Summary
An analysis of an article of political meme creation, sharing and consumption, showing relationships between political and non-political factors.
I’ve chosen to analyse the article Memeing Politics: Understanding Political Meme Creators, Audiences, and Consequences on Social Media by Audrey Halversen and Brian E. Weekes. The article can be found here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/20563051231205588#table-fn4-20563051231205588
Richard Dawkins coined the term meme in the Selfish Gene,
Memes (discrete units of knowledge, gossip, jokes and so on) are to culture what genes are to life. Just as biological evolution is driven by the survival of the fittest genes in the gene pool, cultural evolution may be driven by the most successful memes.
It’s unclear exactly how intentional meme creators are attempting to effect the larger political landscape, or participating for fun and community (Bulatovic, 2019).
The article is research performed in an attempt to identify the motivations of meme creators, their audiences, and the consequences that come about from the creation and sharing of memes. They raise interesting questions, including whether political memes create more partisanship, and whether meme exposure is associated with political participation. The research was done during the 2020 presidential election in the United States.
The results of the research are interesting, with Table 1 and 2 both showing that there is a difference between political meme creators and their audience, often with the data skewing slightly in opposite directions. For example in Table 1, meme creators trend slightly partisan while audiences trend slightly less partisan.
It also shows that both sides of the political aisle use create and consume memes. In Table 3 is presented a simple model for predicting outcomes based on meme exposure. Democrats are more likely to score higher in both political knowledge and anger towards the opposing parties candidates, while Republicans score higher in political cynicism, showing how memes might exert influence along party lines. Overall, being exposed to political memes has a positive relation to anger towards opposing candidates, but no relation to level of partisanship. This could support their hypothesis that political memes tend to spread within partisan groups, rather then memes themselves creating partisanship.
The authors suggest that political meme creators focus on online participation in politics, trending away from real world political involvement and scoring lower on political knowledge.
The use of visual charts would greatly aid in the analysis of the data. Without it, there’s no knowledge of the spread of questionnaire responses, and it can be hard to tell exactly how consequential a number is without seeing it graphed. Responses may have been evenly spread or very close to the average, while producing similar numbers on the whole. Visualisation allows you to quickly identify potential trends and meaningful data points for analysis (Slutsky, 2014).
Overall, I find the article to have interesting research and data, with a credible methodology, but lacks accessibility for others to truly access and easily understand the data. I dislike the obscuring of data behind linear association. While most of their data presents a 75-85 r value, without knowing more parameters of the data, it’s hard to verify the conclusions of the article. It’s difficult to identify how significant the data collected truly is to perform any in-depth analysis. Implementing standards and academic advice for presenting data would improve the quality of the paper (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2023; Fah & Aziz, 2006).
References
Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2023). Presentation of results. https://www.abs.gov.au/websitedbs/d3310114.nsf/home/Basic+Survey+Design+-+Presentation+of+Results
Bulatovic, M. (2019). The imitation game: The memefication of political discourse. European View, 18(2), 250-253. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1177/1781685819887691
Fah, T. S., & Aziz, A. F. A. (2006). How to present research data? Malaysian Family Physician, 1(2-3), 82-85. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4453119/
Halverson, A., & Weeks, B. E. (2023). Memeing politics: Understanding political meme creators, audiences, and consequences on social media. Social Media & Society, 9(4). https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231205588
Slutsky, D. J. (2014). The effective use of graphs. Journal of Wrist Surgery, 3(2), 67-68. https://doi.org/10.1055/s-0034-1375704