Transcriber: Nguyễn Hà Vân Anh Reviewer: Hani Eldalees
Memes and meme culture are everywhere,
Internet memes are images and videos from popular culture mix was the think tanks
and slogans and humorous ways.
and they’re used to communicate people’s
take on a variety of topics,
including religion.
and memes don’t just show up in social media.
Right before the pandemic,
I was in Germany where I saw memes decorating T-shirts,
coffee mugs and postcards.
They were used to talk about the weather, World Cup, soccer and even politics.
Memes first emerged 20 years ago
on all discussion forums using playful pictures to communicate often serious
messages about people and culture.
But now they're part of mainstream Internet culture.
For the last eight years, I've been studying Internet memes and
the messages they communicate about religion and culture.
Memes first grab my attention
as a researcher in 2013,
when a student brought a particular one
to my religion and media class,
it was an image of Christ showing a statue of Jesus from the movie Dogma,
where he's smiling and holding finger guns.
It said The body of Christ is sacrilegious.
My reaction, I laughed and I laughed hard until I saw
the angry stares of several of my students who later told me they were
offended because of their religious background.
It was that day I learned two important lessons.
One, humor depends a great deal on where you're standing.
Two, memes that seemed funny to one person may be highly offensive to another.
Over the same time, that memes have gone from
the fringes to mainstream Internet culture, I’ve noticed another trend.
People are more and more open
and passionate about sharing their views online,
but often less kind in the way they do so.
The Internet often seems like
an angry shouting match where people are not held accountable
for how they treat others or what they say online.
After doing content analysis of over 1000 Internet memes depict religious people
from the five major world religious come to realize that memes can be part
of that problem. And this is what I want to talk with you about today.
The ways Internet memes can promote
and encourage religious stereotypes online.
If we don't become aware of how memes can do this,
we can easily and unintentionally get caught in spreading these same messages
about religious groups online.
Memes are popular because they’re easy to create and share online.
All it takes is access to the Internet,
find a meme generator or just a photograph,
select the image and mix it or remix it with
a catchy slogan posted to social media and presto, you have entered meme culture.
Memes have also become a global communication medium.
Popular meme characters are used by people all over
the world to communicate their opinions or reactions to current events.
The challenge is, is that means often use a subtle sarcasm
or hidden meanings to communicate so that they're only fully understood.
They're only fully understandable to people within a certain subgroup
or to those who are fluent and being culture. Let me give you an example.
In 2019 in New Zealand, the Christchurch mosque shooter used images
on his Facebook account and an online manifesto to communicate his motivations
for killing 51 Muslims during their Friday prayers by using select meme
characters that were well known in racist
and ultraright discussion forums mixed with symbols that communicate anti-Muslim
beliefs. He was able to justify his actions
and encourage others to commit similar hate crimes.
But to those outside those groups, these mems seem silly or nonsensical.
And many media outlets and others got caught is spreading his message of hate
by posting and sharing those memes online.
Through my research, I've come to realize that Internet memes seem neutral
or playful and funny on the surface are not as funny
as they might appear to be.
Oftentimes, messages about religion online are just plain mean.
This is because these mems use a cultural shorthand and
the shorthand is based on historic stereotypes and negative representations
and images of religious groups.
Let me give you an example of two main characters that represent the Muslim
Traditions that are easily found online.
Islamic rage boy and ordinary Muslim man,
Islamic Rage Boy is a meme that's meant to communicate that Muslims are violent
terrorists bent on hate and destruction.
It doesn't matter that the actual image from the meme comes from
a news report about political protests in India
against governmental corruption or the fact that
the main person pictured in these meetings has come out to speak against
the very religious violence his image has used to promote.
Some say ordinary Muslim men offers an alternative view of Islam. In this meme,
the original version we see a South-East Asian man was the saying,
I am da bomb at making falafels.
The meme is meant to play with the stereotype of Islam being
a religion of violence. But in its attempt to challenge this narrative,
the meme inadvertently gets caught in affirming
the same religious stereotype it seeks to critique.
What we often see is Internet memes replicate the same religious stereotypes
and again and again that religious groups have had to wrestle with for decades,
if not centuries, unless we think it is only Islam that is framed negatively
through means. Let’s take a look at two other anti-Semitic mems characters.
The Happy Merchant and Goyim knows
the happy merchant meme takes his name from the Shakespeare's play,
The Merchant of Venice, where a Jewish character is depicted as
a moneylender who is greedy and untrustworthy.
The image used for this meme shows
a Jewish man with exaggerated facial features.
The same type of drawings have been used to demean Jews throughout history.
And the image itself comes from
a racist track circulated by white supremacists in
the 1980s that made its way online in the 1990s.
And the message of this track is that Jews are greedy vermin that need to be
exterminated. Even the more playful meme goyim nose presents Jews in
a negative light. Here we typically see a Jewish Orthodox man whispering,
saying goyim knows
it's meant to communicate that Jews are part of this global underground
conspiracy aimed at taking over the world.
We see that memes often promote religious stereotypes in one of three ways.
They either A) oversimplify complex ideas,
B) present religious people, in inaccurate ways,
C) promote negative or passive response to religion
and both can be dangerous. So what do we do when memes are mean?
It starts by learning how to change the conversation
that means create. And my research is trying to do this.
Through the Create Kindness Initiative,
a project I started to encourage professors
and others to use their talents and creativity for social good.
I am working to develop tools and strategies that challenge
the meanings that mems communicate. Through awareness,
literacy and conversation. This begins by creating awareness.
Mems are unique digital language that uses distinct images
and symbols to represent religious groups.
So my research team and I are building a database of common meme characters
and templates used to talk about religion online.
Through revealing the origins of these memes and the meanings they represent,
we seek to draw awareness to this trend.
You see, creating awareness starts by learning to pause and carefully read
the memes we encounter online. It starts by asking yourself,
what does this meme saying under the surface?
Next, we need to promote meme literacy.
It's often assumed that if someone knows how to use digital media,
they understand digital culture. But this is not always the case.
Digital media are designed to promote certain values and ways of seeing
the world. We need to teach our students and our teachers how to unpack
the messages memes promote through creating active learning opportunities
such as workshops. We need to help them unmask how memes work and
the impact they can have. It starts by asking yourself how might
the humor of this meme prevent me from taking seriously the message?
It’s communicating.
Finally, we need more public conversations about what mems really mean.
We need to take seriously the messages mems communicate.
Awareness, education are not enough.
We need to bring together youth and adults.
Meme creators and consumers to challenge
the biased beliefs that mems communicate.
You see, memes are not playful or funny when they promote disrespect or hate
of religious others.
We live in an increasingly volatile world where our online actions have real
world consequences. We need to see mems for what they truly are,
powerful tools of communication
in digital culture, that don’t just reflect public opinion.
They can also become tools that shape it.
And for this reason, I'll continue to study Internet memes
and hopes that my research not only raises awareness,
but also encourages others to join me in turning mean memes
into caring conversations about religion.