Meme in India

On June 1, 2017, physicists at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory in the US detected a gravitational wave for the third time, proving Einstein was right all along. Newspapers and portals everywhere carried the news. “I saw the news on a Malayalam website and was surprised to see it was ‘liked’ by very few people,” recalls Kochi resident Hrishikesh ‘Hrishi’ Bhaskaran. He quickly got down to creating a ‘meme’ — a typically humorous image, video, text, and so on that is shared virally by Internet users. Hrishi’s meme had Einstein leaning back insouciantly, a la ace comedian Salim Kumar in a hugely popular scene in the Malayalam blockbuster Mayavi , with the hit throwaway line: “Oh, no big deal!”

Boom! In a matter of hours, the meme went viral, over 8,000 likes and about 600 shares at last count. “For sure, many of those who liked and shared the meme would have otherwise ignored the news about Einstein, but they now understood its importance,” says Hrishi, an administrator for International Chalu Union (ICU), a voluntary group of meme makers in South India. That’s the power of the humble Internet meme, he adds.

Full basket: At times light, accessible and even anti-intellectual, memes can also serve as a primer to current affairs and also be a comment on society

Without doubt, the meme is a significant, and possibly underrated, invention of the digital era. There are thousands of meme makers in India who get the average Indian clued in on issues ranging from social to political and cultural, but they often fall short of prompting meaningful or proactive engagement.

Vineetha Krishnan, a research scholar with the Centre for English Studies at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, has brought out a paper on the ICU titled ‘From Laughter, Rage And Criticality: Cybernetics Of International Chalu Union’ ( IJELLH journal, August 2016). Observing that memes have become an important phenomenon in contemporary culture, she writes that the term ‘internet memes’ refers also to some “customs among internets, modes of expression, as well as recurring motifs and conversation topics”.

Full basket: At times light, accessible and even anti-intellectual, memes can also serve as a primer to current affairs and also be a comment on society

For instance, in an ICU meme which refers to Marvel Studio’s recent blockbuster Avengers: The Infinity War , Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr) is seen holding a Christian evangelical publication, and the caption reads: “What Thanos Didn’t Plan For!”. Avengers fans would get the f(p)un instantly: arch villain Thanos is destroying half the universe with a snap of his finger, sparing none. But Iron Man Tony Stark has a simple solution to escape imminent death: an evangelical circular! The meme, while poking fun at the way evangelists boast about their ‘God’, also trivialises the Avengers’ story by pitting it against the perceived might of god among believers.

Interestingly, it was back in 1976 that evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, in his book The Selfish Gene , coined the term ‘meme’ to describe small units of culture that spread from person to person by copying or imitation. Like many Web 2.0 applications — which have users generating the content — memes reflect and shape the general mindset, writes Limor Shifman in Memes in Digital Culture , a comprehensive work on internet memes.

He points out that what is striking about many memetic photos is the “incongruity between two or more elements in the frame”. This, in a way, works like the Kuleshov Effect in cinema, where two different shots are juxtaposed and viewers derive (or, rather, are tricked into deciphering) a new meaning out of the frame. In their influential 2017 paper ‘Never Gonna GIF You Up: Analyzing the Cultural Significance of the Animated GIF’, Kate M Miltner and Tim Highfield of the University of Southern California and Queensland University of Technology, Australia, respectively, explain this better: “Taking a clip from a master narrative and applying it to a new, unrelated setting demonstrates the importance of decontextualization... has the effect of creating a new, partial narrative.”

Take the meme where an Indian school boy tells Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg that he has been told by his father that Zuckerberg is spying on them, to which the FB chief answers: “He is not your dad.” Juxtapose this against the Cambridge Analytica data scandal and the privacy invasion debate involving big tech companies; the meme manages to deconstruct much of it.

Democratic social commentary

C Yamini Krishna, a research scholar at the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, sees memes as the language of social media, and a means for social commentary in today’s world of heightened surveillance and curbs on free speech. She adds that memes end up educating and informing the audience on certain issues that the mainstream media remains silent on.

An important aspect of the internet meme is the manner in which it has democratised social commentary. No longer is this the domain of the learned men, the academics, the OpEd writers or other opinion-makers, says the admin of a popular “dark” meme group in Tamil Nadu. Now anyone can become an opinion-maker and, most importantly, that opinion is heard and appreciated (shared) by hundreds and thousands of people, he says. “Memes have made opinion-making egalitarian, inclusive and democratic.” The millions of memes that came out after the Narendra Modi government’s demonetisation drive are a case in point. One of the laments was whether the PM has become PayTM, considering how he incentivises online payments while making monetary transactions difficult.

“The meme is just a tool,” says a creator from Gujarat. “What you do with it makes all the difference.” He reveals that he even makes memes on family members and relatives, “especially my in-laws, and some friends, and share on social media”. Even though he doesn’t explicitly mention who the targets are, “they get it instantly” and are agitated but can’t react forcefully because they know they will become a laughing stock.

Full basket: At times light, accessible and even anti-intellectual, memes can also serve as a primer to current affairs and also be a comment on society

That may be the innocuous side of it, but in its more darker avatar, memes facilitate trolling of the vicious kind, with political parties, religious groups, student communities, IT professionals and even retired folks indulging in mudslinging of the worst kind. And the scary part is how easily this can be done by just about anyone.

Line of offence: In its more darker avatar, memes facilitate trolling of the vicious kind, with political parties, religious groups, student communities, IT professionals and even retired folks indulging in mudslinging of the worst kind

This is democracy of the mob, says sociologist Shiv Visvanathan. “The internet does not offer democracy to the dissenter. It just empowers the mob. This is regressive,” he says. Concurring with this, Shiju Joseph, a clinical psychologist trained at Bengaluru’s National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, says, “Perhaps the strongest faculty of the meme — its rebel (subversive) nature — has become its weakest feature as well.” In its eagerness to be sarcastic and subversive, the meme tends to see things in black and white, leaving little room for discussion or negotiation, he adds.

At another extreme are those who believe that memes are, by nature, meant to be light and anti-intellectual and thereby accessible to the average individual. Muhammed Afzal P, who teaches at the Hyderabad Central University (HCU), observes that many people see memes as “instant news analysis of current affairs”. In his paper ‘Internet Memes as Effective Means of Social and Political Criticism’, presented to the Delhi-based Centre for Internet and Society, Afzal reasons that in a society where films hold great sway over everyday conversations, “memes use images from popular culture to respond to current affairs as well as contemporary social and political questions”. He argues that memes, although often mistakenly described as ‘trolls’ by the creators themselves, frequently have progressive content related to issues of religion, sexuality, nationalism, and so on.

Full basket: At times light, accessible and even anti-intellectual, memes can also serve as a primer to current affairs and also be a comment on society

Toronto-based Najma Jose, who actively tracks trends in social media, is in no mood to countenance memes as “progressive”. “Barring some exceptions such as the ICU, most meme groups are filled with misogyny, bile and and below-the-belt sarcasm.” Echoing her, Visvanathan says he is very sceptical about the so-called internet revolution itself. He argues that memes and trolls are a form of amplified digital violence. “It gives you tremendous amounts of anonymity while abusing someone. This enables and accelerates digital lynching,” he warns.

Aside from the anonymity, memes give their creators untrammelled powers with no concomitant responsibility or accountability And their audience isn’t looking for any real or meaningful engagement with issues either. This is a kind of passing/floating audience, reasons Krishna, while Joseph describes meme-making as “a minimum-energy activity, in most cases”, often bestowing a fake sense of gratification. A person who shares a meme, in all likelihood, thinks that she/he has performed a social duty by endorsing and transferring an opinion, but this is in fact a distraction. Additionally, memes have the effect of creating, what the thinker Daniel Boorstin refers to as, “pseudo events” — events made and performed only keeping the media in mind.

Memes often use comedy or satire to express things that might not be possible in the traditional media, says Krishnan. But unless substantiated, such commentary ends up becoming entertainment, rather than promoting serious engagement, she warns.

Full basket: At times light, accessible and even anti-intellectual, memes can also serve as a primer to current affairs and also be a comment on society

Off target

Additionally, there is the risk of satire failing to find its mark, and being taken at face value, she says. Visvanathan is among those who believes that perhaps the country isn’t ripe for such mature forms of subversion, as “the information revolution in India is not complete. We are a downloaded culture,” he says, adding that there is very little to differentiate between Macaulayism and the current wave of information revolution. “We get information but we don’t know how to process it. Internet has become a source of rumour, which is not a potent source of knowledge.”

However, there are far too many people, especially those aged 30-plus, who see memes and social media as potent sources of knowledge. This gullible population generally attributes ‘knowledge value’ to anything that is written, printed or produced. “IT is Macaulay 2.0. Macaulay made us secretaries, and Bangalore made us electronic secretaries,” says Visvanathan.

Meme-making is in no way comparable to knowledge creation. “We are not inventing knowledge. Internet gives you converging knowledge, rather than diverging knowledge. Internet has been good at some low-level of information creation. It has not been able to excel at real knowledge creation,” explains Visvanathan.

Given their soaring popularity, is there any way memes be made more progressive, gender-sensitive perhaps? “We must understand memes are cultural adhesives,” says Pramod K Nayar, a faculty member at HCU and the author of Citizenship and Identity in the Age of Surveillance . “The meme creates a community of like-minded people in a much faster way. And, in the process, it transforms the medium itself. So what began as something becomes something else in the end.” This fascinating feature can be put to good use if we can evolve a culture of progressive memeing. The communities must take charge of this change, he says. Sometime ago, the ICU group had decided that it will reject memes containing sexist jokes.

Those who are interested, committed and engaged do not stop with just the memes but go on to engage with the issues in other ways, says Krishna. Those who merely enjoy the memes for the entertainment value, too, willy-nilly become aware of the issues.

“Like any other media form, memes by themselves cannot bring about social change,” says Anirban Baishya, a PhD scholar with the Cinema and Media Studies Division, School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California. “Before we dismiss memes altogether, let us not forget that seemingly “lesser” media forms have always been disparaged… you can think of comics in India maybe 20 years ago when they were not seen as a serious art or storytelling form,” he says.

He feels we can “read” memes for the finer details of social context, especially and most explicitly in the case of political memes. “To understand why memes regularly employ dark humour, we need to see them in the ecology of digital circulation and humour... memes are a variation of the kind of humour you find in, say, All India Bakchod (AIB). Parody, satire and irony are a huge part of meme culture and are integral to their impact and circulation,” says Baishya. AIB is known for its slapstick, dark humour sketches and one of their recent memes showing PM Modi using a Snapchat dog filter on himself had landed them in legal trouble.

Full basket: At times light, accessible and even anti-intellectual, memes can also serve as a primer to current affairs and also be a comment on society

Still, given the pace at which trolls and fake news are overtaking cyberspace, even impacting offline life, there are worries that they might morph into a Frankenstein monster of the digital revolution. After all, memes talk in a sign language, and this, by its nature, is primitive and very powerful. In that context, it forcefully reverses the evolution of language and, hence, culture.

(Memes presented here are meant for representational and illustrative purposes only. BLink doesn’t endorse any of them.)

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