DOCSLIB.ORG

Kolman, Morris 2018 Political Science Thesis Title: I Have No Mouth and I

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Kolman, Morris 2018 Political Science Thesis Title: I Have No Mouth and I Kolman, Morris 2018 Political Science Thesis Title: I Have No Mouth and I Must Meme: Internet Memes, Networked Neoliberalism, and the Image of the Economic Advisor: Mark Reinhardt Advisor is Co-author: No Second Advisor: Released Beyond Williams: release now Contains Copyrighted Material: No I Have No Mouth and I Must Meme: Internet Memes, Networked Neoliberalism, and the Image of the Economic by Morris Kolman Mark Reinhardt, Advisor A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors in Political Science WILLIAMS COLLEGE Williamstown, Massachusetts May 5th, 2018 1 Acknowledgements: This thesis would not have been possible without the exceptional insight and encouragement given to me by my advisor, Professor Mark Reinhardt. Appropriately a scholar of the visual, he has seen potential in my writing and ideas that I could never have known was there without him. He pushed me through undeveloped ideas, led me to new areas of inquiry, and somehow kept himself reading my work despite finding in each new chapter what seemed to be a bottomless well of comma splices. I am extremely grateful to have had classes with him for the majority of my Williams experience, and I consider writing this thesis under him to be the greatest privilege of my time here at the college. The Science and Technology Studies program at this school is criminally underexposed, so I was lucky to have stumbled into Professor Grant Shoffstall’s course on Cold War Technocultures in the spring of my freshman year. In that class and since then he has unflinchingly encouraged my engagement with this field, always putting aside whatever work he was doing to talk for over an hour whenever I showed up at his office unannounced. I thank him for his support and friendship, as well as his constant fight for a field that grows more important by the day. I deeply appreciate the guidance and criticisms given to me by my readers, Professors Laura Ephraim and Christian Thorne. Each brought new perspectives and incisive commentary to the thesis, which spurred me to restructure it in its entirety over the last month. Thanks to them, I truly feel like I have made a new contribution to the academic literature on my topic. There are a number of other faculty and staff who I need to thank. Professor Michael MacDonald for his early input into my thesis and for his organization of the thesis seminar. Professor Sam Crane for being my first advisor on an independent study, as well as a welcome pub buddy in this long and taxing semester. And Krista Birch and Professor Jana Sawicki - as well as all the fellows of the Oakley Center - for giving me a welcoming, quiet, and stimulating place where I could feel the academy around me. I would not made it through Williams were it not for the indispensable love and support from my friends: Jordan Jace, Lauren Steele, Sophie Wunderlich, Caroline McArdle, Alon Handler, Reilly Hartigan, and one who for some reason wishes to remain anonymous. Both at Williams and away these people have sent me memes, listened to me rant, provided camaraderie, talked about nothing, and in general rose us all above the social chains of networked neoliberalism. In the thesis now, they’re stuck with me. Lastly I need to thank my family. To my brother Izzy, you are one of the most genuine and self- starting people I know, may we all have your level of dedication to what we believe in. Mom and Dad, I could not ask for more supportive and loving parents – especially when your son is off spending his time at some hoity-toity liberal arts school studying memes. The encouragement and interest you show in my life and my studies, as well as the constant optimism you espouse, grounds me and keeps me going. I thank the stars that I come from a family of writers, comedians, and lovers of pulling back the curtain. Every day I find in myself more qualities that I can only attribute to you, and every day I am eternally grateful. 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS: Introduction: The Online Politics of Online Politics 4 Memetic Warfare 10 Status Box: What’s on your mind, [USER]? 16 Chapter 1: The Framework of Social Media Criticism - Tracing the rise of Networked Neoliberalism 19 Networked Neoliberalism 27 Memes, the missing piece 38 Chapter 2: They Live! - Biological Metaphor, Visual Theory, and Meme Culture 48 Technical Images: The turning point of the biocybernetic paradigm 57 A Return to the Text: The Biocybernetic Origin of Memes 66 ShitpostBot 5000: A Close Reading 79 Chapter 3: Like and Share If You Agree - Ideological Resistance and Totalitarian Laughter 86 Memes: Revolutionary Humor of the Masses 87 Internet Activism Past and Present: IGC, EZLN, and Kony 2012 92 Social Capital: Social Media and the Commodity Fetishism of the Self 100 Totalitarian Laughter: Memes, Irony, and the 2016 Election 107 Coda: The Left Can't Meme 119 FIGURES: 126 ENDNOTES 128 3 Introduction: The Online Politics of Online Politics In an account of French electoral campaigns in 1957, Roland Barthes highlights the curiosity of campaign posters. Their ubiquity makes sense: posters are easy to spread and carry a message well, but why have a politician's face take up such a large portion of the image? These are real decisions with real issues at stake, and rather than explicating a policy platform, campaigns opt to place a large face shot of their nominee instead of an articulated vision for the country. This observation, Barthes says, is misleadingly premised. Posters don't use their limited space to present a detailed vision; they use it to present a symbolic one.1 The prevalence of portraits over programs in campaign propaganda is a bet, universally taken, that photographs and a pictorial representation of politics have "a power to convert" unreachable by non-visual media.2 This is not a new idea. American politics is littered with visual metaphor and often decided on the battleground of symbolism: Paul Revere's engraving of the Boston Massacre; the photojournalism of the Civil Rights Movement; Nixon/Kennedy on radio and TV. Indeed, the primary function of our representatives is to represent us. No matter the national climate, seeing the political landscape has always played a role in participating in it. For Barthes, this is "above all the acknowledgement of something deep and irrational co- extensive with politics."3 That is, though a picture may be worth a thousand words, its equivalent text does not come to us in any directly comprehensible order. These posters grab our attention not to ask us to read passively, but rather to engage actively. The connection created by the image goes beyond tax plans and foreign policy directly because of the medium's categorical difference from political writing. A full-face, photographic portrait conveys transparency and 4 frankness; an upward-looking view brings forth notions of the future and hope.4 The clothing, lighting, and context of an electoral photograph are all decisions with entire teams of campaign staff behind them, meticulously curating the exact referents they want the image to invoke. At the same time, aren't posters now ephemera? Older readers of this thesis will note a distinct lack of large portraiture in recent election cycles. Campaign materials still exist—posters haven't gone away—but the house of meaning in which candidates reside has moved. Whereas it was once static, linear, from aspirant to supporter, it is now a much more jumbled map. Political symbolism has become participatory. The candidate is no longer in profile, with their face wallpapering scaffolding or handed out on pamphlets. These still exist, but draw much less attention. Rather, the candidate is on profiles, those of the social media electorate. When they are on Facebook, Twitter, or any number of other sites, however, they are figured as a piece of content incorporated into the very media people use to constitute their virtual selves. This shift in the locus of political imagery's source is not without consequence, and merits a rigorous investigation. It is worth belaboring that social media mediate the social; they are the material through which an increasing share of social interactions happens. With this in mind, we should not pretend that political images remain unchanged. With the responsibility of their production and diffusion given to the masses, their content has seen a curious parallel growth in complexity and access. The visuals of candidates we see online are now more than a face on a poster, and their increasing symbolic density coincides with an explosion of popular engagement. To see this trend in action, we need not look further than the past few years. Let's start a decade ago, with the 2008 election. Barack Obama - the first black nominee from a major party in the US, and a relative political novice compared to his opponent - wins, aided by marshaling the theretofore untapped powers of social media. By focusing on digital 5 outreach, the Obama team was able to “personalize the candidate and the campaign, to embrace individual supporters using the same technologies, and to make them feel a part of the campaign,” ultimately producing 3.1 million small donors and 5 million volunteers from their web-based approach.5 The visual anchor of it all: the Hope poster. The stylized stencil portrait represents something of a turning point in our story: it is the twilight of the presidential poster (arguably it is the last one, as one finds it hard to think of another one since).
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Exploring the Intersectional Politics of Feminist Memes on Instagram
    “By Any Memes Necessary”: Exploring the Intersectional Politics of Feminist Memes on Instagram Department of Informatics and Media, Uppsala University Two-Year Master’s Thesis Social Science: Digital Media and Society Student: Caitlin Breheny Supervisor: Ylva Ekström Spring 2017 !1 Acknowledgements I’d first of all like to thank Uppsala University and my wonderful supervisor, Ylva Ekström, for her continuous advice, support and encouragement. I’m also so grateful to the many others whom I have had the privilege of meeting during my time in Uppsala. My postgraduate student experience really wouldn’t have been as fulfilling without everybody (international and Swedish) who welcomed me into this little bubble. To my closest friends (you know who you are) - I value you immensely, your kindness and acceptance is everything. To my family - I would not be where I am now without you, and I am forever grateful for your support for all my choices in life, and for your unrelenting faith in me. And last but not least, a HUGE thank you must go to all of the people who did not just make this study possible, but made it what it is. To all of my interviewees: @goldnosering, @ada.wrong, @bunnymemes, @yung_nihilist, @fluentfascist, @esoteric_queen, @tequilafunrise, @distressed_memes, and @problematiqueer - my conversations with you were equal parts open, funny, and insightful. I learnt a great deal from speaking to every one of you! Additionally, to all of the people on Instagram who inspired and informed this study (of whom there are many), I admire your humour, honesty and resilience. Being immersed in all of this creativity, my thesis-writing experience has never stopped being interesting.
    [Show full text]
  • Corporate Memes & Youth Resistance
    How Do You Do, Fellow Kids?: Corporate Memes & Youth Resistance by Janine Goetzen Advisor / Teddy Pozo Second Reader / James McGrath April 2019 Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors in the department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University ii Table of Contents // v / Acknowledgements 1 / Introduction: meme culture, corporate disruption 5 / Understanding internet culture: the language of memes 16 / Part 1: Corporate Memes 17 / How do you do, fellow kids?: memes as in-group signifiers & corporate misuse 25 / Wendy’s told me to go fuck myself: folklore and the obscene 33 / Give the intern that tweeted this a raise: authenticity and anthropomorphization 42 / Part 2: Youth Resistance 46 / Silence, brand: weaponized memes 53 / Not for mere mortals: uncommodifiable memes & niche communities 62 / Seize the memes of production: anti-capitalist memes as pedagogical instruments 72 / Conclusion: 2020: the brands are president 76 / Appendix 78 / Notes 86 / Bibliography iii Figures // 1 / Fig. 0.1 - A meme posted to Gucci’s Instagram in 2017. 22 / Fig. 1.1 – The “How do you do, fellow kids?” meme. 23 / Fig. 1.2 – The “dat boi” meme; Jolly Rancher’s remixed version of the meme. 27 / Fig. 1.3 – A screenshot from Tumblr featuring the “It’s free real estate” meme. 28 / Fig. 1.4 – A tweet about the avocado toast meme. 29 / Fig. 1.5 – Marika Lüders’ two-axis conception of personal and mass media. 30 / Fig. 1.6 – A Twitter exchange where a user asks the Wendy’s Twitter to “roast” him. 31 / Fig.
    [Show full text]
  • Viral Ethics: Media, Ecology, Debt
    VIRAL ETHICS: MEDIA, ECOLOGY, DEBT by STEPHEN MCNULTY A Dissertation submitted to the Graduate School-Newark Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of American Studies Graduate Program in written under the direction of Dr. Frances Bartkowski and approved by ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ Newark, New Jersey May, 2017 Copyright page: ©2017 Stephen McNulty ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Viral Ethics: Media, Ecology, Debt By STEPHEN MCNULTY Dissertation Director: Dr. Frances Bartkowski This dissertation charts the manifold ways in which contemporary ethics has divided humans from other forms of life. It offers an alternative to anthropocentricity through an ethics of virality. Utilizing the image, architecture, and dissemination of the virus as a model, it explores a vibrant ontological borderlands human-oriented ethics has abandoned. Where humanist ethics seeks purity, individuality, and normativity, viral ethics opts for infection, entanglement, and weakness. Though the discipline of animal studies has critiqued dominant discourses of taxonomy, consciousness, and ability, those studies often fail to move beyond our closest animal brethren. This work, instead, foregrounds the virus as a being which both straddles the scientific divide between life and non-life and revels in radical difference, espousing a form of ethics that embraces dissimilarity over resemblance. Thus, when life becomes a stand-in for human and vice versa, anything that falls outside the parameters of human has no ethical recourse to justice. To explode the dynamic of humanist ethics is to reorient being and politics towards a more expansive notion of life.
    [Show full text]
  • From Meme to Memegraph: the Curious Case of Pepe the Frog and White Nationalism
    University of Northern Iowa UNI ScholarWorks Dissertations and Theses @ UNI Student Work 2019 From meme to memegraph: The curious case of Pepe the Frog and white nationalism Fernando Ismael Quinones Valdivia University of Northern Iowa Let us know how access to this document benefits ouy Copyright ©2019 Fernando Ismael Quinones Valdivia Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.uni.edu/etd Part of the American Politics Commons Recommended Citation Quinones Valdivia, Fernando Ismael, "From meme to memegraph: The curious case of Pepe the Frog and white nationalism" (2019). Dissertations and Theses @ UNI. 949. https://scholarworks.uni.edu/etd/949 This Open Access Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Student Work at UNI ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations and Theses @ UNI by an authorized administrator of UNI ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Copyright by FERNANDO ISMAEL QUINONES VALDIVIA 2019 All Rights Reserved FROM MEME TO MEMEGRAPH: THE CURIOUS CASE OF PEPE THE FROG AND WHITE NATIONALISM An Abstract of a Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts Fernando Ismael Quinones Valdivia University of Northern Iowa May 2019 ABSTRACT This thesis explores Pepe the Frog, a comic book character that became a meme, then went mainstream, and then became appropriated by the Alt-Right in support of the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Users in the Internet have declared this meme a god, others have claimed it as a piece of crypto-art, while White Nationalists use it to propagate their ideology.
    [Show full text]
  • The Pepe the Frog Meme: an Examination of Social, Political, and Cultural Implications Through the Tradition of the Darwinian Absurd
    Edith Cowan University Research Online ECU Publications Post 2013 1-10-2020 The Pepe the Frog meme: An examination of social, political, and cultural implications through the tradition of the Darwinian Absurd Laura Glitsos Edith Cowan University James Hall Edith Cowan University Follow this and additional works at: https://ro.ecu.edu.au/ecuworkspost2013 Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons 10.1080/14797585.2019.1713443 Glitsos, L., & Hall, J. (2020). The Pepe the Frog meme: An examination of social, political, and cultural implications through the tradition of the Darwinian Absurd. Journal for Cultural Research, 23(4), 381-395. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/14797585.2019.1713443 This Journal Article is posted at Research Online. https://ro.ecu.edu.au/ecuworkspost2013/8116 Feels Good Man: An analysis of Pepe the Frog in the tradition of the Darwinian Absurd Dr Laura Glitsos Mr James Hall Key Words: Memescape, Meme Studies, meme, Darwinian absurd, Pepe the Frog, intertextuality, Internet studies Introduction This article offers an examination of the meme known as Pepe the Frog. Through the 2010s, the Pepe character became viral. In 2015, the Pepe the Frog meme was crowned “biggest meme of the year” by Tumblr (Hathaway, 2015). However, only one year later, the Pepe character was branded as a hate symbol by the U.S. Anti-Defamation League (Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 2017a). Having begun as an innocuous joke, the Pepe meme took on a range of other complex characteristics. One of the most important was its incorporation into alt-right politics. We discuss this incorporation, especially as it relates to Donald Trump’s deployment of the meme.
    [Show full text]