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Presider: Britney Summit-Gil (@beersandbooks<\/a>)<\/p>\n Hashmod: Kate Miltner (@katemiltner<\/a>)<\/p>\n This is one post in a series of Panel Previews for the upcoming Theorizing the Web<\/a><\/i> conference (#TtW14) in NYC. <\/i>The panel under review is titled Gone Viral: All Watched Over by Memes of Loving Grace.<\/em><\/p>\n 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.”<\/p>\n <\/em>Patrick Sharbaugh (@psharbaugh<\/a>) Lulz Will Find a Way: How Meme Culture Is Empowering Civic Engagement in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam<\/em><\/strong> 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 \u2018sensitive\u2019 by the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) and government officials, who exercise tight control over traditional media channels in the authoritarian nation.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n
\nAlthough 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.<\/p>\n