Sorted for Memes and Gifs: Visual Media and Everyday Digital Politics
| Published date | 01 August 2019 |
| Author | Jonathan Dean |
| Date | 01 August 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1478929918807483 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
807483PSW0010.1177/1478929918807483Political Studies ReviewDean
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Political Studies Review
2019, Vol. 17(3) 255 –266
Sorted for Memes and Gifs:
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Visual Media and Everyday
https://doi.org/10.1177/1478929918807483
DOI: 10.1177/1478929918807483
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Digital Politics
Jonathan Dean
Abstract
This article identifies an unease, or even squeamishness, in the way in which political science
addresses social media and digital politics, and argues that we urgently need to avoid such
squeamishness if we are to adequately grasp the texture and character of contemporary digitally
mediated politics. The first section highlights some of the methodological assumptions that
underpin this squeamishness. Section ‘Visual Culture and the “Memeification” of Politics’, drawing
on a recent research project on the changing shape of the British left, highlights a number of key
trends in digital politics which deserve more attention from political scientists. In particular, I
stress the ways in which politics is enacted in and through visual media such as gifs, memes and
other forms of shareable visual content. Section ‘Re-Orienting the Study of Digital Politics’ then
mines recent literature in media and communication studies to highlight a range of conceptual and
methodological approaches that might be better able to capture the contours of these emergent
forms of digitally mediated politics. In the section ‘The Pleasures and Passions of Socially Mediated
Politics: Towards a Research Agenda’, I articulate a possible research agenda. Overall, I encourage
political scientists to see the production and exchange of digital visual media not as some frivolous
activity on the margins of politics, but as increasingly central to the everyday practices of politically
engaged citizens.
Keywords
social media, visual culture, Labour Party, memes, participation
Accepted: 10 September 2018
A few days after the 2017 UK General Election, the Metro newspaper published a feature
entitled ‘The Memes that Decided the Outcome of the General Election’ (White, 2017),
reflecting the widely held view that Labour’s better than anticipated performance was in
part explainable by Labour activists’ astute use of social media (Goes, 2018; Norris,
School of Politics and International Studies, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK
Corresponding author:
Jonathan Dean, School of Politics and International Studies, University of Leeds, Social Sciences Building,
Room 13.07, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK.
Email: ipijde@leeds.ac.uk
256
Political Studies Review 17(3)
2017). While pulling back from some of the hyperbole about social media in the Metro
piece, the aftermath of the 2017 General Election nonetheless provides a timely opportu-
nity to reflect on the current state of existing political science scholarship on digital
politics.
In this article, I argue that there is a certain unease, or even squeamishness, in the way
in which political scientists (particularly in the UK) tackle social media and digital poli-
tics. This, in turn, results in a number of key developments in digital politics falling
under our discipline’s radar. To flesh out these claims, the first section of the paper high-
lights some of the methodological assumptions that underpin this squeamishness.
Section ‘Visual Culture and the “Memeification” of Politics’, drawing on a recent
research project on the changing shape of the British left, highlights a number of key
trends in digitally mediated political participation which the political science community
has hitherto downplayed, or overlooked altogether. In particular, I stress the role of the
visual: for many politically engaged citizens, politics is enacted in and through visual
media cultures such as gifs, memes and other forms of shareable visual content. More
broadly, the turn to the visual – what we might call the ‘memeification’ of politics –
directs attention both to the affective dynamics of politics, and to the protean, everyday
nature of digitally mediated political engagement. Rather than seeing this turn to the
visual as something unusual or exceptional it is, I suggest, part of the constitutive fabric
of everyday political engagement.
Against this backdrop, section ‘Re-Orienting the Study of Digital Politics’ mines
recent literature in media and communication studies to articulate a less ‘squeamish’
approach to the analysis of digitally mediated politics. While acknowledging the multi-
plicity of conceptual and methodological approaches to the study of politicised digital
media, I suggest that the recent turn to virtual immersive ethnographies pursued by the
likes of Jessica Beyer and Adrienne Massanari could provide useful methodological
insights. In section ‘The Pleasures and Passions of Socially Mediated Politics: Towards a
Research Agenda’, I articulate a possible research agenda. More broadly, I encourage
political scientists to see socially mediated cultural production and exchange not as some
frivolous activity on the margins of politics, but as increasingly central to how large num-
bers of predominantly young citizens experience politics.
Political Science and the Problem of Social Media
While few political scientists would doubt the importance of social media, our disci-
pline’s capacity to capture the feel and character of socially mediated forms of political
participation is hindered, I argue, by three sets of assumptions about the nature, scope and
purpose of political science research, as well as an implicit self-representation of the fig-
ure of the political scientist.
The first problem concerns the priority afforded to broad-brush diagnostic analyses of
aggregate citizen opinions, values, voting preferences and election results. This was
evident in political scientists’ responses to the 2017 UK General Election (see, for exam-
ple, Denver, 2018; Dorey, 2017; Heath and Goodwin, 2017; Jennings and Stoker, 2017)
and Brexit. Consider, for example, a recent special issue of British Politics on the poli-
tics of Brexit. Despite the importance of social media in shaping the wider discursive
and affective contours of the Brexit referendum and its aftermath, the articles tend to
either totally forego any mention of the role of social media (see, for example, Marsh,
2018) or mention it in passing without subjecting it to sustained analysis (see, for
Dean
257
instance, Copus, 2018). My point here is not to churlishly dispute the value of such
analyses, as all these pieces are insightful and valuable on their own terms. My point is,
rather, that the disproportionate dominance and visibility of aggregate analyses of public
opinion, election results and so on – reflecting the tendency to equate political science
with what Stuart Hall ([1966] 2016: 88) called ‘the psephological equation’ – have a
number of consequences for how the object of political science is constructed, and the
role of social media therein. Such work produces an implicit self-representation of the
political scientist as above the fray of political engagement, looking down from a raised
vantage point. As a result, the specific texture, feel and character of digitally mediated
participation recedes from view, becoming subsumed into broad aggregations of votes,
values, opinions and so on.
Second, when social media is taken seriously, it tends to be framed in consequentialist
terms. By this, I mean that social media is interrogated not because it is seen as constitu-
tive of politics, but because it is seen to impact upon politics. As Brassett and Sutton
(2017: 246) have argued, this is a more general tendency for the political analysis of sat-
ire, comedy and popular culture to be ‘reduced to an instrumental logic of “impact”’. This
tacit framing of the politics/social media relation is present in, for example, Helen
Margetts’s (2017: 386) post-election observation that ‘2017 may be remembered as the
first election where it seems to have been the social media campaigns that really made the
difference to the relative fortunes of the parties, rather than traditional media’. Similarly,
Dommett and Temple’s (2018) study of digital campaigning in the 2017 election exam-
ines whether and how campaign material disseminated via social media impacted the
results. Again, while such work is of course extremely valuable, it still tends to cast social
media as distinct from ‘proper’ politics. Social media is seen as a medium through which
political campaigns are directed, or as something that may have consequences for (elec-
toral) politics, but it is tacitly framed as not, in and of itself, constitutive of the texture and
practice of politics.
The third problem is to do with a certain squeamishness towards the affective and
emotional dynamics of politics. This is mostly manifest as an absence, that is, a discus-
sion of politics in terms of public opinion, party policy programmes and...
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