FROM TAINTED MEMES TO TRENDING STREAMS: HOW LIVE STREAMING SERVES AS A VECTOR IN FAR-RIGHT MEME NORMALIZATION
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Date
2024
Authors
O'Grady, Griffin
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
The far-right, a group which includes all forms of right-wing belief that fall outside of social norms, has always used comedy and mockery to bolster their beliefs, and this has become even more true in the digital era. Their use of memes and other inside jokes is heavily documented and longstanding. Historically, however, these jokes existed on the edge or just beyond the edge of acceptability in polite society. With the introduction of the internet those on the edge were able to convene and insulate themselves on dedicated message boards and niche websites like 4chan or early reddit. Meme culture originated here, with a focus on “trolling” and edgy jokes. Later, meme culture became much more widespread, but lost much of what made it socially intolerable before. Jokes were less edgy, content was less focused on bigotry, the format and irreverence remained but these new memes were for everyone. This is the world we have been living in for the past decade, with memes successfully breaking through to the mainstream and becoming a major facet of life both digitally and in reality. This breakthrough happened because the ecosystem of the internet was such that, as memes moved further and further through the internet, they were softened and made palatable, with the original more offensive versions rarely escaping their site of conception. People did not widely repost offensive things, but they did repost non-offensive jokes told in the same format. This led to an ecosystem where, even though the right was creating the original memes, everyone else was using memes much more successfully and widely. The case I will make in my thesis is that, recently, this movement from the edges of the internet to mainstream social media has become much shorter, and thus the bigoted ideas aren’t nearly as detached from the formats and jokes. Bigoted phrases and ideas from these insulated far-right communities are picked up directly rather than being slowly smoothed out and passed down. Because of this, audiences (often consisting of children and teens) are being exposed to, essentially, propaganda from the right, implanting ideas of homophobia, sexism, and racism in their still forming psyche. I believe the reason this content migration has quickened so much is due to the popularization of live streaming in recent years, especially among younger audiences. In this paper, I will examine a few specific examples of memes that have made their way from far-right communities into the wider internet and analyze how they made that move through live streaming. I will conclude by analyzing how this development fits into the history of internet content and political comedy in general.
Description
57 pages
Keywords
Far-right, Internet, Memes, Politics, Comedy