This paper offers an overview of the vernaculars of radical political subcultures online as expressed through a shared vocabulary of memes, notably the ‘political compass’ meme which is used to portray political ideologies across two axes: left/right and authoritarian/libertarian. The paper’s objective is thus to assess and to update the conceptual toolkit of classic subculture for internet research, with a focus in this case on a (largely Anglo-American) genre of memes that playfully thematize revolutionary political ideologies. The classic literature contended that subcultures sought to solve unresolvable problems in ‘imaginary’ ways, using style as a proxy for politics (Clarke et al 1975, Hebdige 1979). While recognizing a clear continuity, the paper looks at how (by contrast) contemporary online subcultures seem to imagine themselves as engaging directly with politics, as opposed to by way of style. The paper asks what difference has the internet made to the concept of subculture? Empirically we conduct a visual and discursive content analysis of a selection of political compass memes and starter pack memes collected from the PoliticalCompassMemes subreddit and other sources including tweets tagged with #PoliticalCompass. While a smaller section of the paper will describe the criteria for selection and analysis of the corpus, the primary objective is however theoretical. Referencing Lev Manovich’s concepts of ‘modularity’ and ‘remixability’ as formal digital ‘principles’, the paper analyzes these communities’ images as constructing new ‘modular ideologies’ from the bricolage of older ones (Manovich 2001, Manovich 2005: 1)

This circulation study explores how Pepe, a prominent example of memes, and its remix, transformation and circulation become rhetorical and agentive in 2019-20 Hong Kong protests as Pepe travels through various digital and physical modalities, serves as an actant in various socio-political contexts with diverse ideologies and cultures, and evokes controversies over its own ideological and cultural implications, amasses discursive publics of Pepe and nurtures rhetorical ecologies of its own, totally out of the control from Pepe's original creator during its circulation. Situating under Edbauer's rhetorical ecology model and informed by Hawk’s sphere publics framework, I employ and adapt Gries' iconographic tracking method to capture, track, and assemble Pepe's various presences across modalities throughout the protests in the form of images; paratexts around these images (e.g. captions, news reports, threads on forum, etc.) are also collected and close-read as qualitative data to comprehend the contexts within which Pepe reside and how Pepe interact with other actants and actors in this context. This presentation will focus on one finding: the structure of the rhetorical ecologies of Pepe resembles networked sphere publics that resist universal synthesis of Pepe’s implications.

Leading up to, during, and immediately following the 2016 US election of Donald Trump, there was buzz about magic on the internet. From the meme magic of the cult of Kek to liberal witches performing binding spells, magic seemed to emerge out of thin air. However, while technology and the occult may seem like strange bedfellows, they have a cozier historical relationship then we often acknowledge. For instance, it has been well-documented that there was a synergetic relationship between telegraphy and spiritualism (Sconce, 2000) and we can consider ciphers used to construct grimoires as an antecedent to modern techno-cryptography (Reeds, 1998). In this paper, I historicize internet magic situating the recent online magical wars within the broader context of both digital and occult histories. Just as spiritualist séances articulated hopes and anxieties of mass communication, meme magic speaks to contemporary concerns and desires about information spread.

Memes are an important facet of current online communication on social media, with rich social, political, and cultural significance and power. This present work focuses on developing computational frameworks to support textual and visual content analysis of online memes, assisting the profiling of the unique contents and interrelationships of different meme characteristics. The framework focusses on decomposing the multimodal subcomponents of online memes to support accurate sorting and classification of meme exploitable and other rich textual materials. We showcase the development of a multimodal meme classification toolbox with the capability to utilize more abundant information from those multimodal components, with a view towards bolstering and extending existing meme analysis methods for cultural and media studies.