Double Rainbow Guy, Paul Vasquez, at ROFLCon 2012.

It’s easy to write off Internet memes — LOLcats, Double Rainbow Guy, taxidermist Chuck Testa – as trivial but entertaining ways to waste time. At least that was my feeling coming into ROFLCon 2012 this weekend. But then a funny thing happened: After two sessions — one on Supercuts and another on Lolitics — it sunk in that memes say a lot about us as a culture and as such bear serious examination.

For example, even though you can hide your identity on the Internet (where nobody knows you’re a dog) the fact is the web is just as segregated as the rest of the world, said ROFLCon panelist Latoya Peterson, owner and editor of Racialicious. Memes, oddly enough, are one way to address that separation.

Humor, weapon or both

On the one hand, the web is a venue where people can spew bile under cover of anonymity: “If every racist comment is a snowflake, Youtube is a blizzard,”  Peterson said. On the other, it provides a relatively safe place to discuss race, ethnicity and other hot-button issues.

Peterson has seen memes straddle both sides of that divide.

Racialicious editor Latoya Peterson.

Example:  The “s**t black guys say” and “s**t black girls say” videos that exploded on YouTube (the latter logged more than 8.7 million views since December.)  These videos, starring women in drag as the men and men in drag as the women,  generated a raft of imitators including “”s**t white guys say about Asian women.” Another,  ”s**t Spanish girls say”  sparked a brouhaha over just which “Spanish” girls were being depicted. Dominicans? Puerto Ricans? Mexicans? It provoked a real discussion about ethnic identity.

Memes as platforms for social change

Those videos are funny but also painful. “They’re about the f**ked up stuff other people say to you based on your identity,” Peterson said. In this way these memes are very serious. “Humor is a powerful tool … Some of these videos are so ridiculous you want to make jokes but they’re often about very dark moments” she said.

But then again, over time, these same memes can be subverted and become forms of activism, of self-expression. For example, the “s**t people say” videos, as they got more specific, evolved into platforms for people to assert their own identities as opposed to make fun of others. For example, the  ”s**t southern black gay guys say” videos don’t feature people hiding behind fake identities but showcase the subjects themselves –southern black gay men — albeit in an exaggerated way.

Daniel Sinker, another panelist and the man behind the hugely popular @mayoremanuel Twitter account, agreed that humor serves a useful purpose. “It’s not an Internet phenomenon that humor lets us look at dark things. My whole meme was really about how [screwed] up Chicago is — to the point of unrepairability after 29 years of [Mayor] Daley. That’s not very funny. Humor allows us to disarm and engage in conversations that we otherwise couldn’t do.”

Latoya Peterson photo courtesy of Flickr user allaboutgeorg

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Sinker pointed out how the Obama campaign’s latest Internet project The Life of Julia, — which follows a girl as she grows up and shows how Obama’s policies have helped her — is an example of how the campaigns are now attempting to create things that they hope will become Internet memes. The Life of Julia has 33,000 “likes” on Facebook and BarackObama.com itself has 26 million “likes” on Facebook — which is a little less than half of the total amount of votes Obama got in the 2008 election, Sinker pointed out.

In addition to attempting to create memes, embracing the meme will be a key to leveraging the Internet in an election year, says Sinker. The Obama campaign was able to start turning “Obamacare” from a negative term that was created by Republicans into a positive one, by reappropriating and embracing the phrase. Hillary Clinton emerged in a positive light when she embraced the viral tumblr Texts from Hillary, which showed images of her sternly texting with catch phrase captions.

If campaigns don’t embrace the meme, they could stumble, and come off looking negative, as well as potentially kill a viral web opportunity. Sinker pointed to less successful moves like the Romney campaign’s interactions with a satirical Romney Pinterest account that featured images like a spoon of caviar with the caption: “Minimum order: 1,000 metric tons. Everything is cheaper when you buy it in bulk!”

Sinker said the Romney campaign immediately sought to have the username of the account changed from MittRomneyGOP to FakeMittRomney, despite the account owner’s protest. After the forced switch the author stopped updating the account and thus a potentially viral meme faded away.

Sinker, of course, has essentially a PhD in viral campaign memes. As the real Rahm Emanuel was campaigning to become the Mayor of Chicago in late 2010 and early 2011, Sinker launched the Rahm Emanuel for Mayor twitter account, which turned into a viral sensation through its raunchy and hilarious tweets about the sad state of Chicago politics, Emanuel’s soaring ambitions and his side kick David Axelrod (and his mustache). The account grew to close to 50,000 followers and was outed by The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal in an interview.

Photo courtesy of GigaOM’s Barb Darrow.

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