Personhood/Abortion Meme Project

The premise of our meme was the hypocrisy that surrounded the personhood/abortion debate in the political realm, which hopefully would lead people to think critically about the messages disseminated and spark debate. By using Canvas as the main vehicle, we were able to communicate our message to a larger audience; an audience that somewhat participated in the discussion by “remixing” our original meme.

Originally we were not going to attach any specific politician to our meme, but after realizing there was no easy way to visually portray the personhood debate without offending, we thought was best to use politicians to communicate the message. Not only did we use images of politicians who have made statements regarding the issues, we used their ideas/ paraphrased their statements to go along with their images. We chose this route because it was easier to capture all the component of a meme this way, than to show an image of a fetus with accompanying text. We wanted our meme to follow the guidelines that Michele Knobel and Colin Lankshear laid out in their essay “Online Memes, Affinities and Cultural Production.” According to the authors, a successful meme has these key elements:

-has an element of humor,
-transmitted and spread electronically
-able to garner attention
-able to last for a significant amount of time on the web,

Due to the fact that we were dealing with a controversial and sensitive topic, we had to figure out a way to convey the element of humor that Knobel and Lankshear speak of. We turned to politicians, such as Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann, because they have become a comedic staple in pop-culture recently. This is a result of the contradicting views on various topics in political debates and blunders on television appearances. We felt using them for our memes would garner some attention and circulation because people are familiar with them. Additionally, we made one meme with “The Philosoraptor”, a velociraptor that is often deployed to reveal paradoxes. We used him to ask how politicians support legality of birth control while forwarding an agenda that revolves around life beginning at conception.

As mentioned before, we used Canvas as our primary vehicle to spread our meme. Our memes had visibility and there was an interactive element, as users were able to add their own take on the original meme. It was interesting to see, through “remixes,” “stickers,” and text responses who agreed with the statement being made. The most popular meme we did involved a picture of Herman Cain saying “100% Against Abortion, Aborts Campaign”, this post got 13 smiley stickers, 3 classy face stickers, 6 “LOL” stickers, and one cookie. The cookie means someone thought we were trying too hard, but the rest of the stickers are positive (with the classy sticker holding special weight one the #politics board where the meme was posted.) However, the reaction to that meme was lukewarm while there was an overwhelmingly positive message to the image remixed with a “Scumbag Steve” hat. While there are lots of images similar to the meme we posted the one featuring the hat had an added layer of intertextuality which gave it more lulz. Although it was not our meme that was the most popular, the remix supported the text and the popularity furthered the message that we would like to send, this is one reason that Canvas is a good resource. If you don’t produce the most effective version of the meme you are after, there is a chance that someone will help you out.

Also there was a small text debate on the images as recently as yesterday, we didn’t participate as we were trying to gauge the political opinions of the Canvas users. It seemed as though there were multiple people on both sides of the debate (though all were posting anonymously), this felt like a small success after the last project where the Twitter we created ended up just reaching people who already agreed. There was another very short debate on the image with the philosoraptor, but only lasted a few short lines. Primarily, we received mostly “classy” faces which meant that people thought that we were expressing ourselves well. However, the ideas in general didn’t interest users as much as ideas about economics or the possibility or Ron Paul being president (or more specifically, how Ron Paul is a hipster candidate.) It is possible that this is because the abortion debate is seen primarily as a “women’s issue” and Canvas (as a sister site to 4chan) could attract a lot of the same audience as 4chan, which according to Berstein, et al. is a heavily male community. Also suggestive of this was the fact that the debate was about men’s rights in relation to abortion, which isn’t necessarily an issue that we originally thought of when conceiving the project. In addition to Canvas we tried to post the image on 4chan, but we couldn’t find it after we posted it, this really brought to light what Berstein, et al. were talking about, emphasizing the ephemeral nature of 4chan in a huge way.

Essentially, while both 4chan and Canvas can be used to harness debate at some level, they are both exclusive communities predicated on the fact that the user has the knowledge of the inner workings of the community. The more time we spent on Canvas the more successful our posts became, when your meme fails I guess the answer is to just “lurk more” and try again later.

All attempts: http://canv.as/p/id6m5

http://canv.as/p/7uesp/reply/878505

http://canv.as/p/id5zh

http://canv.as/p/itq4n

http://canv.as/p/id60j

Anonymous: From the Lulz to Collective Action

• Any individual or group can take Anonymous as their name, functioning as an “improper name.”
• Some members of Anonymous are hackers, some are “geeks” who hold many different media literacies such as video editing, and the rest are just familiar with the cultural codes of those who associate with Anonymous.
• Anonymous was born out of 4chan, originally associated with trolling, the primary motive being “for the lulz”.
• However, Anonymous trolled the Church of Scientology because Scientologists attempted to prevent viewing of an internal promotional video. The author considers this series of raids a turning point in the way the Anonymous name was deployed.
• Mark Bunker then asked Anonymous to launch a more serious attack on the church, which he sees as a cult. After this, a group of people who associate with the Anonymous name appeared publicly to protest Scientology. However, their “IRL” protest used internet references such as “mudkipz” and there were a prevalence of Guy Fawkes mask.
• “I came for the lulz but stayed for the outrage” – actions justified under the Anonymous ethos and the element of “lulz” hasn’t subsided from even the more serious attacks on the the church. There is a difficulty balancing the serious nature of the outrage and the desire for lulz.
• In September of 2010, Anonymous also launched “Operation Payback”, a series of politically motived DDoS attacks on the MPAA website for taking down The Pirate Bay, a popular torrent website.
• These attacks originated on 4chan, similar to the raids on Scientology.
• When major companies like PayPal and Mastercard prevented support for Wikileaks, Anonymous shifted the focus of Operation Payback toward those groups, shutting down their websites in retaliation.
• After the government of Tunisia blocked access to Wikileaks, Anonymous also DDoSed the government’s website. Anonymous also attempted to release information to residents of Tunisia, because of the limited internet access they had.
• This is a turning point because it shows an interest in human rights campaigns, not just censorship and internet freedom.
• Although Anonymous is open to everyone, there are still power dynamics in play.
• Protests are often organized through two separate groups via Internet Relay Chat, a program that most people know very little about even though it is not difficult to use.
• Also there is a hierarchy within IRC, ops control the groups, have the power to kick people out, etc.
• Authority is also manifested in policies that are generally enforced for the whole group.
• No leaders or names, if you posit yourself in this way you are at risk for a personal attack.
• Lulz serves to make political work, which can be depressing, more palatable and enjoyable to pursue.
• Anonymous is more coherent than Crenshaw argues, they have more political snuff than the rest of 4chan and trolling and enjoy being dissociated from it.
• Anonymous is a political gateway for geeks.

Is Coleman’s argument skewed by leaving out other raids that Anonymous has done that are less political since 2008 (such as Jessi Slaughter, briefly mentioned in the article and videos below)?

Is DDoS-ing a website hypocritical because it denies freedom of speech?

Why is there a need for Anonymous to be a purely political group? The lulz don’t exist in a vacuum, doesn’t it make sense that there will be occasional overlap?