but rather they '[flaunt] morally or politically objectionable content, which can lead to its dismissal by others'. ...
... Maybe it is just funny. Maybe it is a little too true, which underlies the humor and implores us to pass it on' (Graeff, 2015). This type of 'cynical political participation' supports Bennett and Segerberg's (2012) logic of connective action, where loosely coordinated groups use networks to organize and activate social movements that 'coexist with their adoption and exploitation by professional political organizations' (Graeff, 2015). ...
... Maybe it is a little too true, which underlies the humor and implores us to pass it on' (Graeff, 2015). This type of 'cynical political participation' supports Bennett and Segerberg's (2012) logic of connective action, where loosely coordinated groups use networks to organize and activate social movements that 'coexist with their adoption and exploitation by professional political organizations' (Graeff, 2015). This was clearly evidenced by President Trump's use of the widely popular Pepe the Frog meme to bolster his campaign and connect to a younger audience. ...
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Young people today are immersed in digital culture: often considered savvy navigators of online ecosystems and adept at using everyday technologies to share, create and express. These technologies are often seen as social and personal tools instead of spaces for meaningful participation. This paper shares the results of an investigation in young people’s attitudes towards popular social communication modalities – memes and hashtags – for civic purposes. The study employs Emerging Citizens: a suite of digital literacy tools and accompanying learning content that teach people of all ages how to critique and create hashtags and memes. This inquiry explores how young people perceive memes and hashtags as relevant avenues for civic expression, and the impact that a digital literacy intervention can have on youth attitudes. An analysis of the student experience using the Emerging Citizens tools and reflection of their creations finds that digital literacy interventions impact young people’s perceptions of popular social modalities for civic impact.
... Following a framing established by media scholar Ethan Zuckerman's (2007) so-called 'Cute Cat Theory' of digital activism, which prophesied a new golden era for media activism in the era of visual social media, political memes were discussed in terms of a new kind of subaltern discourse. Within this dominant framing, political memes were theorised as instances of symbolic 'meme speech acts' (Graeff, 2015) that both demarcated in-group status within the new category of a 'networked public ' (boyd, 2010), while at the same time serving to expand the broader spectrum of political debate to include otherwise marginalised viewpoints (Shifman, 2013). It was in this spirit of progressive activism, inaugurated by Zuckerman, that the influential Dutch media design collective Metahaven published a manifesto in 2014 titled 'Can jokes bring down governments?', in which they celebrated the emergence of the political meme as 'an open-source weapon of the public' capable of disrupting what they referred to as 'reality-management'. ...
... This framing conceptualised political memes in terms of a protest against 'consensus politics', where consensus is seen as 'the crystallisation of relations of power' (Mouffe, 2000: 49). If consensus functions as a mask for domination, from Zuckerman's initial framing it would follow that political memes represented a form of 'impure dissent' exposing us to otherwise unspoken political opinions and thereby expanding the scope of progressive political debate (Graeff, 2015). In this framing, authors have championed memes as an 'enjoyable route for expressing political opinions' (Shifman, 2013: 123) in which 'democracy benefits' since 'more people [. . ...
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Previously theorised as vehicles for expressing progressive dissent, this article considers how political memes have become entangled in the recent reactionary turn of web subcultures. Drawing on Chantal Mouffe’s work on political affect, this article examines how online anonymous communities use memetic literacy, memetic abstraction, and memetic antagonism to constitute themselves as political collectives. Specifically, it focuses on how the subcultural and highly reactionary milieu of 4chan’s /pol/ board does so through an anti-Semitic meme called triple parentheses. In aggregating the contents of this peculiar meme from a large dataset of /pol/ comments, the article finds that /pol/ users, or anons, tend to use the meme to formulate a nebulous out-group resonant with populist demagoguery.
... Embedded in the DNA of networked publics is the potential for opinions to go viral, spreading very quickly across vast, interconnected networks having great effect compared to the low amount of effort demanded of the individual (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012, 761). Some have even considered this exponential sharing of content as a new political discourse in itself (Graeff, 2016). ...
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Full-text available
The establishment and constant development of social media technologies over the last two decades have left media scholars with a burning desire to understand their contribution to the formation of public opinion and its political consequences. At this very moment it is undeniable that public opinion fuelled by social media is a force to be reckoned with. At the same time, the complex information flows and communication practices on social media make it difficult to predict how public opinion will form. Research into how information and opinions are shared has created concerns that some parts of the public are becoming increasingly politically homogenous and polarized due to social media. This thesis project suggests a new framework to evaluate the function of public opinion, specifically in relation to the opportunities offered by social media. The framework is inclusive and conflates concepts that are usually considered separate within the field of media studies e.g. opinion polling and deliberation. It is a descriptive framework that highlights advantages and weaknesses for certain instances of public opinion. The framework is used to inform the development of computational methods that can be used to gauge public opinion with respect to political homophily and polarization. These methods rely on automatically calculating the cross-cutting agreement, i.e. how much agreement there is between people with opposing political affiliations, as they interact in public social media discussions. They are developed as universal methods to enable public opinion to be measured based on how politically homogenous the users who react to and share a piece of information are and how well political oppositions in the comment threads are able to reach agreement, in combination with topics and sentiments. The methods are tested on a large cross-section of public Danish Facebook pages related to everything from local fitness clubs to government pages and news media organization. Results show that high levels of political homophily and disagreement that are likely to cause polarization are highly dependent on context. Overall polarization does not appear to be increasing over a period of five years, except if moderated by certain other factors of which discussion topics related to refugees and immigration is one of the strongest. The results are furthermore an indicator that the methods developed can be used to effectively evaluate public opinion with respect to homophily and polarization. Since the methods are computational, the process is easily automated and can be used to create 3 tools that can deliver increased transparency in public opinion formation as it unfolds on social media platforms.
... According to Moody-Ramirez and Church (2019), the 2016 campaign season memes represent a grassroots attempt to shift political ideologies. Grassroots political memes offered some power against prevailing mainstream political views (Graeff, 2015). They also served to accentuate and diversify visual representations of presidential hopefuls, ensuring that candidates did not have complete control of their own political image (Moody-Ramirez & Church, 2019). ...
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... However, memes are produced by anonymous amateurs and gain legitimacy from repeated online transmission rather than location in legacy media. Their capacity to influence political discourse was first observed in the 2012 US presidential campaign, when 'Big Bird' and 'binders of women' memes proved so damaging to Republican candidate Mitt Romney (Tay 2014;Graeff 2015;Rentschler and Thrift 2015). ...
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Impure Dissent: Hip Hop and the Political Ethics of Marginalized Black Urban Youth
  • Tommie Shelby
  • Forthcoming
Shelby, Tommie. forthcoming. "Impure Dissent: Hip Hop and the Political Ethics of Marginalized Black Urban Youth." In From Voice to Influence: Understanding Citizenship in a Digital Age, edited by Danielle Allen and Jennifer Light.