This is a repository copy of Sorted for Memes and Gifs: Visual Media and Everyday Digital
Politics.
White Rose Research Online URL for this paper:
http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/137096/
Version: Accepted Version
Article:
Dean, J orcid.org/0000-0002-1028-0566 (2019) Sorted for Memes and Gifs: Visual Media
and Everyday Digital Politics. Political Studies Review, 17 (3). pp. 255-266. ISSN
1478-9299
https://doi.org/10.1177/1478929918807483
© The Author(s) 2018. This is an author produced version of an article published in
Political Studies Review. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy.
eprints@whiterose.ac.uk
https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/
Reuse
Items deposited in White Rose Research Online are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved unless
indicated otherwise. They may be downloaded and/or printed for private study, or other acts as permitted by
national copyright laws. The publisher or other rights holders may allow further reproduction and re-use of
the full text version. This is indicated by the licence information on the White Rose Research Online record
for the item.
Takedown
If you consider content in White Rose Research Online to be in breach of UK law, please notify us by
emailing eprints@whiterose.ac.uk including the URL of the record and the reason for the withdrawal request.
1
Sorted for Memes and Gifs:
Visual Media and Everyday Digital Politics
Jonathan Dean
A few days after the 2017 UK General Election, the Metro newspaper published a feature
entitled ‘The Memes that Decided the Outcome of the General Election’ (White, 2017),
reflecting the widely held view that Labour’s better than anticipated performance was in part
explainable by Labour activists’ astute use of social media (Norris, 2017; Goes, 2018). While
pulling pack from some of the hyperbole about social media in the Metro piece, the aftermath
of the 2017 General Election nonetheless provides a timely opportunity to reflect on the
current state of existing political science scholarship on digital politics.
In this paper, I argue that there is a certain unease, or even squeamishness, in the way in
which political scientists (particularly in the UK) tackle social media and digital politics.
This, in turn, results in a number of key developments in digital politics falling under our
discipline’s radar. To flesh out these claims, part one of the paper highlights some of the
methodological assumptions that underpin this squeamishness. Part two, drawing on a recent
research project on the changing shape of the British left, highlights a number of key trends
in digitally mediated political participation which the political science community has
hitherto downplayed, or overlooked altogether. In particular, I stress the role of the visual: for
many politically engaged citizens, politics is enacted in and through visual media cultures
such as gifs, memes and other forms of shareable visual content. More broadly, the turn to the
visual – what we might call the “memeification” of politics – directs attention both to the
affective dynamics of politics, and to the protean, everyday nature of digitally-mediated
political engagement. Rather than seeing this turn to the visual as something unusual or
exceptional it is, I suggest, part of the constitutive fabric of everyday political engagement.
2
Against this backdrop, the third section mines recent literature in media and communication
studies to articulate a less “squeamish” approach to the analysis of digitally mediated politics.
While acknowledging the multiplicity of conceptual and methodological approaches to the
study of politicised digital media, I suggest that the recent turn to virtual immersive
ethnographies pursued by the likes of Jessica Beyer and Adrienne Masanari could provide
useful methodological insights. In the final section, I articulate a possible research agenda.
More broadly, I encourage political scientists to see socially mediated cultural production and
exchange not as some frivolous activity on the margins of politics, but as increasingly central
to how large numbers of predominantly young citizens experience politics.
Political Science and the Problem of Social Media
While few political scientists would doubt the importance of social media, our discipline’s
capacity to capture the feel and character of socially mediated forms of political participation
is hindered, I argue, by three sets of assumptions about the nature, scope and purpose of
political science research, as well as an implicit self-representation of the figure of the
political scientist.
The first problem concerns the priority afforded to broad-brush diagnostic analyses of
aggregate citizen opinions, values, voting preferences and election results. This was evident
in political scientists’ responses to the 2017 UK General Election (see, for example, Goodwin
and Heath, 2017; Jennings and Stoker, 2017; Denver, 2018; Dorey, 2017) and Brexit.
Consider, for example, a recent special issue of British Politics on the politics of Brexit.
Despite the importance of social media in shaping the wider discursive and affective contours
of the Brexit referendum and its aftermath, the articles tend to either totally forego any
mention of the role of social media (see, for example, Marsh, 2018) or mention it in passing
without subjecting it to sustained analysis (see, for instance, Copus, 2018). My point here is
not to churlishly dispute the value of such analyses, as all these pieces are insightful and
valuable on their own terms. My point is, rather, that the disproportionate dominance and
visibility of aggregate analyses of public opinion, election results etc. – reflecting the
tendency to equate political science with what Stuart Hall called ‘the psephological equation’
3
(Hall, [1966] 2016, p.88) – has a number of consequences for how the object of political
science is constructed, and the role of social media therein. Such work produces an implicit
self-representation of the political scientist as above the fray of political engagement, looking
down from a raised vantage point. As a result, the specific texture, feel and character of
digitally-mediated participation recedes from view, becoming subsumed into broad
aggregations of votes, values, opinions etc.
Second, when social media is taken seriously, it tends to be framed in consequentialist terms.
By this, I mean that social media is interrogated not because it is seen as constitutive of
politics, but because it is seen to impact upon politics. As Brassett and Sutton (2017) have
argued, this is a more general tendency for the political analysis of satire, comedy and
popular culture to be ‘reduced to an instrumental logic of ‘impact’’ (2017, p. 246). This tacit
framing of the politics/social media relation is present in, for example, Helen Margetts’s post-
election observation that ‘2017 may be remembered as the first election where it seems to
have been the social media campaigns that really made the difference to the relative fortunes
of the parties, rather than traditional media’ (Margetts, 2017, p. 386). Similarly, Dommett and
Temple’s (2018) study of digital campaigning in the 2017 election examines whether and
how campaign material disseminated via social media impacted on the results. Again, while
such work is of course extremely valuable, it still tends to cast social media as distinct from
“proper” politics. Social media is seen as a medium through which political campaigns are
directed, or as something that may have consequences for (electoral) politics, but it is tacitly
framed as not, in and of itself, constitutive of the texture and practice of politics.
The third problem is to do with a certain squeamishness towards the affective and emotional
dynamics of politics. This is mostly manifest as an absence, i.e. a discussion of politics in
terms of public opinion, party policy programmes etc. without consideration of the feelings
and affects that underpin them (see Hayton, 2018). As Foster et al found in a widely cited
analysis of politics and IR undergraduate degree programmes in the UK, ‘there is
considerable bias towards institutionalised forms of power located within and through
institutions, government and governance’, which comes at the expense of a consideration of
the role of the private sphere and the affective dynamics of political life (Foster et al, 2013,
p.568). Occasionally, however, a more explicit defence of politics as (relatively) unemotional
is made, such as in Gerry Stoker oft-cited remark that politics ‘is not the most edifying
human experience. It is rarely an experience of self-actualization and more often an
4
experience of accepting second-best’ (Stoker 2006, p. 72). While Stoker is making a specific
point, it reflects a wider sensibility in political scholarship in which, as Laura Jenkins argues
in a discussion of the work of Stoker (alongside Colin Hay and Matthew Flinders) there is ‘a
tendency to prioritise thought over emotion and to imply…. that emotions cloud reasoning
capacities’ (Jenkins, 2018, p.195). This unease that surrounds political scientists’ discussions
of social media is, therefore, symptomatic of a more general wariness of digging into the
feelings and affective dynamics that underpin everyday forms of political participation and
engagement.
To reiterate: none of this is to say that political scientists have not made valuable
contributions to the study of digital politics. Consider, for example, Usherwood and Wright
(2017) on the role of twitter during the 2016 EU Referndum campaign, Ohme (2018) on the
changing relationship between citizenship and digitally-mediated participation, or Leston-
Bandeira and Bender (2013) on parliamentary engagement with social media. However, I do
want to suggest that deep, sustained analysis of digitally-mediated engagement tends to be
viewed with a certain squeamishness from political scientists, and as such there are important
features of citizen engagement in a digital age which we tend to overlook. Consequently, if
we are serious about capturing the character of contemporary forms of (digital) political
participation, we require a diversification of our conceptual and methodological tools.
Visual Culture and the ‘Memeification’ of Politics
This preliminary analysis of our discipline’s nervousness towards digital politics invites a
further more empirical question, namely, what are we missing? What kinds of developments
in the practice of digital politics are falling under our radar? My answer here is indicative
rather then exhaustive. However, one particularly significant development concerns the
increasing prevalence of visual digital media in everyday political engagement. This emerged
as a key theme during a recent research project on the changing character of British left
politics, in which we were struck by the centrality afforded to social media in general, and
visual media such as memes and gifs in particular, in left activists’ practices and sensibilities
in the context of the resurgence of the Labour left following Jeremy Corbyn’s securing of the
Labour leadership (see author, 2017). Memes, a portmanteau of mimesis and genes,