The Role of Memes and Citizens in Geopolitical Dialogue
If you're on any social media channels at all these days, including Signal or WhatsApp and other messaging apps, the memes are everywhere. Sometimes funny animal ones or just pop-culture stuff. Then there's the darker ones and the hardened political memes. In memeland, it seems, one is either this or that. Forget nuance and context.
But memes aren't designed for subtlety, nuance or intelligent discourse. They're modern myth-making tools. From myths we create stories, narratives, which then become realities. Unlike traditional myths however, memes operate in compressed time cycles and today, cross cultural boundaries at unprecedented velocity.
Memes encode and transmit cultural meaning through symbolic oppositions (us/them, powerful/powerless, legitimate/illegitimate.)
Traditionally, political critique across cultures tended to move through hierarchical systems in a bottom-up or top-down method. With memes, they have become a new form of cultural learning that spreads rapidly through a population horizontally. Inadvertently, citizens have become cultural ambassadors, broadcasting their political worldviews across boarders almost instantaneously. Often with little or no understanding of the broader implications.
While it is common today for State actors to engage non-state actors in the production and dissemination of memes for mis/disinformation, in this case, I am considering the average citizen themselves. Over time, these individual acts of political satire aggregate into something much larger; a distributed form of soft power operating outside traditional diplomatic channels.
In a way there's a friction paradox with political memes as well. They reduce friction by being easy to create and share while increasing friction through border complications for travellers and social media monitoring by governments. Increasingly, the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol are requiring travellers to turn over their devices to inspect political standings on social media feeds. A frightening step towards authoritarianism.
While memes had been considered more noise than signal, the clamp down by U.S. CBP shows undeniable evidence that there's a policy shift. One that shows citizen generated content has crossed a threshold from cultural expression to political force.
Autocracies have, for years, adeptly engaged in information warfare, exploiting both the asymmetric nature of sharp power and democracies’ obligation to uphold freedom. They've used memes to distort realities. Yet now their own citizens are partaking in these acts to shape a narrative towards other countries. Citizens themselves are carrying out memetic warfare against one another, both within the political divides of their own country and against other countries.
And some citizen grass-roots organisations have become increasingly well organised in producing and distributing memes. They've come to understand their power and influence, not just domestically, but geopolitically.
While it's hard to say without some extensive empirical research, one could posit that memes are beginning to play an outsized role in increasing political divides around the world. The power of citizen-generated memes lies in their ability to create connections between aesthetics and ideology, transforming conflict into interactive spectacle.
Memes predominantly circulate within political echo chambers, fostering increased engagement within ideologically homogeneous groups while limiting exposure to opposing viewpoints. But they do slip between the liminal spaces of groups, thus reaching into echo chambers at faster rates.
In the recent Romanian elections, a satirical meme about corruption reached more citizens than traditional campaign ads. It is thought that these memes influenced election outcomes. They can stir up emotions and serve even as citizen protest signs and placards, translating themselves into the real world and playing a part in promoting street violence.
A danger I see with many political scientists, governments and academics is that these memetic wars are only in digital spaces, that they may shape myths and some narratives, but they rarely connect them to real world activities from protests to voting patterns. That is a risky misunderstanding.
My research with Freedom House and UNDP in 2012 in Africa that looked at how online hate speech translates to political violence in the streets showed a clear path as to how this happens. In addition, diplomats and multinational experts may be influenced by memes from their respective countries and roles.
Beyond just violence however is that memes that mock failed or planned policies and institutional programs are leading to greater distrust in bureaucracies and established institutions, further eroding the public trust. And when memes cross into journalism, when a legacy news media channel doesn't conduct proper verification, it can get worse.
This is not a simple problem to solve. It is highly emotional, it is ritualistic in some cases and sits at the root of how humans form, govern and work together. It's essentially a whole-of-society issue with no simple answers.
