{"id":13995,"date":"2013-01-19T11:58:30","date_gmt":"2013-01-19T15:58:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=13995"},"modified":"2013-01-19T12:34:32","modified_gmt":"2013-01-19T16:34:32","slug":"dilutions-of-grandeur-meme-longevity-and-political-disillusionment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2013\/01\/19\/dilutions-of-grandeur-meme-longevity-and-political-disillusionment\/","title":{"rendered":"Dilutions of Grandeur: Meme Longevity and Political Disillusionment"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
via durdom.in.ua<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The past U.S. elections season was exciting for social scientists for many reasons, but none so much for the web theorist crowd as the amazing proliferation of election memes. In his essay \u201cSpeaking in Memes\u201d<\/a>, Nathan Jurgenson aptly dissects the phenomenon and its various facets: why and how election memes become viral, whether this virality is subject to campaign control, and how audiences and media conjure meaning by rebroadcasting and reporting these memes. There are many things I would love to further discuss in Jurgenson\u2019s essay, but I will latch on to the issue of meme longevity and the possible reasons for some memes surviving far longer than most. I will also attempt to speculate about factors that afford memes the power to shift shape and adapt to new contexts, and about how and why their meaning might be transformed by the public in the process.<\/p>\n

It is useful to look at election memes (U.S. ones and those found in other political arenas) as cases that quickly go viral, yet some fizzle out, and others persist. Of those that survive longer, some do so because they gain a sort of meta meaning, a new applicability to existing contexts (\u201847%\u2019 has gone through many, many iterations); others last because they\u2019re universally understandable and are reflective of a shared moral or emotional experience (\u2018binders full of women\u2019 owes some of its success to the fact that so many are exasperated with the exact sentiment it addresses). At least in some cases, though, political memes continue to live on and transform due not to passionate persuasions, but as an expression of a profound disillusionment on the part of the public \u2013 disillusionment with the government, the politics and the notion of democracy and nation-building in general. While this does not necessarily hold true for all kinds of democracies, post-Soviet countries like Ukraine and Russia (which are variously dubbed \u201cdeveloping democracies\u201d and \u201cfailed states\u201d in Western analytical reports), offer evidence of meme longevity through political disillusionment.<\/p>\n

The Cyrillic part of the web is fascinating to me as a bilingual researcher, as it often picks up the most popular English-language memes and translates\/adapts them in ingenious ways. But it also generates its own memes, and then the question is: do these native memes follow the same laws of growth, distribution and success (expressed through virality, fecundity, longevity and a number of other indicators)? Given the same social media and digital affordances, how do political memes in Ukraine and Russia achieve longevity? And how much control do political forces and governments have over those memes?<\/p>\n

An example of a long-lasting meme from Ukrainian elections that I have been observing is the Ukrainian word “\u043f\u043e\u043a\u0440\u0430\u0449\u0435\u043d\u043d\u044f” (pokrAschennya, or, literally, “improvement”), which was adopted by Internet users from a campaign slogan of the currently ruling Party of Regions<\/a> and then adapted to be used, often ironically or satirically, as social commentary in many different contexts. The word was very quickly ripped out of its original context (praise of and reassurance from the ruling party) and flooded the social web in the form of multiple tweets posted on Twitter with the #\u043f\u043e\u043a\u0440\u0430\u0449\u0435\u043d\u043d\u044f (#improvement) hashtag, as well as in photoshopped images on Facebook\/Twitter.<\/p>\n

The story of the meme is a traditional one: the initial slogan was \u201c\u041f\u043e\u043a\u0440\u0430\u0449\u0435\u043d\u043d\u044f \u0436\u0438\u0442\u0442\u044f \u0432\u0436\u0435 \u0441\u044c\u043e\u0433\u043e\u0434\u043d\u0456!\u201d (\u201cImprovement of your life today!\u201d), which the then-Presidential candidate Victor Yanukovych and Party of Regions actively used during the 2010 Presidential election campaign in Ukraine. The slogan was eventually whittled down by social media users to a single word \u2013 \u201c\u043f\u043e\u043a\u0440\u0430\u0449\u0435\u043d\u043d\u044f\u201d (\u201cimprovement\u201d) \u2013 which came to be associated online (and offline) with the campaign, and later, with Yanukovych\u2019s (controversial) victory in the election, as well as with the agenda, promises and actions of the ruling Party of Regions and the President himself.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
via molbuk.ua<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Even the initial slogan met with critical reaction and a healthy dose of cynicism from the public (at least the part of the public who dislike the ruling party). This is due to a large extent to the general dissatisfaction with the political and economic situation in the country. Ukraine has struggled with democratic development, obstructed by its Soviet past, and current widespread corruption and internal power struggles in the government have not endeared people to the ruling party. In short, announcing \u201cimprovement\u201d when obviously no such thing is happening was not the brightest idea. People found even more pleasure in subverting a unit of political propaganda that was so blatantly false. This automatic desire to subvert any attempt by the ruling power to make a slogan go viral means that, as Sarah Kendzior puts it, \u201cmemes can be self-defeating \u2013 less an assertion of political power than an avowal of the pointlessness of politics\u201d<\/a>. By using the slogan and the word in ironic contexts, the public was essentially commenting on the uselessness of political games and acknowledging that the electoral campaign was simply a Potyomkin village of a democratic process.<\/p>\n

The slogan quickly turned into a meme online, generating multiple photoshopped images on Facebook and various blogs, as well as a popular Cyrillic hashtag on Twitter<\/a>. Most of the early social media content surrounding the \u201cimprovement\u201d slogan in 2010 was based directly on the political video ad or on the billboards displaying the party\u2019s slogan all over the country. What is interesting, however, is how broadly it has since spread and mutated to encompass the spectrum of issues that Ukrainian citizens choose to perceive as \u201cpolitical\u201d in some way and worthy of social commentary. The \u201c\u043f\u043e\u043a\u0440\u0430\u0449\u0435\u043d\u043d\u044f\u201d (\u201cimprovement\u201d) meme continues to thrive as a kind of tool to evaluate the government, the social institutions and the public themselves. It is still sometimes used to make a genuinely positive comment on reality (when something does indeed improve), but is much more often subverted by the meme-carriers to reflect their ironic or satirical attitude to whatever they are commenting on. Most often, when there is said to be \u201cimprovement\u201d, it means there is none, or things have actually gotten worse.<\/p>\n

The Twitter hashtag was initially used to comment on actions\/decisions of President Yanukovich and the ruling Party of Regions. But with the elections over, the meme did not disappear; instead, it found new outlets. I looked at a sample of 260 tweets with the Cyrillic hashtag from May and June 2012 to gauge the kinds of contexts in which people were still using the #improvement hashtag. Remember, the meme first appeared in December 2010 (!), and the hashtag is still used regularly to comment upon current events. In 2012, Twitter users applied the hashtag to a wider scope of contexts to comment on local officials and affairs, police force, businesses, urban planning, and an even broader spectrum of situations, completely unrelated to politics. These were often cases where something had changed but the effectiveness of change was doubtful. The meme then began to be applied in more personal contexts: its use broadened from general comments on politicians, police, public transit to personal comments about today\u2019s traffic on the road, video games, broken appliances, soccer match results, a new version of iPad firmware released or Google changing Google Places to Google Local in Android firmware. The meme was there to add additional color to the tweeter\u2019s words and to place the assertion\/observation within a familiar context for other users. The meme applications went from specific words\/actions by certain political persons to broader social commentary on how society functions to personal, apolitical, everyday life observations.<\/p>\n

Here are three very different examples of tweets with the #\u043f\u043e\u043a\u0440\u0430\u0449\u0435\u043d\u043d\u044f (#improvement) hashtag from my sample (translated into English, of course):<\/p>\n

\n
\n

\u0422\u043e\u043b\u044c\u043a\u043e \u0432 \u0423\u043a\u0440\u0430\u0438\u043d\u0435 \u0435\u0441\u0442\u044c \u043c\u0438\u043b\u0438\u0446\u0438\u043e\u043d\u0435\u0440\u044b-\u0445\u0438\u043f\u0441\u0442\u0435\u0440\u044b: \u043e\u043d\u0438 \u0435\u0431\u0430\u0448\u0430\u0442 \u0442\u0440\u0443 \u043b\u0443\u043a\u0438 \u043d\u0430 iPad. #\u0445\u0438\u043f\u0441\u0442\u0435\u0440<\/a> #hipster<\/a> #\u043f\u0430\u043a\u0440\u0430\u0449\u0435\u043d\u043d\u044f<\/a> #\u043f\u043e\u043a\u0440\u0430\u0449\u0435\u043d\u043d\u044f<\/a> pic.twitter.com\/Jn3QgL0T<\/a><\/p>\n

— Ch\u00e2teau de Mejyhiria (@iliasunset) June 9, 2012<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n