Module 1, Task 1: Access this journal, Social Media and Society, and read one article from the current issue that appeals to your interests. In a blog post, provide a brief description and an analysis of the article of your choice. Do you agree with the authors? If not – why not? (350-400 words).

There is a history of political caricatures and cartoons published in newspapers, which were once a form of political meme expression before the rise of social media. The lasting memories of political leaders were influenced by how they were depicted in newspapers and shaped the cultural norms and attitudes towards politicians. For example, the illustration presented above, “Johnny’s garage sale”, published in the Courier Mail, is a form of meme expression to criticise the economic reforms, such as the privatisation of Telstra, which Prime Minister John Howard introduced in the mid-nineties (NMA, n.d). Back then, memes were credible, trusted sources of information by journalists; you knew the newspaper editor validated the source, compared to now, where social media enables anyone to be the creators or sharers of memes with or without any political knowledge, so the underlying agenda seems questionable. 

Halversen and Weeks’ (2023) “Memeing politics: understanding political meme creators, audiences, and consequences on social media” study investigates the creators and sharers of political memes and their motives. Despite their initial prediction that politically minded individuals were likely to create and share memes to develop a sense of unity with other like-minded people, they found that the psychological viral nature of memes is based on humour, emotion, and relatability plays a significant role. The study findings found that the strength of partisanship was not associated with creating or sharing memes but with an expression of persuading others or making fun of candidates, usually driven by anger towards political opponents. Nevertheless, creating certain political memes takes a certain degree of critical thinking and policy knowledge, which questions the ethics of viral political memes and the consequences and harms of memes that contain false or misinformation.

The study results seem evidential. The sharing of memes is how we articulate and tell each other stories through the interpretation of the actions of others and how we share memes (de Saint Laurent et al., 2021). Through my experiences, friends and I have shared memes as an alternative and easier way to express our opinions of something funny or opposing, commonly in frustration. Considering the memes that surfaced during the COVID-19 pandemic, “COVID isn’t real” and “vaccines contain microchip tracking devices”, all were false and misleading conspiracies that went viral (Lynch, 2022). This period demonstrated that memes are fragmented and limited; therefore, the likelihood of memes clashing with counternarratives is highly consequential for our mental health and has a detrimental effect on society, especially for those with a different level of public policy knowledge or lower media literacy skills. 

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