Vota por un gato...

I am this year undertaking the South by Southwest Interactive festival for the first time since, I think, 2000. This is the biggest thing that happens in little 'ole Austin, Texas which is progressing to be less little and more avant-garde all the time. I saw a talk today called "Lol of Nations – Understanding Global Memes" which featured four panelists each speaking to the niche memes of six particular nations. One thing that each speaker had in common was a focus on the exclusively political memes. There were not any goofy fun equivalents of the Nyan Cat brought out. Each meme on exposition was made in the name of influencing opinion. The panelists were:

1. Andreas Monroy-Hernandez focused on Mexico and asserted that one may see a political narrative by watching how trending political memes progress over time. He focused on Enrique Peña Nieto, Mexico's current president, and how he was portrayed in memes over time. Initially there were winks at his handsome appearance and suave persona, but this trend gave way to one of a fake reformer who is a puppet of perhaps the United States or perhaps Felipe Calderón who was president before him. Andreas also mentioned a political campaign to get a cat named Morris to be elected the mayor of a city which appealed to exactly the sort of voters which Nieto disenchanted and also disenchanted voters in general. Vota por un gato...
    
2. Ben Valentine spoke on the three West African nations which share Lake Victoria: Kenya, Tanzania, & Uganda. He mentioned that when elections were held, there was a bias by Western journalists to try to portray the elections as disastrous. Any misdemeanoresque altercation was stereotypically blown up into a bigger problem when retold by outsiders when in reality the electoral process ran pretty smooth. Locals began making fun of how warped the coverage was in memes making light of how American News saw things. This helped them reclaim the reality.
    
3. Ellen Agapie spoke to a political tug-of-war between two parties in the government of Romania and how the two sides used signature tactics. One offered exclusively the sort of text-merely-overlaying-a-photo readable "sound" bytes that we've come to expect from memes in America. The other offered sort of fictitious movie posters with the faces of Romanian political figures Photoshopped into other images from American media ads.
    
4. Katie Pearce said that memes are cheap, funny, shareable, anonymous, and trackable making them great political tools. She spoke to how the government of Azerbaijan used memes to undermine political opponents. She felt that in or modern era it is just harder than it used to be to be a dictator. A dictator can only suppress so much of the media on modern tech-savvy planet Earth and no longer has the cold war politics to prop him up. Dictators now win elections by seventy-eight percent of the vote in lieu of ninety-nine, and they try to just shut down opponents by sending them auditors or health inspectors in lieu of death squads. Dictators now pretend to champion democracy in the name of controlling their narratives. They are, in fact, treading carefully in destroying their enemies. Memes are a great tool for them as they allow them to undermine their enemies and in a dictatorship, the dictators will be able to broadcast widely within the media a lot louder than their opponents may shout back.