The Meme-ification of Civic Discourse
There is no doubt that social media and digital engagement smarts have become a basic qualification for anyone running for the highest political offices in America. As with every other sphere of public and social interaction, political discourse and media strategy rests on, to such a large extent on a party’s or candidate’s performance of the leading social media platforms. Most importantly and unfortunately - on Twitter.
With the idealism of movements like the Arab Spring or the Occupy movement, co-ordinated by grassroots movements using the leading social channels as potent tools becoming a distant memory, the current mode of reactionary political battles and getting sucked into the vortex of algorithmic filter bubbles leads to massive polarization. That can’t be good for a people and society at large.
Amanda Hess writes for The New York Times -
If we used to want our elected officials to represent our interests in government, now we also want them to represent us in new ways — to reflect our pop cultural sensibilities back at us; to make a facial expression in a video that we can relate to our own lives; to serve as a willing host for a round of internet jokes. A politician may hope that her image resonates positively with voters. But maybe it’s enough that her image resonates at all.
More than clear roadmaps of battling the biggest challenges, policy underpinnings of their manifestos or even their personal convictions, what the people seem to want more from their candidates is how in-tune they are with the blink-and-you-miss-it artifacts of popular culture. And in the social media age, they translate to a culture of performance on these platforms, whether organic or not.
On Bernie Sanders’ engagement or rather disengagement -
There is an advantage to Sanders’ personal disengagement with music, and with pop culture more generally. Hillary Clinton courted celebrities with such a thirst that it seemed as if she might swallow them whole. She engaged so gamely with the surface delights of popular culture, she invited suspicion — that she was operating transactionally, using pop figures for the sheen of cool they could infuse into her campaign.
Sanders is using Cardi B’s celebrity, too, but his attitude toward that celebrity feels agnostic. In the video, he treats her not like a star but like a constituent. His very distance from pop culture allows him to create credible pop objects of his own.
If seemingly intelligent adults who are being given the charge of setting the course of the country and making important policy decisions have to spend an inordinate amount of energy on becoming palatable to a people’s warped expectations of relatability - that cannot be good for the republic.