COMM 150: Know Your Meme - website's discussion of social media, #Occupy protests (and pepper spray) in NYC and UC Davis

Discuss: How are social media (sometimes hyped as Internet 2.0) changing the face of American culture? You may consider entertainment, politics and/or government. Provide specific examples from Vivian, from your own reading and your own experience communicating with the World Wide Web. REVISED Essay assignment, Dec. 2, COMM 150.

An Internet meme [pron. "meem"] is an idea that is propagated through the World Wide Web. The idea may take the form of a hyperlink, video, picture, website, hashtag, or just a word or phrase, such as intentionally misspelling the word "more" as "moar" or "the" as "teh". The meme may spread from person to person via social networks, blogs, direct email, news sources, or other web-based services. "Internet Meme," Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_meme.

When students at the University of California Davis got pictures of campus police Lt. James Pike pepper-spraying students protesting a tuition hike, they posted them to social networking sites like YouTube. The pictures went viral, and so did artwork ridiculing Pike by Photoshopping his image into scenes ranging from classic works of art to a Pink Floyd album cover and pictures of Bambi and the Smurfs.

Best place to get up to speed on it is a website called Know Your Meme. It has tracked the #OccupyWallStreet protests since September, and now it has a page devoted to "Pepper Spray Cop" (also known as “Casually Pepper Spray Everything Cop”). The demonstrations at UC Davis grew out of #Occupy protests at Berkeley and several other University of California campuses.

While it is too early to tell what lasting significance the Pepper Spray Cop meme will have, it has created sympathy for athe protesters. Megan Garber of Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab suggests it is "a telling case study for observing what happens when political images become, in the social setting of non-traditional media, de- and then re-politicized" (Mackerel Wrapper Nov. 26). I have posted several items to the Mackerel Wrapper telling how students took the pictures and how they went viral.



In the video above, "Internet scientist Forest" of Know Your Meme gives some background on how the #Occupy Wall Street demonstrations got started in New York City. He notes that they began Sept. 17 with a flash mob demonstration in lower Manhattan but didn't get much attention until Sept. 24 when demonstrators were pepper sprayed by New York Police Department officers. He explains how social media including Facebook and Twitter were instrumental, and suggests Occupy is "arguably ... one of the first social media driven national demonstration in the United States."

On the "Pepper Spray Cop/Casually Pepper Spray Everything Cop" page, Know Your Meme gives background on how #Occupy UC Davis got started and how campus police sprayed the students Friday, Nov. 18. It also explains the Pepper Spray Cop meme and several related memes, including one that ridicules an out-of-context remark by Megyn Kelly of Fox News that "pepper spray is a food product, essentially." It notes:

Two photoshopped versions of the photo surfaced on Reddit on November 20th. The first featured Strutting Leo photoshopped over the Pepper Spray Cop in the original image. The second placed Lt. Pike in the 1819 painting Declaration of Independence by John Trumbull. The same afternoon, Lt. Pike was placed in Georges Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884) by Tumblr blog It Makes No Sense where it received over 2400 notes in a day.

Compilations of the images began appearing on Facebook community Occupy Lulz and BoingBoing on November 20th. The next day, additional compilations were posted on Washington Post, ABC News, the Metro, Gawker, and Buzzfeed. Four separate single topic Tumblrs were also created that day. Redditor andresmh created an interactive Pepper Spray Cop where users can take the exploitable cop and shoot pepper spray throughout the Trumbull painting."

Know Your Meme. According to its homepage, "Know Your Meme is a website dedicated to documenting Internet phenomena: viral videos, image macros, catchphrases, web celebs and more." Its profile in Wikipedia says it has more than 500 entries on memes ranging from My Little Pony / Friendship is Magic to Pepper Spray Cop / Casually Pepper Spray Everything Cop Images. It began in 2007 and made Time magazine's 50 Best Websites of 2009. In March 2011, the website was acquired by Cheezburger Network for "seven-figure amount." Significantly, much of the content on Know Your Meme is user generated. Says Wikipedia, "In a manner similar to Wikipedia, anybody with an account can submit meme entries to the website and submit relevant images that help further document the memes. The administrators have say over what gets confirmed and what gets 'Deadpooled' or rejected."

Later - Reuters on "uptick in student activism."In a story datelined in Davis, Noel Randewich of the international news agency reported Friday, "Violent confrontations between police and protesters at two University of California campuses have drawn a new cadre of students into the Occupy Wall Street movement and unleashed what some historians call the biggest surge in campus activism since the 1960s." The other one was NOv. ___ at UC Berkeley. He added:

"When a cop pepper-sprays a student, everyone can sort of imagine their children, or their nieces or nephews, their friends who are students," said Kyle Arnone, a 26-year old teaching assistant at the University of California's Los Angeles campus.

"It's harder for the public to stigmatize student protesters as being a bunch of hippie, unemployed people that are difficult to relate to."