How memes are changing today's social media and digital discourse

In September this year, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) took a dig at the Congress by tweeting a graph about the rise in fuel price. It was meant to show that the percentage of increase was a lot less under its regime than during the tenure of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance. Instead, the graph listed the absolute price of petrol, which had increased since the BJP came to power in 2014.

It was a faux pas the Congress wasn’t going to ignore. In less than an hour, it bombarded Twitter with multiple satirical versions of the graph, each accompanied with a picture of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. BJP’s faulty graph, meanwhile, went viral with the Twitterati coming up with their own versions of it. One such meme even had yoga guru Baba Ramdev performing vrikshasana (tree pose) as the last bar of the graph.

Social media has taken over the world and there is nothing we can do about it. Long conversations over the phone have been reduced to free-of-charge WhatsApp messages with GIFs and emoticons replacing language and words. And political parties now tweet to make themselves heard. Memes, too, are a part of this digital discourse. Their snippety, funny and often sarcastic content is ideal for a world battling shrinking attention spans.

It’s difficult to explain what a meme is. Perhaps the Amul girl, who has been around for over 50 years with her puns and satirical take on current affairs, can help. Every day, this utterly, butterly, contemporary cartoon appears with a witty twist to a recent event. Amul had an early understanding of how the world would one day consume information — in small, easily palatable bites. That’s exactly what memes are doing, often by adding a twist to the tale.

The word “meme” dates back to 1976, when biologist Richard Dawkins published The Selfish Gene, in which memes originally represented ideas, behaviours and styles that go viral within a society or in a biological environment or system. Simply put, a meme is the cultural equivalent of a gene that gets passed from person to person. Virtual memes act in a similar way, as people share them on different social media platforms.

“Memes came into the picture when online community websites such as Reddit became a haven for teenage boys who had no social life and preferred to spend their time gaming or watching anime,” explains Anunaya Rajhans, a writing preceptor with the Young India Fellowship at Ashoka University in Sonepat near Delhi. Rajhans teaches a course called “Memes and the Internet”, which looks at memes as the smallest units of internet culture.

Around 15 years ago, these boys, through their love for all things nerdy, began creating memes that were largely politically incorrect. Eventually, some of the best memes made it to bigger, mainstream social platforms such as Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. “In fact, the memes you see on mainstream social media sites are in their last stage of evolution as they have already done the rounds of online chat rooms,” says Rajhans.

Today, memes have invaded various domains: political parties, brands and advertisers, social media influencers and even law enforcement agencies. The police in Kerala, Mumbai and Bengaluru make judicious use of them to spread a message or make a point in a catchy way.

Marketing agencies have jumped on the meme bandwagon to reach a far wider audience for much lower cost. Sandeep Goyal, chairman of digital advertising agency Mogae Media, says while meme marketing in India is still in the nascent stage, it has immense potential because of a growing population of internet-friendly consumers.
 

“Memes do not feel like an advertisement or promotion for a product. Instead, they engage users because they are funny, clever or irreverent,” says Goyal. “This, if handled well, builds authenticity and the identity of a brand.” For instance, Sacred Games, the gritty show on Netflix starring Saif Ali Khan and Nawazuddin Siddiqui, inspired a number of marketing memes by Mother Dairy, Swiggy, AIB and even the Punjab and Uttar Pradesh police.

Siddiqui’s famous line from the show, “Kabhi kabhi lagta hai ki apun hi Bhagwan hai (Sometimes it feels like I am God)” was turned into “Kabhi kabhi lagta hai ki chai hi Bhagwan hai (Sometimes it feels like tea is God)” by Mother Dairy.

Unlike most marketing campaigns, where the communication is one way (from the brand to the consumer), memes encourage active participation from anyone and everyone who is on the internet. Memes are meant to be shared, liked, commented on, which is what adds to their virality. This also makes them malleable as they transform and evolve with every comment from the audience — which, in turn, makes meme marketing tricky.

Brands, says Goyal, are trying their hand at meme marketing but not always succeeding. “There is still not enough talent that can think creative, think social and also think brand,” he says, explaining, “Digital agencies still have little or no creative talent. And advertising agencies don’t understand digital. So meme marketing is sporadic. Some brands have got their act in place. Most haven’t.”

Lenovo, for example, came out with a heart-warming meme in tribute to David Bowie following news of the singer-songwriter’s death in 2016. Foster’s did a take on the internet slang “Netflix and chill” and Flipkart played on Marvel’s eccentric hero, Deadpool.

Though memes are brief, with only one or two lines of text, creating them requires intelligence, wit, humour and a knowledge of what’s making news. “The whole process is best executed within 24 hours of the event, after which the story is too old to be effective,” says Chraneeta Mann, co-founder of The Mob, a Gurugram-based digital marketing agency.

US President Donald Trump, celebrity weddings, the startup culture, the #MeToo movement, demonetisation, Baba Ramdev, Patanjali, all have their share of memes floating around.

Given their potential, political parties in India have started taking the meme discourse seriously. Congress’s official Twitter account is flooded with memes that take digs at rival parties. One could say that a memetic combat is on. The results of the recently concluded Assembly elections in five states only added to the growing repertoire of hilarious political memes featuring Modi and Congress President Rahul Gandhi.

Fun as they are, memes are also serious business for people like Jitendra Sharma, whose Instagram handle, TedtheStoner, has 678,000 followers. Sharma creates memes to encourage political and social debates and also to draw attention to issues such as reservation in educational institutes and jobs.

Most people do not take the time out to read articles on serious political topics but they readily consume funny pictures, says Sharma. “Amusingly, when it comes to memes based on anything that is remotely political, everyone jumps into the discussion. Even though it gets ugly most of the time, it is necessary for people to know each other’s points of view and then decide on their political stance,” he adds.

Despite the participatory and all-are-welcome nature of memes, sarcasm and other such humour can be misinterpreted, leading to heated arguments. “It’s rare to see a healthy, informed discussion when it comes to political memes. It’s more like a social media warzone.” says Sharma.

Pratik Sinha, co-founder of fact-checking website Alt News, warns that misinformation gets converted into memes as well. Like most information available over the internet, memes need to be scrutinised and consumed with a pinch of salt, he cautions.

While memes continue to be a hit-or-miss strategy for marketeers and politicians, they have managed to pique academic interest. Stanford University in California, for example, offers a course called “Dank Learning: Generating Memes using Deep Neural Networks”, which involves the study of a meme generating system.

The temporary and contemporary nature of memes makes for a horrible “meme death” as the meme fails to do its job the second it becomes irrelevant or old. Old memes are not shared and those who share them do not have their head in the meme game.

That’s why Amul comes up with a new cartoon every day. And that’s why, 50 years on, these ads continue to remain popular. For, once a meme dies, it’s time to think up another one.