\u201cIn the 1850s, thousands of Americans proudly called themselves \u2018the know-nothings\u2019 and formed a movement against migrants for the \u2018purification\u2019 of America.<\/p>\n
They were bragging about their lack of a clue about politics and rational argument,\u201d my academic friend sighed over a coffee in London last week.<\/p>\n
Because they were the only Democrats in the neighbourhood, my friend\u2019s family had moved from Alabama back to the Old World.<\/p>\n
These days, the politics of the United States has turned into a similar whirlpool of awe and ridicule \u2013 but now you don\u2019t have to be geographically bound to the country, as the digital realm makes the flows of controversial rhetoric spill over traditional boundaries of time and space.<\/p>\n
The campaign between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton featured an unprecedented amount of memes<\/a>, viral texts that proliferate on mutation and sharing. In my research<\/a>, I look at how memes have become the fast food media of contemporary politics as well as mindbombs of political activism.<\/p>\n They are absurd, politically incorrect, incomplete and require the knowledge of context to \u201cget\u201d the joke. But most importantly, they mirror public opinion and popular emotions on the subject.<\/p>\n Hillary Clinton\u2019s office tried to appropriate the language of internet cultures and shape their campaign posters like memes. But they failed to detach from the composition and expression style of a traditional poster. Not bold enough for memes, not classy enough for placards, these visuals got stuck somewhere in the grey zone between the online and offline.<\/p>\n