Virality, Contagion and Public Discourse. The Role of Memes as Prophylaxis and Catharsis in an Age of Crisis

Internet memes emerging during the Covid-19 crisis focus on a range of themes: institutional discourse about the virus and contagion; the response of global leaders to the crisis, the mediatisation of their pronouncements and legislative measures, links with a possible third world war, and so on. We suggest that such memes reverse engineer and subvert official security discourse as well as reveal personal and public coping strategies. They function both as a prophylaxis and cathartic to fears and anxieties over the threat of contagion. As a prophylaxis, the sharing of memes allows individuals to find and share their voices in the face of precarity, as well as to cement social and cultural bonds through discourses of resilience and prevention. As a cathartic, they provide humorous and satirical counter-narratives of personal agency in the midst of state-enforced directives of social distancing and self-quarantine. They empower their producers, ideally providing them with the means of attempting to effect social change (Mason 2013), in a crisis which has seen the withdrawal of civil liberties on a scale unknown since the Second World War. These include the right to leave home, the suspension of all but essential commercial activities, the enforced cessation of social functions like church services, sporting events, cinema and theatre, as well as open-air activities like cycling, hill-walking or jogging in parks. New social practices have arrived, such as mask-wearing, repeated hand sanitisation and social distancing; these repressive measures have largely been accepted supinely by most populations worldwide , despite the fact that alternative discourses centring on the concept of ‘herd immunity’ have raised doubts over the long-term efficacy of this response (see, e.g. De Vlas and Coffeng 2020; Wittkowski, 2020). While certain world leaders (e.g. Trump, Johnson, Bolsonaro) initially appeared to contemplate a more laissez-faire response, the rising death tolls rapidly led most governments to fall into line with a lockdown approach. While public discourse during the 2003 SARS outbreak was limited to elite channels of traditional mass media and a less-than-participatory first-generation internet, the recent pandemic has been remarkable for the public reliance on social media for assessing often ambiguous institutional messaging and legislative pronouncements. Memes have become vital markers for communicating and visualizing public sentiment first in Italy, one of the countries initially hardest hit, and then around the globe. This article focuses on creative responses to Covid-19 in the form of online memes, which represented a key outlet for those in lockdown across many forms of social media, including YouTube, WhatsApp, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and so on.