Memes to Movements: How the World's Most Viral Media Is Changing Social Protest and Power

Memes are the street art of the social web. Using social media-driven movements as her guide, technologist and digital media scholar An Xiao Mina unpacks the mechanics of memes and how they operate to reinforce, amplify, and shape today' s politics. She finds that the ' silly' stuff of meme culture' the photo remixes, the selfies, the YouTube songs, and the pun-tastic hashtags' are fundamentally intertwined with how we find and affirm one another, direct attention to human rights and social justice issues, build narratives, and make culture. Mina finds parallels, for example, between a photo of Black Lives Matter protestors in Ferguson, Missouri, raising their hands in a gesture of resistance and one from eight thousand miles away, in Hong Kong, of Umbrella Movement activists raising yellow umbrellas as they fight for voting rights. She shows how a viral video of then-presidential nominee Donald Trump laid the groundwork for pink pussyhats, a meme come to life as the widely recognized symbol for the International Women' s March. On the long, winding road from innocuous cat photos, internet memes have become a central practice for political contention and civic engagement. Memes to Movements unveils the transformative power of memes, for better and for worse. At a time when our movements are growing more complex and open-ended' when governments are learning to wield the internet as effectively as protestors' Mina brings a fresh and sharply innovative take to the media discourse.

Author: An Xiao Mina
Publisher: Dreamscape Media
Published: 01/08/2019
Binding Type: MP3 CD
Weight: 0.10lbs
Size: 4.80h x 5.60w x 0.40d
ISBN: 9781974936373

About the Author
Xiao Mina, An: - An Xiao Mina is an American technologist, researcher, and artist. She served as a contributing editor for the book Ai Weiwei: Spatial Matters, and her own work has been exhibited in museums and galleries around the world. Her writing has appeared in the Atlantic Al Jazeera English, and Hyperallergic. A 2016'Äì17 research fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and product director at the technology company Meedan, her home is wherever the Wi-Fi is.Bennett, Erin: - Erin Bennett is an actress, a singer, and a voice-over artist. As an actress, she has performed at numerous theaters, including the Pasadena Playhouse, the Arizona Theatre Company, and the International City Theatre. Her voiceover work includes animation, BBC radio plays, video games, commercials for radio and television, and a wide range of audiobooks, including contemporary fiction, mysteries, science fiction, and romance.