Do memes affect our political ideas?

Memes have become an integral part of digital communication. These images, which are generally photomontages with limited technical merit and almost always have the same form and structure, spread quickly on social media and messaging apps, and provide our everyday lives with a dose of humour. According to Ezequiel Soriano, a student on the doctoral programme in Humanities and Communication at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), they are "a way of engaging with the internet, a kind of digital carnivalesque world view that mocks the sincere, trivializes the serious, disrupts the static, and adds layers of irony to online interactions".

From closed circles to going viral

Although most of the memes that circulate on the internet are humorous, and some feature dark humour and even poor taste, the open access study Un Political Compass de los estudios sobre memes [A Political Compass of Studies on Memes] by Soriano, a member of the Critical studies in culture, design and network communication (MEDIACCIONS) –research group in the Faculty of Information and Communication Sciences–, focuses on memes with political content, who is carrying out his doctoral thesis under the direction of full professor Elisenda Ardèvol, from the Faculty of Arts and Humanities Studies. He argues that they can be used for specific political goals as part of communication processes and even for proselytism. He pointed out that they are "forms of online communion" between people who belong to closed circles, such as online discussion forums, who share their own "jokes, games and symbols" that sometimes transcend the boundaries of their natural environment, and go viral. "These memes are humorous, but also create communities of like-minded people, geeks who share the same absurd, twisted or bizarre jokes."

Proselytizing with humour

Some studies link humour to an improvement in communication skills and an increased impact of messages. Accordingly, the study, published in Teknokultura. Revista de Cultura Digital y Movimientos Sociales highlights the use of memes, perhaps the quintessential form of humour in the digital world, as an important means of communication for political parties. "Communication specialists working for these parties create humorous images that engage with the logic of memes and then circulate them anonymously on social media," said Soriano. He pointed to the anonymity of memes as "crucial in generating communication that appears to come from the general public, from users who have no direct links to a political party".

Politigram: people posting political memes

The UOC study describes a phenomenon known as the politigram, an ecosystem of political humour based on memes that are not produced by any political party, but instead by users, who are probably teenagers not old enough to directly participate in institutional politics. It is a subculture of "tricksters and pranksters," according to the study, which finds that forums such as 4Chan and Reddit provide a more or less private online space where users can give free rein to a mixture of extreme art, "shitposting" (posting irrelevant and aggressive content of poor quality in terms of language and design), and extremist political attitudes, sometimes with racist and sexist overtones aligned with alt-right movements. "Far from treating them as trivial jokes, we need to understand the role played by memes' fast, oral and humorous dynamics," said Soriano. "Thinking of memes as trivial nonsense is part of a literary prejudice according to which ephemeral and mutable things are deemed less important than things that are permanent, such as books or works of art."

The study uses the popular Political Compass meme, which consists of axes of coordinates along which different political positions are located with a touch of humour, as an example of a meme culture that transcends humour, and becomes a means of communication that can be tailored to suit any situation or subject matter because of its communicative power. "I believe we should consider memes in terms of how they are valued in online communities," he said, referring to the fact that they become codes that simultaneously act as a barrier for the uninitiated and as a language of the online communities that use them to "create a kind of intimate space in which there are no spectators, but where everyone participates and is involved".

New ways of creating content

The types of communication are not always pre-established in what could now be defined as meme culture. "There are many memer communities, and like memes, they are ephemeral," said Soriano. So, "memes can't be considered something unique," he pointed out, even though some famous memes have rules, which are generally stylistic, and which are repeated in each new creation.

He argues that a meme is not merely a humorous "anonymous and viral" image, as not even virality or humour are prerequisites for a product to be considered memetic. "I think it's more interesting to think about what they offer us. The speed, orality and ambivalence of memes can help us rethink how we produce art, communication, literature and politics," he said Soriano in relation to his study examining the communication potential of memes in the political context, and their role in the participatory and therefore democratized creation of cultural products.

Thanks to the work done by the UOC researcher, memes can be understood beyond the concept of a humorous viral image, as a deeper phenomenon that is rooted in the interactive nature of the internet and in the new forms of interpersonal communication which the digital world offers. At a time when fake news has become a tool for manipulation, especially during elections, understanding memes as "in-jokes in niche communities or visual compositions with authorship", beyond temporary viral phenomena, as the author of the study pointed out, goes beneath the surface of these images, and provides an understanding of their much richer cultural backdrop.

As a result, formulas can be found to provide people with tools to contextualize memes in their place in society: a new transgressive and uninhibited vehicle for communication that is available to anyone, both actively, and passively as a consumer.

This UOC research contributes to UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 10, Reduced Inequalities.

Related article

Soriano, Ezequiel (2024). Un Political Compass de los estudios sobre memes. Teknokultura. Revista de Cultura Digital y Movimientos Sociales, advance online publication, 1-9. https://dx.doi.org/10.5209/tekn.92391

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