What makes a meme

Sun, 28 Oct 2012 15:00:00 +0000

Biden-laughs and Ryan-abs, Big Birds and binders and bayonets: There is something fascinating when an event as stodgily ceremonial as the presidential campaign is run through the lulz-filter of social media, secreting a hallucination of phrases and images and videos and, of course, gifs. An army is at the ready to spin off a gag at every turn, to propagate the joke to maximum scope; digital arpeggiations of candidate goofs and campaign blunders are transmitted from host to host through a mere caress of the touch-sensitive screen. Watching debates with that second screen of fast-moving social media streams and text-input boxes begging our thoughts has positioned many of us as hunters for the most shareable, memeiest content, ready to pounce at something, anything, and in the process, changing the overall narrative of an event. We’ve developed a kind of meme literacy, a habit of intuiting in real time the potential virality of a speech act — to hear retweets inside words.

Sunday show round up

Sun, 21 Oct 2012 17:49:00 +0000

With just one day to go before the final presidential debate, which will focus on foreign policy, the Sunday shows were awash with Obama and Romney surrogates trotting out party lines on foreign policy topics du jour -- predominantly the Libya embassy attacks and Iran.

Iran

Fox News Sunday saw Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) tow a hawkish line on Iran, calling the crippling program of sanctions currently in place a "miserable failure." "Time for talking is over he said," echoing Bibi Netanyahu's call for the U.S. to draw "red lines" over Iran's nuclear ambitions. "We should be demanding transparency and access to their nuclear program," Graham said.

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) defended the sanctions program against Graham's attacks, "There's unrest in the streets of Tehran and the leaders in Iran are feeling it," he said.

David Axelrod echoed Durbin's point during his appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press," "They're [Tehran is] feeling the heat. And that's what the sanctions were meant to do. So if they're sensible, they're looking at that and saying it's time to set aside our nuclear ambitions and save our economy."

Salon.com > Romnesia

What makes a meme

Sunday show round up