Meme, the People
As anyone who has ever found their friends feed clogged up with pictures of Willy Wonka can attest, there's not much that spreads faster than an Internet meme. Apparently, however, the rapid transmission of dumb jokes can be utilized for more than just procrastination purposes. (Who knew?)
We've talked a bit before about collective action problems and the uses of social media in making an idea go viral. However, there's also a lot to consider in terms of what makes a concept spread, peer-to-peer, among a given population; it's especially important in the process of democracy promotion, where the speedy and efficient diffusion of ideas is vital both to mobilize and to define a population. And, according to Merriam-Webster, a meme is defined as an "idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture." All of which means that if you're interested in the business of spreading ideas and encouraging large-scale engagement, it's worth looking at what makes a meme take root among a given population and what we can learn about the fact that a given demographic has adopted it as its own.
So where does technology come into this equation? Two recent analyses of the intersection of democratization and memes illustrate not only how powerful this kind of information-sharing can be, but also the many roles that different tech tools can play. In the first example, which occurred in Serbia during the late 1990s**, the method of diffusion was decidedly analog, but it was broadcast television that planted the seed; in the second, which caught on late last year in Kyrgyzstan, technology played a major role in facilitating the spread of the meme. In both cases, however, technology played a major role in contributing to the collective identity that marked these ideas. In other words, the presence of these tools not only helped these ideas form and spread, but it was one of the things that made people adopt these ideas as their own.
The first analysis comes from Soraya Roberts, who wrote a recent Slate article &discussing the unlikely Serbian presidential campaign of the (fictional) B-level detective Nick Slaughter:
On Nov. 17, 1996, mass protests broke out in the country in response to Milosevic’s attempt to manipulate local elections. The protests took place throughout Serbia, but were at their most concentrated in Belgrade where, in the suburb of Zarkovo, sometime in the mid-’90s, a young graffiti artist had written "Sloteru Niče, Zarkovo ti kliče!!!"— a rhyme that means, "Nick Slaughter, Zarkovo hails you"—in bright blue spray paint on the red exterior of a building. According to Marc Vespi, director ofSlaughter Nick for President, this graffiti (which survives to this day) inspired student protesters with “the idea of running Nick Slaughter for president.” Soon rhyming slogans like "Slotera Nika, za predsednika" ("Nick Slaughter for president") and "Svakoj majci treba da je dika, koja ima sina k'o Slotera Nika" ("Every mother should be proud to have a son like Nick Slaughter") started showing up on protesters’ banners and badges.
[According to Marc Vespi, the director of the documentary Slaughter Nick for President,] “It was a kind of mock-campaign, the message of which was, even a fictitious TV detective would make a better president than Milosevic...It was an expression of frustration with the leadership that the political system was providing.”
While we're accustomed to thinking about memes in Internet terms, this particular unit of cultural transmission (as Richard Dawkins defined it) was spread by painting onto walls - surely one of the lowest-tech approaches possible. And yet what made the meme possible, and what made it stick, was cable television. The television show featuring Nick Slaughter, Tropical Heat (otherwise known as Sweating Bullets - yes, really) was a Canadian production, brought in by the channel TV Politika in the early '90s in order to buoy the spirits of a population numbed by war. And it became a rallying point for people who shared memories of consuming foreign entertainment in order to distract themselves from a crumbling system. As one actor says in a documentary on the subject, Slaughter Nick for President, "That was the weapon the regime couldn't fight...we knew that it was our joke and they didn't understand what our joke meant."
On the other end of the transmission spectrum, Matt Kupfer at Registan has an analysis on what the recent rise of another political meme in Kyrgyzstan, one spread primarily via Internet video, can tell us about internal divisions within the country. This particular phenomenon has its roots in a video by the politician Arstanbek Abdyldaev in which he makes some "unusual claims about Kyrgyzstan and the greater world in ungrammatical Russian," including that Kyrgyzstan was the "energy center" of the earth and, most significantly, that zima ne budet - "there will be no winter." The video, along with myriad remixes and tributes, spread quickly - especially among a certain class of citizen.
In contrast to the majority of users participating in the Zima ne budet meme, Arstanbek Abdyldaev is originally from a rural area, a village outside of Naryn (in central Kyrgyzstan). Some of the other members of his organization, judging by their accents or limited Russian-language abilities, also seem to be from rural areas. This was clearly not lost on internet users. A few commented and openly referred to Abdyldaev as “myrk,” a derogatory term describing a person who has moved from a rural area to Bishkek...The comments that employed this word generally connected it with the perception of stupidity. As one user wrote, “For this I love myrks, you can always laugh at them.”
This particular meme bears a much closer resemblance to the lolcats we know and love, and so the role of technology in its success seems obvious at first - the Internet made it easier for people to share the video with their friends. Its real effects, however, go deeper. As Kupfer points out, most of the meme's fans are young, cosmopolitan, and, most importantly, Internet-savvy - in other words, the exact opposite of Abdyldaev's core constituency. (It's also worth noting that it first gained traction through a web series called This is Horosho, which Kupfer describes as a "kind of Russian Tosh.0.") It's entirely possible, then, that transmission of this meme isn't just an absurdist way for people to complain about an inefficient government; the transmission itself provides a way for people to define themselves in opposition to what they perceive as the prevailing norm.
So what can practitioners, seeking to make ideas like voting and transparency go viral, learn from these examples? First, and most obvious, is that the presentation and quality of the content is paramount - which requires serious knowledge of your audience. Both of these memes caught on in part because they were not only funny, but also touched on common identity markers - childhood heroes, feelings of isolation - that led them to resonate with their population.
The second, I think, is that technology often carries its own message. We've all heard Marshall McLuhan's dictum that "the medium is the message," but it might be a good idea to revisit it: in both cases, the tools associated with these memes carried specific and unifying cultural connotations. To make an idea go viral, it's vital to understand not only what you need to say, but how people will react to your method of communication, and how that can help (or hurt) your cause.
Mass messaging has been around since the dawn of humanity, so memes themselves are not exactly a new tool. The rise of different types of tech tools, however, has added an extra dimension to the idea of what makes them stick, and the value of analyzing these may come less from examples and more from the shift in mindset that those examples necessitate. If it worked for Nick Slaughter, there's no reason it can't work for us.
(For another interesting take on memes, check out my colleague Lindsay's recap of PDF, including but not limited to the work of An Xiao Mina on memes in China.)
*The concept of an Internet meme is based off of Dawkins' work on memes, which isn't limited to the web. This post uses the Dawkins definition, which is substantially broader.
**ETA: the original post mis-identified this period as the early 1990s.