Quote:
“The memes have been a major part of the American electoral scene since artist Shepard Fairey created his famous hope poster and Obama was subsequently coined ‘the 1st meme President’.” (Miltner, 419)
Comment:
A lot of great memes and humor have been created when related to politics. You can pick a party or representative and make a meme about them and more than likely most of the other party’s supporters will agree or laugh. The same thing can be said for memes made about other countries’ political leaders like the shirtless Putin on a bear. I’d think these are all good reasons to make memes that relate to an otherwise boring and unfunny political system. However, there is a problem if these memes are influencing part of the outcome of an election. Though they’re funny, they don’t have a place in politics especially when they affect the outcome of an election. The election process and the decisions being made by the government are very important to an entire country so it needs to be taken seriously. But, there’s another side to that argument. Some agree that memes being able to influence the outcome of an election could be a good thing. For example, most of the memes from the 2020 election were of Donald Trump’s loud mouth being put with a funny image or Joe Biden not being able to walk or talk. Is that a bad thing? For those reasons, I think memes can be important in influencing an election because we as a group of people would be able to point out some obvious flaws of the candidates.
Question:
Do you think memes should influence politics?
