Meme War Lab: Decoding Political Subcultures

Meme War Lab: Decoding Political Subcultures

Date: 
01.02.2018 14:00
Edition: 
2018
Format: 
Workshop
Location: 
HKW - K1

“The Great Meme War” is the semi-ironic title of a grass-roots information war orchestrated on 4chan’s “politically incorrect” image board and the Reddit forum “The Donald.” It is waged by a loose-knit collective of individuals who like to imagine that they elected a meme as President of the United States. Initially, political memes were thought to increase political activism by lowering its transaction costs. When they became mainstream on 4chan, however, memes turned out to be much much darker than expected. Political events, too, started to become memetic, and therefore much more influential. The Meme War Lab will offer a digital autopsy of the political subcultures of the deep vernacular web, and how they make use of internet slang and image-based memes in order to formulate political ideologies.

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