Digital Memes and US pop politics. Dynamism and pervasiveness of a digital genre in the Internet/mobile era

This paper analyses US political memes relating mainly to the Obama and Trump presidencies asan illustration of a subgenre shaped by today’s mobile culture, and thus part of the rise of new forms of digitaltextuality. In particular, the study explores the connection between technology, participatory culture and theentrenchment of memes as a multimodal genre within political discourse. The illustration of the diffusion ofthis political meme subgenre as a grass roots phenomenon, generated and distributed through social media, isilluminated by the article’s focus on the often ironic comments it makes about US politics. By reconstructingthe evolution of digital memes in this period and illustrating and exemplifying the textual processes that givethis political subgenre its unique forcefulness, the article concludes that digital memes have embraced textualforms – based on mass media and shared authorship – that are certainly informal and often offensive, butwhich also testify to a vision of politics which is interpretable within the wider framework of US popularculture, the American Dream in particular.