Memes to Movements: How the World’s Most Viral Media Is Changing Social Protest and Power Audiobook (Free)

A worldwide exploration of the internet meme as an agent of pop culture, politics, protest, and propaganda on and offline, and exactly how they will conserve or destroy us all

Internet memes are among today’s most unexpectedly potent and creative forms, born of digital tradition and — increasingly more — in dialogue with real life. An image of protesters, for example, in Ferguson, Missouri raising their hands inside a gesture of resistance gets replicated eight thousand mls aside in Hong Kong, where dissidents are about Memes to Movements: How the World’s Many Viral Media Is normally Changing Cultural Protest and Power fighting for voting rights. Or a viral video of a presidential candidate-elect can become the impetus for a global march of women in red ‘pussy-hats,’ itself a viral meme come to life. In the long, winding road from grumpy cat photos, internet memes have become a central idea of modern protest.

Using sociable media-driven movements as her lead, technologist and digital media scholar An Xiao Mina unpacks the mechanics of memes and how they operate to bolster, amplify, and form today’s politics. She discovers the ‘silly’ stuff of meme culture — the picture remixes, the selfies, the Youtube songs and the pun-tastic hashtags — are fundamentally intertwined with how we find and affirm each other, direct focus on human privileges and interpersonal justice issues, build narratives, and make tradition. Crucially, she reveals how in elements of the globe where general public dissension is certainly downright dangerous, memes can belie contentious political opinions that could incur drastic implications if portrayed outright. And additional, she examines the continuing future of internet memes as tools in both anti-authoritarian intensifying circles and authorities propaganda.

Memes to Movements unveils the transformative power of memes, for better and even worse. In a time when our actions are growing more technical and open-ended, Mina brings a brand new and sharply innovative undertake the media discourse.