BY AMIR HUSSAIN
Critics and educators may plausibly perceive social media as preferring and promulgating fragmentary thinking, consumerist scrolling, and buzzwords over the attention to nuance and context that is cultivated in university settings. But the emergence of this arena nonetheless needs to be seen as relevant—even vital—for considering the intellectual and political landscape of thought and expression today.
One of the most prominent recent examples of the relevance of social media involves the fiery engagement and counterresponse through meme culture to JD Vance’s now infamous statement about “childless cat ladies” running the country. Streams of cat memes have bombarded social media in response to the viral video of Vance’s comment. Moreover, a range of recognized figures have launched their own witty responses on social media platforms, decrying the problematic comment, which has a long history, and challenging misinformation more broadly.
It is worth considering that meme culture often reappropriates things like fragmentation, scrolling, and buzzwords in order to rework them for alternate, often oppositional, thoughts and purposes. Indeed, Vance’s attacks on women, on historically marginalized groups like the LGBTQ community, and on university professors have all resulted in wide-ranging and creative social-media counterresponses worthy of careful reflection. As another recent example, Donald Trump and Vance’s widely publicized claims that immigrants were eating cats and dogs in Ohio have led to a plethora of provocative memes created with AI, memes that bring to light alternate perspectives, challenge anthropocentricism, and delegitimize power.
In my article for this year’s Journal of Academic Freedom, “The Art of Truth in the Social Media Age,” which reflects on the breakdown of authoritative truth and the porosity of borders between institutional life and social-media life, I cite the example of the viral cat meme “Zoom cat lawyer”—inspired by an attorney who could not deactivate a filter showing him as a cat on an official Zoom-held hearing—and discuss how the meme pokes holes into an anthropocentric demand to “solemnly swear to tell the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” It should be added that the judicial admonition to “solemnly swear” is the very opposite of the central attitude driving meme culture today: sarcasm, whimsy, a kind of friskiness.
The anonymous digital posts shared and spread on the internet as a form of imitated messaging known as memes characteristically present sarcastic, not solemn, responses to, or takes on, dominant and authoritative truths. This sarcasm is itself an indication of the general, cultural breach of trust or faith, on which someone would otherwise hypothetically swear. One might recall that Georg Lukács in his influential work The Theory of the Novel positioned irony as the quintessence not only of the novel but of modern literature in general. If one considers memes as a form of popular and accessible digitally based literature, comparable in a way to the poetry appearing on Instagram known as Instapoetry, then its predominant mode of irony can be better understood.
Meme culture, that is to say, speaks to the loss of faith in dominant, prevailing institutions and their ability to hold to an authoritatively binding truth. It is not a surprise then that social media and its prevalent meme culture would be particularly popular among younger adults, including current college students—but not solely because this demographic has grown up amid increased digitization. This group also turns to memes because the sarcasm (and at times, even the cynicism) in the mimetic messages speak to the disillusioning experiences that mark the times—whether that be the COVID-19 pandemic and the worry over future pandemics, the recurring threat of hurricanes and other global warming disasters, or the continuing political conflicts and wars at home and abroad.
Especially for those without power or authority, the allure of the counterdiscursive meme also includes its viral quality: A meme can be initiated with the “click of a button” and its messaging can then be imitated and spread widely and anonymously across any platform, especially if an algorithm ends up promoting it in feeds. The critical relevance of such memes cannot be easily discounted. They show us that even when a discursive act is taken out of a broader context or when it is modified through digital means, memes can nonetheless become a germane ground for new discourse, meaningful interpretation, and free thought.
One can observe, for example, how a discourse against authoritative, power-wielding conservativism has become implicitly embedded in the stream of cat memes that have ballooned in the last few months all over social media. No longer limited to refuting the Vance position that originally sparked them, the cat meme trend appears to have morphed shape into a broader movement that far exceeds the original impetus. Pertinently, Leigh Claire La Berge’s study Marx for Cats reminds us that the cat has been a politically relevant and symbolic creature across the span of human history—long before computers, let alone the internet, ever came into existence. As La Berge artfully puts it, “Cats, too, make their own history.”
With the internet, which is rife not only with cat content but also with warranted pessimism, it seems that meme culture has been particularly primed to visually comment on, intervene in, and parody the populist debates of our times. We have to take seriously the many facets of social media today.
Amir Hussain is a writer and scholar living in eastern Pennsylvania. His recent work can be found in Global Nineteenth-Century Studies and Linguaculture.
