technologyreview | Memes come off as a joke, but some people are starting to see them as the serious threat they are. In October 2016, a friend of mine learned
that one of his wedding photos had made its way into a post on a
right-wing message board. The picture had been doctored to look like an
ad for Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and appeared to endorse the idea of
drafting women into the military. A mutual friend of ours found the
image first and sent him a message: “Ummm, I saw this on Reddit, did you
make this?”
This was the first
my friend had heard of it. He hadn’t agreed to the use of his image,
which was apparently taken from his online wedding album. But he also
felt there was nothing he could do to stop it.
So
rather than poke the trolls by complaining, he ignored it and went on
with his life. Most of his friends had a laugh at the fake ad, but I saw
a huge problem. As a researcher of media manipulation and
disinformation, I understood right away that my friend had become cannon
fodder in a “meme war”—the use of slogans, images, and video on social
media for political purposes, often employing disinformation and
half-truths.
While today we tend to think of memes as funny images online, Richard Dawkins coined the term back in 1976 in his book The Selfish Gene,
where he described how culture is transmitted through generations. In
his definition, memes are “units of culture” spread through the
diffusion of ideas. Memes are particularly salient online because the
internet crystallizes them as artifacts of communication and accelerates
their distribution through subcultures.
Importantly, as memes are shared they shed
the context of their creation, along with their authorship. Unmoored
from the trappings of an author’s reputation or intention, they become
the collective property of the culture. As such, memes take on a life of
their own, and no one has to answer for transgressive or hateful ideas.
0 comments:
Post a Comment