THIS GOOD, THAT BAD
INTERNET MEMES AND VISUAL RHETHORIC
One of the many comparisons that can be made to the internet, is that it is a very big place, without many rules and limitations, where one can find many like minded individuals regardless of physical distance, and traditional notions of groups and belonging. Among the enormous amount of topics debated by these people in those digital communities, politics might have some remarkable importance. The exercise of politics requires complex, responsive and dialectical interactions, in which all parts can communicate and be understood, and answered to, ideally in person, capturing all nuances of the arguments presented by each side of the debate. Internet memes and most digital social media, are some of the media which are the least compatible with this need for civility , understanding and responsiveness characteristic to traditional political discourse. Nevertheless, political debate thrives in environments such as politgram, as it is colloquially called the heterogeneous group of thousands of Instagram accounts dedicated to debating politics under a tribe-like logic through memes. The groups formed by ideological affinity vary wildly, from radical Marxists, to so- called Anarcho-Capitalists, to nationalist sections of the far-right. They all have unique lingos, understood only by insiders, and some graphic styles that also can identify and differ one tribe from another. But very unlikely, in meme-centered environments dedicated to political discourse and debate, the most opposite groups seem to share one fundamental characteristic of their debate: Fallacious visual rhetoric.
In the most different ideologies, there is a pattern in the visual rhetoric of memes. From the more traditional and intellectually inclined groups such as orthodox Marxists, to peripheral, unscholarly groups such as anarcho-primitivists, all seem to use an extreme version of a meme format that is older than memes themselves. This format for visual argumentation is very simple, maybe too simple: it consists of depicting the opinions of the author as positive, and it’s antagonist as negative. There are countless meme templates that function in such a way that their message is simply that one thing is better than the other, as it can be seen in the memes below.
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All of the templates presented in the meme mean the same: one thing is better than the other. In this case, the author prefers their ketchup separate from their fries.
In traditional, verbal rhetoric, this is a well known and universally frowned-upon strategy: the ad hominem fallacy, in which one part tries to disqualify the opponent's argument attacking not their ideas, but their reputations. Memes, being limited by a small amount of pixels and an even smaller textbox, are fundamentally concise and direct pieces of communication that circulate in digital environments that value relevance in an attention economy instead of a pondered debate. It’s not surprising to see a limited or simplified rhetoric in this medium, but it surely is a reason for concern that many people, especially teenagers and young adults produce discourses or even develop their political identity in environments with such an immature form of debating serious ideas. Below, there are some examples of what could be hypersinthetized as “this good, that bad” memes in which the author is always strong, happy and correct, and their intellectual enemies, weak, sad, and pathetic:
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The combination of digital memes and political discourse isn't always counterproductive or toxic. There are digital spaces that hugely facilitate traditional debates on the internet, such as streams through Twitch, Discord or Youtube, in which many important digital political influencers such as Vaush or Ben Shapiro host long, civilized and profound debates on the most varied topics. Even the memes presented here, with their poor very limited rhetoric aren’t seen as a reliable source of information by all users, many times taking advantage of the virality and immense popularity of memes to spread topics, encouraging the audience to research it further. There might be a concern about the quality of the political discourse produced by millennials and Generation Z influenced by the simple rhetoric of memes, but so far, they have shown signs of political and social organization quite larger than that of previous generations of the 20th century, which were raised by traditional media, so to any one exaggeratedly concerned with political memes still behaving as memes, all that can be said, is: Ok,boomer.