Joanna Doona: “Political laughter and internet memes: civic forms of satire"

Political laughter and internet memes: civic forms of satire

GP seminar with Joanna Doona who is senior lecturer at the Department of Communication at Lund University, Sweden. Her research interests lie in the intersection between the serious and the silly – combining studies of civic, popular and political culture with political humour, using approaches informed by audience and cultural studies as well as digital ethnography. Her work has been published in journals such as the International Journal of Cultural Studies and Javnost-The Public, as well as in edited collections and a textbook monography. Her most recent work focuses on memes and civic engagement.

 

This talk will focus on two interrelated studies of civic internet meme engagement on the popular platform Reddit.

1. The first offers a theoretical and methodological approach to the study of humorous memes, using examples of vaccination and pandemic policy themed memes. Memes are understood as forms of symbolic civic levelling, arguing for approaches that are sensitive to memes’ polysemic ambiguity, i.e. allowing for several different kinds of readings. I conceptualise them as ironic space, wherein the uncertainty of the pandemic everyday context was expressed through humour. Beyond establishing varying opinions, identities, emotions, and knowledge beliefs, ironic space encourages oscillation between analytical distance and myopia – allowing for negotiation of civic pandemic vulnerability.

2. The second study, carried out with Tommy Bruhn (KU), places memes as civic interaction in focus. Considered forms of folk satire, memes can expand and constrain reflexivity on identity and its relationship to world events. Through a case study of a Reddit community devoted to Swedish politics, we focus on joking and seriousness about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and Sweden’s subsequent NATO application. By combining digital ethnography and rhetorical textual analysis, we emphasise users’ negotiations of national identity and sensemaking of geopolitical changes, which created a space where users could entertain nationalism that would otherwise be fraught with unease.

Satire and silliness interspersed with serious discussions

Satire and silliness interspersed with serious discussions allowed users to play with nationalist sentiment in a space seemingly bracketed from consequences. The joking functioned to manage anxieties about the prospect of war, and the nature of Swedishness; aiding the processing of conflicting values and reaffirming a national community among the otherwise anonymous forum users. Our study hence argues for a view of civic satire as important forms of civic discourse in everyday life in times of crisis, emphasising the playfulness afforded by ‘memefication’.

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