Presider: Britney Summit-Gil (@beersandbooks)

Hashmod: Kate Miltner (@katemiltner)

This is one post in a series of Panel Previews for the upcoming Theorizing the Web conference (#TtW14) in NYC. The panel under review is titled Gone Viral: All Watched Over by Memes of Loving Grace.

There’s something categorically different about things that are a hit on the Web. Unlike a blockbuster movie or a critically-acclaimed TV show, a viral meme inculcates everyone in its production, popularity, and eventual descent into hackneyed trope-dom. Sometimes the “patient zero” of the meme is notorious or well-known, but often times there is no clear author. Such is the case in almost all of the case studies in this panel where memes are not so much treated as stories told by authors, but as tools and methods of political dissent, identity construction, and cultural critique. Patrick Sharbaugh’s presentation on civic engagement in Vietnam shows how viral memes afford new kinds of cultural protest that can come from very oblique angles, rather than head-on collisions with hegemony. Joel Penney surveys two seminal texts on virality and concludes that the intervening decades have proven these texts to be the basis of a “persuasion model of political internet use” but we have yet to see a systematic articulation of this persuasion model in action. Rob Horning turns the conversation inward by positing that “To the extent that the self is constituted in social media, it knows itself in terms of statistical measures of circulation and algorithmically generated feedback rather than other forms of content.”

Patrick Sharbaugh (@psharbaugh) Lulz Will Find a Way: How Meme Culture Is Empowering Civic Engagement in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam
Although social media platforms have garnered much attention in recent years for their putative role in dramatic social and political movements around the world, scholars such as Clay Shirky have suggested that the real potential of such tools for change exists in the way they empower citizens and organizations to privately and publicly articulate and debate a welter of conflicting views throughout society. According to this view, social media matters most not in the streets and squares but in the the social commons that Jurgen Habermas termed the public sphere.

Ethan Zuckerman has observed that by using the seemingly innocuous tools of meme and remix culture, citizens are able to create and participate in an active public sphere of indirect political commentary and debate that comprises an entirely new form of civic engagement, particularly for nations in which traditional civil society is proscribed. Social media platforms and creative practices in Vietnam are emerging as powerful tools in this regard, offering a voice to a citizenry who since 1975 have been unable to express in public their views and opinions on many topics considered ‘sensitive’ by the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) and government officials, who exercise tight control over traditional media channels in the authoritarian nation.

While showing little taste for direct engagement with traditional political activism, Vietnamese netizens are increasingly turning to the digital techniques of remix and mashup culture to indirectly express and debate sentiment on issues of social and political relevance. Using several case studies, I will argue that this widespread practice constitutes a culturally-specific form of civic and political engagement that has a subtle but real influence upon state policy in this rapidly developing Southeast Asian nation, in a manner distinct from but not dissimilar to that seen in the social commons of more open, developed societies.

Joel Penney (@professorpenney) Meme Warriors and Media Viruses: Theorizing the Persuasive Political Power of the Web
Twenty years ago, the journalist and media critic Douglas Rushkoff released the book Media Virus!, which became one of the most influential—and most criticized—early works of web theory. While the book went on to inspire a generation of commercial marketers to craft promotional messages that spread and replicate across digital networks, Rushkoff’s focus was in fact the use of viral dissemination techniques for radical-progressive political activism. Five years later, Kelle Lasn, a founder of Adbusters magazine, advanced a similar model of the new media activism in the book Culture Jam, calling for his followers to kick off an left-progressive revolution by acting as “meme warriors.” Both of these books put forth a postmodernist theorization of political power as the equivalent of networked communicative power in a fully media-saturated world. As Lasn proclaims, “potent memes can change minds, alter behavior, catalyze collective mindshifts and transform cultures. Which is why meme warfare has become the geopolitical battle of the information age. Whoever has the memes has the power,” while Rushkoff proposes that “a tiny virus, launched creatively and distributed widely, can topple systems of thought as established as organized religion and institutions as well rooted as, say, the Republican Party or even the two-party system altogether.”

Flash-forward to 2014, and political groups from across the ideological spectrum are now functioning as what Lasn dubs “meme factories,” churning out short bits of rhetorical media content (or “propaganda,” in his words) and summoning their supporters to spread them across a swath of digital networks. From electoral campaigning to social movement advocacy, political organizations are increasingly utilizing platforms like Facebook and Twitter as venues for persuasion via the peer-to-peer sharing of memes and other digital content. Does this shift towards media-based strategies of change threaten to dilute the force of political action, disconnecting symbolic victories in the ‘datasphere’ from the distribution of resources on the ground? Or were Rushkoff’s and Lasn’s visions of grassroots media power as the new political power truly prescient in the age of the information network?

On the fifteenth and twentieth anniversaries of these seminal works, respectively, this paper re-examines their controversial claims and considers how their theories of media contagion as political power inform contemporary debates about “slacktivism” and the value of symbolic political expression on the web. The paper argues that these popular works of media criticism can be viewed in retrospect as forming the foundation for a persuasion model of political internet use that has since appeared in a handful of scholarly works (such as those of Manuel Castells, Henry Jenkins, and Ethan Zuckerman) but has yet to be formerly and systematically articulated. In contrast to more established models such as digital deliberative democracy and civic cultures, the persuasion model advanced by Rushkoff and Lasn is particularly useful for thinking critically about a variety of recent politically-oriented web phenomena, such as the HRC Red Equal Sign campaign, KONY 2012, and Justice for Trayvon Blackout.

Robert Horning (@marginalutility) Virality, Uncreativity, and the End of Self-Expression
The recent popularity of websites like Upworthy suggest how virality can be engineered as an end in itself in social media, as a formal component of content that trumps the specific nature of the content itself. In this paper, I will argue that something similar happens to the self: To the extent that the self is constituted in social media, it knows itself in terms of statistical measures of circulation and algorithmically generated feedback rather than other forms of content. Virality becomes both a feeling (an aesthetic response that confirms itself in the act of sharing) and a personal goal (aspiring to have a sense of one’s own ubiquity, confirmed by metrics).

Viral content teaches what it takes to engineer the self to go viral, providing a model for self-memeification. As the specific consumerist signifers of “cool” become more unstable under the pressure of their constant circulation, the online “engagement” metrics that track content become the newly reliable and stable measures of self-esteem.

By encoding audience enthusiasm at the level of form, viral content permits vicarious participation not only in the story — whose apparent popularity helps encourage an indulgent suspension of disbelief — but in the social itself. You can vicariously identify with how the story circulates, not just what it describes. Though the life span of any piece of viral content is short, the clear conventions of the viral genre allow readers to quickly identify similar content and access the same vicarious emotions more readily. Reading and sharing viral content make us feel as popular as a meme.

Social media supplies infrastructure for performing consumption as redistribution. Because I know my reaction to something I am reading can be performed on Twitter, I am sure to have a reaction—to method-act my response and see how it goes over. That performance can then circulate and substantiate me, as well as provide the pleasure of vicarious involvement with the story and with the crowd I imagine reading it. Having feelings is already pointless if you can’t be seen having them; soon it may be that having feelings will be pointless if your performance of them won’t go as viral as what prompted them. We will want to feel only what will spread.

Just as genuineness has proved irrelevant to viral content, it is also irrelevant to the viral self, whose “authenticity” is an after-effect of having marshaled an audience. Being true to some unchanging interior spirit, being consistent despite the demands of an audience watching — these are no longer relevant.

Social media sustain a measurement system that makes “more attention” seem always appropriate and anything less insufficient. If your content is not circulating ever more widely, then you are disappearing, in danger of total exclusion. But as long as others re-share what you share, your being is secure. You are rippling throughout the network, and you can hear the reassuring echoes.