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Memes as Meaning: Theorizing Authority and Authorship in Arab New Media
Abstract
This paper entangles the often hyperbolic debates surrounding the exceptionalism of virtuality and how they inform new modes of communication and embodiment. By examining memes as both sites and products of "co-creational semiosis," I argue that temporality and spatiality speak not to the uniqueness of new media utterances but rather to the expanded scope of mundane practice. That said, mundaneness is not meant to suggest replicability, repetition, and a lack of idiosyncrasy. Rather it is a function of the totality of individuated and collective self-expression that occurs in the most experientially situated way. By looking at memes generated in and about Egyptian, Syrian, Iraqi, Lebanese, and Palestinian social and political milieus, the paper emphasizes the extent to which the study of memes informs our understanding of positionality and agency, particularly in relation to authority. Meaning constructed, comprehended, and learned through the contested realm of memes in the Arab world should be seen not as a function of the marketability of ideas through virality, but rather as fundamental reconfiguration of the political economy of communication in the social media and an irreverent dismissal of discursive monopolies. While the political narrativity embedded in memes may reflect status quo, counterrevolutionary, pro-establishment, or neoliberal tendencies (in some cases even the co-option of their critical perspectives), it is imperative to not overlook their disaggregated multi-sited authorship and transmutability as a theoretical premise for a practiced, albeit utopian, critical imaginary.
Discipline
Media Arts
Geographic Area
Arab States
Sub Area
Media