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Do you love the colour of the sky?

Tales from Earthsea (2006) Spirited Away (2001) Whisper of the Heart (1995) Castle in the Sky (1986) Ponyo (2008) Howl’s Moving Castle (2004) Porco Rosso (1992) My Neighbor Totoro (1988)

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first date

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first date

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Cover artist: Dean Ellis

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Hipstamatic photos: propaganda in the 21st century

“A Grunt’s Life” was a photojournalism project by Damon Winter when he served in Afghanistan in 2010. His photos were awarded 3rd place at Pictures of the Year International, but this caused some controversy, as some said that using the app to create vintage-looking photos had violated the rules for the contest. However, this controversy didn’t focus on other issues these photos might bring up: if these photos were manipulated in other ways, with a goal to manipulate others- if A Grunt’s Life could actually be a form of military propaganda. 

“Perhaps this is a reason for the popularity of faux-vintage war photos: saturated, vignetted, faded, scratched and portrayed on simulated photo paper, Hipstamatic war photos frame contemporary conflict as like the wars our parents and grandparents fought.” - Nathan Jurgenson

The faux-vintage creates a certain kind of nostalgia for the present, and Winter was not the only one to employ the use of apps on his army photos. David Guttenfelder is another solider journalist who used the Polariod format offered from ShakeIt Photo when he served in Afghanistan (Simons).

By making use of the app Hipstamatic, Damon Winter brings up all sorts of questions about the ethics behind spreading social media content about the military that could potentially be misleading or shed a positive light on the job. 

The first picture below invokes comfort, coziness, and a sense of closeness to others that one might find at a slumber party or sleep away camp. Winter even admits to the resemblance in his statement: “We had spent so much time with these men and they had become so comfortable with us that we really got to see a rare and honest glimpse into their lives — which for us sometimes resembled more a summer camp with guns than a military operation for the men on the ground.” (Myers)

The other photo is also affectionate in a way that men are usually deprived of because of social norms, but when a macho military man does it, it makes it seem as if this is type of human contact is accepted when in a solider setting. 

Hipstamatic’s distinct color tones and “vintage” feel make these photo seem old or timeless, and another contributor to that ache for the past is sleeping in a dog pile will often times conjures up childhood memories. These photos make contemporary war feel like the ones “our parents and grandparents fought”, once again grounding this job with the familial and affectionate.

In a live statement on Poynter.org, Winter said “At the heart of all of these photos is a moment or a detail or an expression that tells the story of these soldiers’ day-to-day lives while on a combat mission. No content has been added, taken away, obscured or altered.” (Estrin) However, photos of war have been altered for a very long time in order to cause the biggest impact on the viewer. For example, “Brady and Gardner made visible carnage that was previously hidden from civilian view, but to do so they purposefully rearranged corpses on the battlefield for heightened impact.” (Alper) While I think that this can potentially be seen as manipulation or a misleading tactic, it seems that even though they rearranged corpses, there were still corpses and carnage existing in the first place. How can we know that nothing was changed, even slightly? Is it morally acceptable to tweak small parts of an image so that its effect becomes more dramatic, especially for a subject like war that could have a large impact on public opinion?  

Some effects of putting such an harrowing experience in a nostalgic and overall positive light could be stronger than we realize. For young men who are thinking about joining the military, would just one image of Afghanistan being shown to them as “a summer camp with guns” tip them in favor of enlisting? This photoset “makes the unfamiliarity of war more comfortable and familiar for mass consumption” (Alper), and because of societal norms limiting men’s friendly affection towards each other, I would jump to conclusions and say that every man experiences feelings of isolation to some degree and are deprived of normal levels of affection from other men in today’s society. 

Because these photos could potentially sway young men in favor of enlistment, could this content actually be classified as ‘propaganda’? 

That’s for you to decide!

Works Cited

Nathan Jurgenson (2011). “The Faux-Vintage Photo: Full Essays (Part I, II, & III)” in Cyborgology.

Meryl Alper (2014). “War on Instagram: Framing Conflict Photojournalism With Mobile Photography Apps” in New Media & Society, 16(8), pp. 1233-1248.

Simons, Jon, and John Louis Lucaites, editors. In/Visible War: The Culture of War in Twenty-First-Century America. New Brunswick, Camden, Newark, New Jersey; London, Rutgers University Press, 2017.

https://www.poynter.org/news/damon-winter-explains-process-philosophy-behind-award-winning-hipstamatic-photos

https://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/21/finding-the-right-tool-to-tell-a-war-story/?ref=asia

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While companies themselves adhere to sleekness and simplicity, like Google’s clean white background and solid colors, or Apple’s simple product design, when we turn to amateur content creators and user-generated content platforms we see things start to get sloppy, and ugly on purpose (Feldman). This leads us to wonder: why would people want to create things that are “ugly on purpose”? One might assume that the higher quality would always “win”, but the Internet has proven this isn’t always the case. 

As the world is becoming busier and more connected with each passing year as technology continues to develop, amateur content creators favor flexibility and convenience, the “quick and dirty” over the “slow and polished”. “Instant” is better than “perfect”, and customization is king. Some reasons why quantity is valued over quality in the digital sphere is because of its speed, the absence of gatekeepers, and because ‘threads’ or digital discussions can only be around for a few hours before they expire, participants must churn out their content and upload it before its relevance is over (Eveleth). Consumer technology also has been designed to make things easier, as the technology is specifically “meant to put activities and skills that once required specialized knowledge within the reach of the common man." (Feldman)

"As opposed to media like TV or print, where the amateurish is marginalized and audience attention centers on mainstream blockbusters, the internet is built to give outsized attention to the amateurish, the accidental, and the surprise hit”, says Douglas, who coined the term ‘Internet Ugly’. While most of his article spoke about it in a visual medium such as Rage Comics or Nailed It images, he only barely touched upon the way that amateur writers flooding spaces online has had an effect on textual Internet Ugly.

Internet Slang and memes stemming from Fan fiction

User bases for many of the most popular websites or modern technology comprises of mostly amateurs: "Amateur writers, amateur designers, amateur photographers and film editors.” (Eveleth)

While the typical ways that Internet Ugly expresses itself is through “freehand mouse drawing, digital puppetry, scanned drawings, poor grammar and spelling, human-made glitches, and rough photo manipulation”, Internet Ugly can have roots in amateur writers online as well as the way that language/slang can change on the Internet, favoring poor grammar or spelling because it adds humor. I’d like to share a few examples of how Internet Ugly can affect textual content as well.

While there are also websites to upload original fiction, fan fiction thrives online, and because it is often dominated by amateur or very young writers, it has a stereotype for being poorly written, sometimes extremely so. 

Three major websites host this type of content and dominate the field of written transformative works: Fanfiction.net, Archiveofourown.org (also called AO3), and Wattpad. AO3 alone has 3,466,000 uploaded ‘works’. Amateur writers and their sloppy, terrible styles often turn into part of the Internet language itself. For example, memes have come out of the grammatical errors and spelling mistakes from young teens in a popularized format called “One Direction Imagines”, published on Wattpad. As this format has exploded, it is getting harder to find the line between what was once a genuine “imagine” and just bad writing or what is a parody of that kind of writing.

Another example would be one of the most infamous fan fictions of all time, also known as “the worst fan fiction ever written”, is a Harry Potter inspired work called My Immortal which was recently confirmed to be a parody after over 10 year of speculation as to whether it was a “trollfic”, or not. 

Many of the lines in the story have become memes themselves, such as the style of the opening paragraph being translated to apply to Shakespeare’s Hamlet. 

[Above: written with the prompt “Imagine Shakespeare but written in the style of My Immortal”]

Some buzzwords or phrases that become meme-like and spread in online communities are often misspelled, or absurdist, and become just more common vocabulary within Internet Slang. The components of this slang include: 

Intentional misspellings, with roots in “LOLspeak” from gaming chats, such as “I can has Cheezburger”, or a more recent example of replacing “small” with “smol”. 

Phonetic translation as a result of shorthand texting on SMS, or on old cell phones that you would need to hit one number pad several times to get a letter, called t9 word. An example of this would be “u” instead of “you”, “gr8″ as “great”, or “2″ instead of “to” or “too”.  

Acronyms, which come and go. “Lol” (laughing out loud) or “lmao” (laughing my ass off) have stayed strong for a while and are still in use today, but it’s probably been a long time since you’ve seen others that have faded away, such as “rofl” (rolling on floor laughing), or its cringier brother, “roflcopter”. 

Another important factor for the messiness and sloppiness of even the most popular memes has to do with who is on the receiving end for this type of content. 

Most people that see and share these images, memes and jokes are other average people who love memes and Internet cultures, who care much more about how funny the joke is than how good the image actually looks or if the spelling is accurate.

Douglas argues that Internet Ugly isn’t going anywhere. 

He says, “So long as some creators have more ideas than capabilities, there will always be an Internet Ugly.”

Works Cited

Nick Douglas (2014). “It’s Supposed to Look Like Shit: The Internet Ugly Aesthetic” in Journal of Visual Culture 13(3), pp. 314-339.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/12/internet-ugly-and-the-aesthetic-of-failing-on-purpose/384023/

http://nymag.com/selectall/2016/10/the-internet-trends-toward-crap.html

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Messages from Miyazaki

What Studio Ghibli has done to spread positive messages about human relationships to the natural world around us. 

Hiroshi Yamanaka attributes Spirited Away’s massive international success to several factors, including high animation quality, family-friendly content, great promotion, and material that is for children but also conveys deeper, more serious issues. Spirited Away was so immensely successful that 1 out of 5 Japanese citizens have seen the film! While Yamanaka focus more on the idea of the “power to live” and how Studio Ghibli movies empower young girls with their frequent female protagonists, this is just one of the several messages that is present in almost every film by Miyazaki. These movies delve into themes of environmentalism, pacifism, feminism, love and family, personal transformation, and traditional values (Schellhase).

In this post, I’d like to elaborate more on the “shiny leaf culture” that Yamanaka touched upon in The Utopian Power to Live and talk more about the environmentalist messages, often in line with Shinto beliefs, contained within many of these films.

Yamanaka talks about the disconnect Miyazaki felt with Japan and its nationalism, which led him into something of an identity crisis. In fact, Miyazaki considers himself more along the lines of a Europhile, according to the recent documentary The Kingdom of Dream and Madness. However, dissonance was alleviated when he read a book called The Cultivation of Plants and the Origin of Agriculture, because this brought on an epiphany that Japanese is not as isolated when one looks to nature and forests common with other cultures. This common culture, not limited to borders, was coined by the author of the book as “the shiny-leaf culture”, and Miyazaki felt relieved of his depression and guilt when he imagined himself as part of this culture instead (Yamanaka). He was awakened to the beauty of the environment, which knows no borders or nations. 

His view of nature also aligns and is influenced by Shinto: one of the main beliefs being that everything in the universe, include non-living objects like rivers or stones, have their own spirit. Perhaps this view feels so refreshing to a Western audience because we are so used to “a Judeo-Christian tradition, in which nature is an impersonal object created by a transcendent God and given to humanity to be conquered and controlled” (Yamanaka).

I have grown up watching many of Miyazaki’s films, and almost every movie includes themes about the coexistence of humans with nature, and our mistreatment and destruction of the natural world and how humanity owes nature our respect. Often set in gorgeous natural backdrops, characters make friends with spirits of nature like the tree spirit Totoro, the river spirit Haku, wolves and boar from Princess Mononoke, or tales are even told from the perspective of these animals like shape-shifting raccoon dog “tanuki” in Pom Poko.

In My Neighbor Totoro, the father of two young girls tells them that the great tree near their house has“been around since long ago, back in the time when trees and people used to be friends.” This contains a nostalgic notion that humans and the environment are not on the same good terms they once were in the past, as humanity continues to carve out so much of nature for their own gain.

Pom Poko is one of the movies that sends the strongest message of environmentalism. In this movie, raccoon dogs with shape shifting powers try their best to frighten humans away from encroaching on their land, then expend their last ditch effort to create a gigantic visual mirage that shows what an older, less urban Japan looked like, trying to convince the humans to bring this type of world back. They fail each time to stop the development, and at the end of the movie, those who cannot shape shift perish, and the raccoons who have the ability take on human appearances to live in the city that sprang up all around them.

In the last scene, the raccoons shed their human disguises and meet again at night in their true forms to dance on the last remaining patch of green land: a manicured golf course. The protagonist and all of the main characters in this movie are non-human forest creatures, and watching the destruction of these animal’s homes from their perspective over many years is both heartbreaking and eye-opening.

Miyazaki often weaves personal experiences into his films, and it’s clear that seeing the pollution, exploitation, and disrespect of nature has affected him deeply. In Spirited Away, Chihiro helps to escort a ‘stink god’ to be cleaned up at the bathhouse, and this creature actually turns out to be the spirit of a highly polluted river. Miyazaki was inspired for this scene from a personal experience, when a river near his house was excessively polluted. They finally made an effort to clean it, where junk and objects like a bicycle were discovered and removed (GreenShinto).

Even if the whole movie doesn’t center around ideas of environmentalism, it is a recurring trope that we can see hinted at anywhere. Sophie from Howl’s Moving Castle lives above a hat shop right next to train tracks, which spews out smoke and exhaust frequently over her window.

Nausicaä navigates a “toxic jungle” of fungi and mutated plants after a nuclear fallout. What you see in this GIF aren’t snowflakes: they’re actually toxic spores, and she wears a gas mask to protect herself against them, a foreboding warning against how nature could turn against us as a result of humanity’s own bad decisions. Nausicaä has been collecting samples and experimenting on the poisonous plants, and she found that plants grown with clean soil and water are not toxic, but it was the humans who destroyed the soil to make the plants grow that way. The humans in the story fear and even hate the toxic jungle, not realizing it was actually them who led to its creation in the first place.

One of the main characteristics of the majority of the villains or antagonists in his films are that they are “exploiters”: “people who attempt to dominate nature in pursuit of political domination, and are destructive to both humanity and nature.” (Schellhase)

However, one device that is also present in many of these films is the idea of the grey area that exists between good and evil, and that maintaining a balance is often for the best. This balance is demonstrated within Princess Mononoke several times. One example would be the highly complex character and antagonist Lady Eboshi. On one hand, she rescues prostitutes and takes in lepers to run the factory-village Iron Town, but the iron production is bad for the surrounding environment and she does not care about the damage it brings to nature and the animals. She is very complex in her morals, as we can see with this tumblr thread here, titled “Lady Eboshi is Awesome”.

Nature is not shown as the perfect option either, as the wild animals are not without their own faults. Both movies do not urge for domination on either end, but rather coexistence. The environmentalist message calls for coexistence of all living things, and perhaps for humans to stop seeing themselves as the dominators and instead as equals to all things we share this world with.

Works Cited

http://www.greenshinto.com/wp/2014/12/11/miyazakis-shinto-themes/

http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2014/11/conservative-vision-hayao-miyazaki.html

Hiroshi Yamanaka (2008). “The Utopian “Power to Live”: The Significance of the Miyazaki Phenomenon” in Japanese Visual Culture: Explorations in the World of Manga and Anime (pp. 237-255).

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Gender and Video Game Characters: Then vs Now

Mikula opens her article on Gender and Video Games with a nearly impossible to answer question: Is Lara Croft a feminist icon, or a sexist fantasy?

[Pictured: the 1996 version of Lara compared to the most recent version. Game graphics have come a long way!]

While it was concluded that she is a “positive image", which means she works along non-stereotyped behavior and attitudes as an independent, intelligent and resourceful woman, the first tomb raider game in 1996 was one of the first games that broke out of the image of women in video games as damsels in distress (Mikula).

It seems that the question about if Lara is a good thing for women’s representation in video games is because the game industry has been known for being extremely exclusive of women, leaving people to grasp at straws for the slim representation women did receive.

Lara Croft as a female protagonist seemed like a big deal around twenty years ago, but  since then, we have seen several improvements for women’s representation in games, like the main character Chell in Portal or Cortana from Halo. (In doing some research for this post, it almost seemed funny to have to do a search engine search for “male video game protagonist”). 

Still, it seems that people were taking everything they could get: yes, it was a good thing to have Lara at a time when video games were exclusive, and even hostile, towards women. This treatment is not a thing of the past by a long shot, as what has been dubbed “Gamergate” occurred as recently as 2014, when female game developers such as Anita Sarkeesian received death and rape threats, bomb threats, and doxxing. "Most academics have since characterised Gamergate as a reaction to a shift in the videogames industry away from its traditional base to a more inclusive one.” Says Sam Hinton, professor of Digital Media at the University of Canberra. 

Some of this problem lies with who is producing this content behind the scenes, with the most recent report concluding that the industry consists of 23% female game developers and a whopping 81% are both white and male.

However, there have been some huge changes to this narrative with the release of recent games, mainly one from Blizzard Entertainment called Overwatch. This game demonstrates a shift in the tides for the video game industry, and since its release has demonstrated the immense effectiveness of using diversity as a “core design strategy" (Hinton).

The playable heroes are men and women, straight and gay, people of color, a variety of body types, ages, non-human, and represent 6 of the 7 continents, only excluding Antartica. Instead of perpetuating something called the “Smurfette Principal”, or only including one solitary female within a group of males, Overwatch actually tips it in favor of female representation, with 12 female and 11 male characters.  

And the main mascot of the game, Tracer, is a queer woman. This is huge in an industry where gay characters are still extremely rare, and historically almost non-existent, according to research done by the Queerness and Games Conference. 

"Rather than giving a nod to diversity in the form of a single female character or plot element, they wove it into their world with every design decision” (Hinton), and this seems to be exactly the kind of thing an industry that has lagged behind the rest in diversity and inclusion needs. 

Instead of thinking of diversity as a pesky kind of quota that one must fulfill, the game developers instead seize it as an opportunity to go outside of the “small slice of humanity [the industry] feels comfortable portraying” (Campbell), which is white or East Asian males, and explore characters that break out of the previous narrative, much like Lara’s character did in 1996. 

Works Cited

Maja Mikula (2010). “Gender and Videogames: The Political Valency of Lara Croft” in Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 17(1), pp. 79-87.

http://c.ymcdn.com/sites/www.igda.org/resource/resmgr/files__2016_dss/IGDA_DSS_2016_Summary_Report.pdf

https://theconversation.com/diversity-and-inclusion-are-the-heroes-in-overwatch-a-runaway-commercial-gaming-success-75132

https://www.polygon.com/features/2017/3/20/14960924/overwatch-diversity-jeff-kaplan-interview-blizzard

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The New Face of Nicotine Addiction

One of the first products to align itself with women’s movements was the cigarette industry. 

Back then, campaigns needed to undo the idea that women smoking was ‘unsightly’, and created the idea that smoking was a slimming aid, latched onto the “growing sense of autonomy”, and advertisers worked hard to make smoking seem like it was fighting sex taboo, and that it contributed to women’s liberation by inhaling formerly masculine smoke (Zeisler). Tobacco and cigarettes could be freely advertised like this only before 1971, when the Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act was passed and banned advertisements of tobacco products on radio and on television (ftc.gov). Tobacco in America is about to take another hard hit very soon: with graphic imagery on packaging, which has already been implemented on tobacco products in Australia, Brazil, Canada, India, New Zealand, Singapore, Venezuela, Thailand and Uruguay (Daily Mail) , and are much more effective than written warnings on these products’ packaging.

[Pictured above: Poster used to promote World No Tobacco Day, 31 May 2009, Tobacco Free Initiative, World Health Organization]

Ellen Peters of Ohio State University has stated that “The best experimental evidence we have so far is that graphic images will help to reduce smoking.” (Daily Mail). These “pictoral warnings” could be implemented on tobacco products on US markets soon, and this paired with other widespread campaigns like Truth or The Real Cost campaigns, is just another nail in the coffin of a dying tobacco industry that is fighting to continue selling its carcinogen products.

However, a new threat looms on the horizon, a loophole that the tobacco industry so desperately needs to stay ‘in the game’. E-cigarettes, also called vapes/vaporizers, are rising quickly in popularity in high schools and colleges across the country. Since 2011, e-cigarette use has tripled among middle and high school students (National Youth Tobacco Survey). Tim McAfee, director of the CDC's Office on Smoking and Health, said this increase "shows the power of 21st century marketing." (Harty)

In the rest of this post, I’d like to compare and contrast new media’s advertising of the e-cigarette the “Juul” compared to the old, co-opting smoking campaigns highlighted in Andi Zeisler’s “The Coordidors of Empower”.

While companies like Virginia Slims or Lucky Strike latched onto the first waves of feminism and co-opted the “language of liberation”, e-cigarettes like Juul are similarly aligning themselves with a particular generation and its values, the Millennials and Gen Z.

Let’s examine the look of their recent advertisements, their campaigns, and most especially Juul’s “rule of cool” that has persevered around tobacco products since the beginning with the Marlboro man and liberated woman.

This is the Juul. 

[Source: JUUL Labs]

It’s sleek, discreet, and reminiscent of a USB drive (if it didn’t seem high-tech enough already). Right now, e-cigs are “in a state of limbo” because they have yet to be regulated, and this is good news for this industry when traditional, or “combustable cigarettes” are bogged down by the law. Juul is rolling out a multi million dollar campaign called “Vaporize”, which employs the use of colorful and geometric “Juul bars” in Los Angeles, New York, and the Hamptons, all places known for their ‘cool’ or ‘hip’ factors. 

[Source: AdAge.com]

The ads for Juul are bright, promote diversity and uses mostly women or a non-traditionally masculine man in their ads. This type of diversity is increasingly important and has a huge appeal to a Millennial audience, who puts an immense value on diversity, and these ads were designed with a “dynamic energy” in mind. Also, all of them feature young and hip models, and advertises #smokingevolved to nail in the “futuristic” appeal once more with the idea that this product is better than the last. 

The director of state communications for Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids John Schachter has said that the way this campaign depicts young men and women is concerning, “especially when adjoined with the design”. His organization has noticed obvious trends that appeal to adolescents in e-cigarette campaigns such as: celebrity endorsements, sponsorships and various flavors (Harty).

Appealing to women by using the “language of liberation” in the first combustible cigarette campaigns has now transformed in new ways, selling the electronic cigarette by similarly co-opting a generation’s attraction to developments in technology and interest in seeing diversity.

Online advertising has power. This can be good news for an industry that is struggling against regulations and laws that hold it down, but bad news for health, especially when ads are targeted to a youth market.

Works Cited

Andi Zeiser (2016). “The Corridors of Empower” in We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to CoverGirl®, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement (pp. 3-28).

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1065854/Graphic-images-appear-cigarette-packets-shock-smokers-quitting.html

https://web.archive.org/web/20041121233134/http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/tobacco/Title15_Ch36.pdf

http://adage.com/article/cmo-strategy/juul-hopes-reinvent-e-cigarette-ads-campaign/299142/

https://www.slideshare.net/YTHorg/mobile-marketing-of-electronic-cigarettes

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Memes and Marriage Equality

Recently, Australia passed the vote with a 61.6% vote for “Yes” for marriage equality, changing the Marriage Act to the phrase “two people” to encompass all to marry, including gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and intersex Australians. One interesting result of this vote was the voter turnout of those who are under 25, since they are the most likely to support marriage equality, but the least likely to be enrolled to vote (Butler). 

In the vote for the Marriage Act, voter turnout for a younger generation was at a steady 70-80 percent.

“Digital campaigning, including tools like memes, are part of the new language of political campaigning.” - Rose Jackson

“Political campaigning has changed. How do you reach out to a group of people that have no landline, can’t be door-knocked, don’t watch free-to-air television and think politics is out of touch?”  says Rose Jackson, NSW Left faction leader in the Huffington Post. 

This usage of memes for something usually very serious or hard to understand is similar to the way that advertisers have co-opted messages of a youthful generation in the past, using the “language of liberation” to sell products, like how cigarettes latched onto first wave feminism and aligned smoking with women’s liberation (Zeiser). However, there are limits to how effective these messages can be, and it all depends on the receiver’s level of Internet meme literacy. The meme takes a chance that those reading are familiar with the format, however, it can seem abstract or confusing if someone is not in on the joke. This type of joke takes a gamble on the receiver’s understanding, at the risk of eliminating the power of its potential humor. 

One example of memes done right that had an impact during this vote was the “Dank marriage equality memes for yes-voting over18s”. Even the title of the page itself is an Internet inside joke: a “phrasal template” originating from a page called “Dank Memes for Edgy Teens” from 2015. The Facebook page is full of jokes urging young Australians to enroll to vote by the deadline, using memes such as the wikihow cat illustrations in “Pills that Make You Stare” meme (2017), “Powder that Makes you Say Yes” (2017), Owlturd comics, “Distracted Boyfriend” (2017), or the “Nut Button” (2016). Another that uses this strategy is the Australian Young Greens page, or NSW Left.

[Above: “Dank Marriage Equality Memes for Yes-Voting over18s” posts a meme that follows the “Nut Button” template to urge voters to vote ‘Yes’ on a marriage equality act]

Memes are reactionary by nature, and a good way to express opinions through a GIF or visual instead of just through text. The reproducibility and immediate recognizing of a meme format is important, too. 

[Above: of these two images, one shows a physical act of smearing glitter paint onto a handheld sign that urges others to vote ‘No’ to Marriage Equality. The other is an online meme using a wikihow illustration template demonstrating the user’s aversion to the message, both demonstrating the person’s dislike of the ‘Coalition for Marriage’ campaign.]

The albeit sometimes bizarre emergence of a kind of “Internet language” through meme literacy can help make discussing these serious social and political issues feel a lot more palatable. Not only that, but it makes those who get the joke laugh, which will more likely lead us to spread the joke to our friends, so they can laugh too. 

[Above: Use of the Kermit the Frog “But That’s None of My Business” (2014) template]

[Above: Use of Gordon Ramsey and the “Lamb Sauce Located” (2017) template]

One of the dangers of using this approach is that this Internet language is always evolving, and extraordinarily fast. Memes expire, become old enough to be ironic, go through phrases of being acceptable to use, and are rich with interactions that constantly change and shape the meme’s underlying connotations. It’s not easy to be completely on top of the shifting landscape of memes. When companies aren’t completely tuned in, these types of campaigns very quickly lose their appeal and can feel out of touch with modern digital popular culture.

For example, Queensland Greens sent out this tweet on November 14, 2017 as a reaction to the result of the vote. However, the image of a rainbow projecting out of a computer screen to a stick figure is related to both the “puking rainbows” or “ASDFmovie” meme era, both of these jokes being extremely outdated: one originating from 2006 and the other 2008, which is ancient in meme years when we consider how fast these digital cultural phenomenons are created, spread, manipulated, and how transient their ‘life cycle’ of relevance can be. 

Other content, including a celebratory GIF produced by Tumblr’s @staff account, maintains a professional, streamlined look. Memes are known for feeling youthful and funny, but on the downside the connotation for this is that they are viewed as unprofessional and very amateur (as some memes employ the use of crude editing as part of the joke itself). 

When people are engaging so much with the digital sphere, it’s harder now than ever to produce content that people like, want to share, and will break through the vast amount of data being presented to individuals every day. In the past, many companies employed the use of sexual imagery to “break through” the slew of images and believed it was a surefire way to grab attention. Now, research has shown this is not only not a good business strategy, but it isn’t actually that effective (Dolliver, 1999, Fetto, 2001). Memes have proven to do a great job at “breaking through” the vast amounts of daily media clutter, and they are the hilarious sugar that helps the medicine, the emotional labor expended on being informed and involved with news or politics, go down. 

Image sources: 

1. Participation by Age and Sex bar graphs

2. Dank Marriage Equality Memes Facebook photos page

3. Vote Yes Nut Button

4. It’s Ok to Say No handheld poster

5. Wikihow Cat “It’s ok to Say No” reactionary

6. When You See Your Mate and They’ve Got a Flat Tire / That’s None of My Business

7. Marriage Equality Located

8. Queensland Greens Twitter status

9. ‘Australia Said Yes’ Twitter status

10. Tumblr Staff Gif

Works Cited:

Andi Zeiser (2016). “The Corridors of Empower” in We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to CoverGirl®, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement (pp. 3-28)

Lauren Rosewarne (2007). “Advertising and Public Space” in Sex in Public: Women, Outdoor Advertising and Public Policy (pp. 9-31).

Josh Butler. “How Memes Could Swing The Plebiscite For Marriage Equality Supporters.” Huffington Post Australia, HuffPost, 16 Aug. 2017, www.huffingtonpost.com.au/2017/08/16/how-memes-could-swing-the-plebiscite-for-marriage-equality-suppo_a_23078669/.