‘Mind Viruses’: LI Professor Studies The World Of Political Memes

ROCKVILLE CENTRE, NY — Molloy College professor Jamie Cohen has dedicated his career to studying the way people communicate and interact online. He studies how they share information, how ideas spread, and how those ideas influence people around the country. He examines how ideas proliferate and how they evolve over time.

In other words, he studies memes.

Cohen is the founder of Molloy’s New Media program, and he is one of just a few memeticists around the world — people who study memes and how they affect our culture.

A meme can be hard to define. The dictionary definition is an idea that is spread among a culture via imitation. And while it can be a visual representation of an idea, Cohen has a different definition.

“They’re the creative output of surplus culture,” he said. What he means is that memes take time to create. If you’re too busy worrying about putting food on the table or going to work, you’re not going to have time to make memes.

“There’s actual productivity and production necessary to make them,” Cohen said. “That means there’s extra time available to make a meme.”

Cohen’s path to becoming a memeticist began in 2015, during his time in grad school. Cohen said said he noticed that memes started to become commodified and reused for commercial purposes. Specifically, he said, he saw that the government was using memes to publicize former President Barack Obama's new health care law.

Diving into the world of memes, Cohen and a colleague had the first peer-reviewed research paper published on the subject. Their topic for that paper was Pepe the Frog — a cartoon frog that was co-opted by the alt-right and white supremacist groups, and is now a symbol of hate.

Today, Cohen is studying political memes in the United States.

“The political memes I’m studying now show a real deep anxiety that people don’t know how to express,” Cohen said. “We don’t have the words for it, but it can be output in sardonic visual media.”

Donald Trump is, by far, the most memeable presidential candidate, Cohen said. That began in 2016, when Trump’s campaign — and Trump specifically — embraced the meme culture that rose up around him.

“Because the community was encouraged by both Donald Trump and Donald Trump, Jr. and [Trump’s campaign manager] Brad Parscale to continue with the memes, that bolstered the idea of community engagement, which lead to civic action,” Cohen said. “Which was voting.”

Trump is still the most memeable candidate going into the 2020 election, Cohen said, but it’s a close race with Democratic front-runner Bernie Sanders. His authenticity is what helps make him memeable, Cohen said — as well as the faces he makes during debates.

“If the other candidates learned that memeability, they might get some cultural excitement around them too,” he said.

Another candidate who is trying to get a meme culture surrounding them is Democrat Michael Bloomberg. But unlike Trump and Sanders memes, Bloomberg’s team is paying people to make memes about him. And that perceived lack of authenticity is noticeable to the public, Cohen said, so the memes quickly fizzle out.

“In my opinion, it’s only a matter of time before Bloomberg finds a format that’s perceived as authentic,” Cohen said. “And at that moment we’re screwed, because we move past the ability to see the difference between authentic and inauthentic work.”

Part of Cohen’s work is also focused on analyzing the memes that most appeal to Trump — the ones most likely to get his attention to and to get the ultimate recognition: a retweet.

The memes most likely to get Trump’s attention, Cohen said, are “dogwhistle” memes — memes that have dual meanings and often show violence or anger. Trump likes these, Cohen said, because if anyone criticizes him for them, the dual meaning allows him to play it off as a joke.

“They have dual meanings that include subversive content,” Cohen said. “It’s evocative of violence or the more dangerous pieces of legislation he’s pushed. He likes those.”

One of the benefits of memes is that they condense complex ideas into bite-sized chunks to spread information quickly. But that benefit is also their downside. When reduced to memes, topics and ideas lose their nuance and leave out a lot of information.

In the current age of disinformation, that’s especially dangerous, Cohen said. He follows many people who make memes (or “memelords,” as they’re known), and sees many more right-wing memes that are filled with misinformation.

"Memes contain energy. They require you to participate in them by thinking,” Cohen said. “If you’re a memelord, if you’re somebody that lives and die by the meme, if you don’t keep the energy up on your page, people leave. So the best way to do it is controversy. And because of the nature of memes, it spreads.”

One of Cohen's worries is that disinformation memes will be “weaponized” in the upcoming election — that memes that were designed for energy for a certain audience will “get out of their casing” and spread. And once the information is out, it’s hard to contain.

“Memes are like mind viruses,” Cohen said. “They’re like viral videos. You just can’t get them out of your head.”

As the 2020 race heats up, memes are going to get more attention. In 2016, no one in the media was really paying attention to memes. Now, Cohen said, major outlets have reporters dedicated to memes and their messages. This is a double-edged sword, he said. It’s good because the memes will be covered, and there will be accountability for their creation. But by covering them, it will also introduce them to the public, and memes aren’t supposed to be that widespread.

“Memes have to work subversively. They need to,” he said. “There’s no such thing as a direct-to-mainstream meme. Then they wouldn’t be a meme. Once it becomes mainstream, it’s no longer memetic: it’s just culture.”

In addition to influencing and spreading ideas, memes can also be predictors of what’s coming next in culture, Cohen said. “I think memes, and meme literacy, give us an idea of how culture is moving,” he said. “It’s the fair warning sign of what comes next.”

As an example, Cohen said he’s studying how teens in Italy make memes about the coronavirus and its effects on the country. That can tell us how Americans will react should the virus become more prevalent here.

“When memes start appearing, they show how the culture is going to be in two to three weeks,” he said.

Memes will continue to evolve, as will the means for creating them. Right now, the social media video app TikTok is the hot way to share memes, as everything on the app is made for sharing, Cohen said. But that will change eventually when TikTok is replaced by a new app.

In some ways, memes are a form of modern art, Cohen said. He likened many memes to the famous sculpture “Fountain” by artist Marcel Duchamp: a signed urinal on a pedestal.

“It’s very similar to modernist work in the early 20th century,” Cohen said. “It’s kind of both art and trolling at the same time.”