![]() The 2012 Barack Obama/Mitt Romney race brought the world pop cultural references such as “binders full of women” (from a phrase uttered by Romney at one of the debates) and a rain of Photoshopped pictures showing Romney and Big Bird (after Romney said he loved Big Bird but would nonetheless cut funding to PBS if elected). Memes - an idea or image that is relentlessly copied, manipulated and shared - are hardly new.ĭuring World War II, the graffito “Kilroy Was Here,” showing a bald figure with a big nose looking over a fence, was drawn on tanks, planes and in bathrooms the world over by American G.I.’s. Since the advent of the Internet, memes have taken all manner of forms: an early digital animation of a dancing baby, a video of a kid doing his finest Star Wars moves with a metal rod and of course, the LOLcat - the omnipresent images of cats saying cute, grammatically incorrect things.Īnd this isn’t the first presidential election to feature prominent memes. Hillary Clinton's famous shimmy at the first presidential debate. Lyons, a researcher who studies memes at the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. “It’s the current background noise.” This election, it turns out, will not only be televised. (Such is the case of the innocuous comic book character created by illustrator Matt Furie, which was adopted without the artist’s knowledge as a white supremacist symbol on Internet forums such as 4Chan and Reddit - and was later, quite controversially, retweeted by Trump.) In the past, national elections introduced into the culture bold works of graphic design emblazoned with phrases such as “We Like Ike” or “Hope.” These days, our voting process is just as liable to bring to visual prominence a stoner cartoon frog named Pepe. ![]() In a presidential race that has broken just about every established rule of electoral politics and decorum, it should probably come as no surprise that the images that have accompanied it have done much the same. A crude illustration of Ted Cruz drawn to resemble the Zodiac Killer. ![]() Bernie Sanders photoshopped to look like fried chicken mogul Colonel Sanders. They are the sort of visuals that Salvador Dalí might have seen in his most feverish dreams: A looped animation of Donald Trump eating a taco bowl out of his own head. ![]()
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