https://doi.org/10.1177/1478929918807483
Political Studies Review
2019, Vol. 17(3) 255­–266
© The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/1478929918807483
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Sorted for Memes and Gifs:
Visual Media and Everyday
Digital Politics
Jonathan Dean
Abstract
This article identifies an unease, or even squeamishness, in the way in which political science
addresses social media and digital politics, and argues that we urgently need to avoid such
squeamishness if we are to adequately grasp the texture and character of contemporary digitally
mediated politics. The first section highlights some of the methodological assumptions that
underpin this squeamishness. Section ‘Visual Culture and the “Memeification” of Politics’, drawing
on a recent research project on the changing shape of the British left, highlights a number of key
trends in digital politics which deserve more attention from political scientists. In particular, I
stress the ways in which politics is enacted in and through visual media such as gifs, memes and
other forms of shareable visual content. Section ‘Re-Orienting the Study of Digital Politics’ then
mines recent literature in media and communication studies to highlight a range of conceptual and
methodological approaches that might be better able to capture the contours of these emergent
forms of digitally mediated politics. In the section ‘The Pleasures and Passions of Socially Mediated
Politics: Towards a Research Agenda’, I articulate a possible research agenda. Overall, I encourage
political scientists to see the production and exchange of digital visual media not as some frivolous
activity on the margins of politics, but as increasingly central to the everyday practices of politically
engaged citizens.
Keywords
social media, visual culture, Labour Party, memes, participation
Accepted: 10 September 2018
A few days after the 2017 UK General Election, the Metro newspaper published a feature
entitled ‘The Memes that Decided the Outcome of the General Election’ (White, 2017),
reflecting the widely held view that Labour’s better than anticipated performance was in
part explainable by Labour activists’ astute use of social media (Goes, 2018; Norris,
School of Politics and International Studies, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK
Corresponding author:
Jonathan Dean, School of Politics and International Studies, University of Leeds, Social Sciences Building,
Room 13.07, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK.
Email: ipijde@leeds.ac.uk
807483PSW0010.1177/1478929918807483Political Studies ReviewDean
research-article2018
Article
256	 Political Studies Review 17(3)
2017). While pulling back from some of the hyperbole about social media in the Metro
piece, the aftermath of the 2017 General Election nonetheless provides a timely opportunity
to reflect on the current state of existing political science scholarship on digital
politics.
In this article, I argue that there is a certain unease, or even squeamishness, in the way
in which political scientists (particularly in the UK) tackle social media and digital politics.
This, in turn, results in a number of key developments in digital politics falling
under our discipline’s radar. To flesh out these claims, the first section of the paper highlights
some of the methodological assumptions that underpin this squeamishness.
Section ‘Visual Culture and the “Memeification” of Politics’, drawing on a recent
research project on the changing shape of the British left, highlights a number of key
trends in digitally mediated political participation which the political science community
has hitherto downplayed, or overlooked altogether. In particular, I stress the role of the
visual: for many politically engaged citizens, politics is enacted in and through visual
media cultures such as gifs, memes and other forms of shareable visual content. More
broadly, the turn to the visual – what we might call the ‘memeification’ of politics –
directs attention both to the affective dynamics of politics, and to the protean, everyday
nature of digitally mediated political engagement. Rather than seeing this turn to the
visual as something unusual or exceptional it is, I suggest, part of the constitutive fabric
of everyday political engagement.
Against this backdrop, section ‘Re-Orienting the Study of Digital Politics’ mines
recent literature in media and communication studies to articulate a less ‘squeamish’
approach to the analysis of digitally mediated politics. While acknowledging the multiplicity
of conceptual and methodological approaches to the study of politicised digital
media, I suggest that the recent turn to virtual immersive ethnographies pursued by the
likes of Jessica Beyer and Adrienne Massanari could provide useful methodological
insights. In section ‘The Pleasures and Passions of Socially Mediated Politics: Towards a
Research Agenda’, I articulate a possible research agenda. More broadly, I encourage
political scientists to see socially mediated cultural production and exchange not as some
frivolous activity on the margins of politics, but as increasingly central to how large numbers
of predominantly young citizens experience politics.
Political Science and the Problem of Social Media
While few political scientists would doubt the importance of social media, our discipline’s
capacity to capture the feel and character of socially mediated forms of political
participation is hindered, I argue, by three sets of assumptions about the nature, scope and
purpose of political science research, as well as an implicit self-representation of the figure
of the political scientist.
The first problem concerns the priority afforded to broad-brush diagnostic analyses of
aggregate citizen opinions, values, voting preferences and election results. This was
evident in political scientists’responses to the 2017 UK General Election (see, for example,
Denver, 2018; Dorey, 2017; Heath and Goodwin, 2017; Jennings and Stoker, 2017)
and Brexit. Consider, for example, a recent special issue of British Politics on the politics
of Brexit. Despite the importance of social media in shaping the wider discursive
and affective contours of the Brexit referendum and its aftermath, the articles tend to
either totally forego any mention of the role of social media (see, for example, Marsh,
2018) or mention it in passing without subjecting it to sustained analysis (see, for
Dean	 257
instance, Copus, 2018). My point here is not to churlishly dispute the value of such
analyses, as all these pieces are insightful and valuable on their own terms. My point is,
rather, that the disproportionate dominance and visibility of aggregate analyses of public
opinion, election results and so on – reflecting the tendency to equate political science
with what Stuart Hall ([1966] 2016: 88) called ‘the psephological equation’ – have a
number of consequences for how the object of political science is constructed, and the
role of social media therein. Such work produces an implicit self-representation of the
political scientist as above the fray of political engagement, looking down from a raised
vantage point. As a result, the specific texture, feel and character of digitally mediated
participation recedes from view, becoming subsumed into broad aggregations of votes,
values, opinions and so on.
Second, when social media is taken seriously, it tends to be framed in consequentialist
terms. By this, I mean that social media is interrogated not because it is seen as constitutive
of politics, but because it is seen to impact upon politics. As Brassett and Sutton
(2017: 246) have argued, this is a more general tendency for the political analysis of satire,
comedy and popular culture to be ‘reduced to an instrumental logic of “impact”’. This
tacit framing of the politics/social media relation is present in, for example, Helen
Margetts’s (2017: 386) post-election observation that ‘2017 may be remembered as the
first election where it seems to have been the social media campaigns that really made the
difference to the relative fortunes of the parties, rather than traditional media’. Similarly,
Dommett and Temple’s (2018) study of digital campaigning in the 2017 election examines
whether and how campaign material disseminated via social media impacted the
results. Again, while such work is of course extremely valuable, it still tends to cast social
media as distinct from ‘proper’ politics. Social media is seen as a medium through which
political campaigns are directed, or as something that may have consequences for (electoral)
politics, but it is tacitly framed as not, in and of itself, constitutive of the texture and
practice of politics.
The third problem is to do with a certain squeamishness towards the affective and
emotional dynamics of politics. This is mostly manifest as an absence, that is, a discussion
of politics in terms of public opinion, party policy programmes and so on without
consideration of the feelings and affects that underpin them (see Hayton, 2018). As Foster
et al. (2013: 568) found in a widely cited analysis of politics and international relations
(IR) undergraduate degree programmes in the UK, ‘there is considerable bias towards
institutionalised forms of power located within and through institutions, government and
governance’, which comes at the expense of a consideration of the role of the private
sphere and the affective dynamics of political life. Occasionally, however, a more explicit
defence of politics as (relatively) unemotional is made, such as in Gerry Stoker oft-cited
remark that politics ‘is not the most edifying human experience. It is rarely an experience
of self-actualization and more often an experience of accepting second-best’ (Stoker,
2006: 72). While Stoker is making a specific point, it reflects a wider sensibility in political
scholarship in which, as Laura Jenkins (2018: 195) argues in a discussion of the work
of Stoker (alongside Colin Hay and Matthew Flinders), there is ‘a tendency to prioritise
thought over emotion and to imply … that emotions cloud reasoning capacities’. This
unease that surrounds political scientists’ discussions of social media is, therefore, symptomatic
of a more general wariness of digging into the feelings and affective dynamics
that underpin everyday forms of political participation and engagement.
To reiterate, none of this is to say that political scientists have not made valuable contributions
to the study of digital politics. Consider, for example, Usherwood and Wright
258	 Political Studies Review 17(3)
(2017) on the role of twitter during the 2016 European Union (EU) Referndum campaign,
Ohme (2018) on the changing relationship between citizenship and digitally mediated
participation, or Leston-Bandeira and Bender (2013) on parliamentary engagement with
social media. However, I do want to suggest that deep, sustained analysis of digitally
mediated engagement tends to be viewed with a certain squeamishness from political
scientists, and as such there are important features of citizen engagement in a digital age
which we tend to overlook. Consequently, if we are serious about capturing the character
of contemporary forms of (digital) political participation, we require a diversification of
our conceptual and methodological tools.
Visual Culture and the ‘Memeification’ of Politics
This preliminary analysis of our discipline’s nervousness towards digital politics invites a
further more empirical question, namely, what are we missing? What kinds of developments
in the practice of digital politics are falling under our radar? My answer here is
indicative rather than exhaustive. However, one particularly significant development concerns
the increasing prevalence of visual digital media in everyday political engagement.
This emerged as a key theme during a recent research project on the changing character of
British left politics, in which we were struck by the centrality afforded to social media in
general, and visual media such as memes and gifs in particular, in left activists’ practices
and sensibilities in the context of the resurgence of the Labour left following Jeremy
Corbyn’s securing of the Labour leadership (see Dean, 2017). Memes, a portmanteau of
mimesis and genes, originally coined by Richard Dawkins in 1976, refer to ‘digital objects
that riff on a given visual, textual or auditory form and are then appropriated, re-coded, and
slotted back into the internet infrastructures they came from’ (Nooney and PortwoodStacer,
2014: 249). More prosaically, memes typically consist of images accompanied by
text. They often involve the use of humour, irony and subversion, and are, above all shareable,
open to very rapid circulation over a number of different social media platforms. Gifs
are simply animated memes, often consisting of short looped video clips shared for the
purposes of conveying emotion or a reaction to an event or an utterance.
A striking feature of the 2017 UK General Election was the pervasiveness of memes
and gifs as a way of conveying political values, sensibilities or opinions (Segesten and
Bossetta, 2017).Among Labour supporters, memes and gifs featuring Jeremy Corbyn and
other high-profile Labour figures were circulated ad infinitum. Among the more memorable
of these included Obi Wan Corbyn memes, in which Corbyn was favourably compared
to Star Wars character Obi Wan Kanobi (made possible in part by Corbyn’s physical
resemblance to Alec Guinness) (see Figure 1). Furthermore, a popular gif showed Steven
Gerrard celebrating his goal for Liverpool in the 2005 Champions League final that precipitated
his team’s unlikely comeback against AC Milan, but with the faces of Corbyn
and Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell superimposed onto those of the Liverpool players,
a humorous comment on Labour’s suddenly improved poll ratings. Finally, perhaps
the most widely shared Corbyn tweet of the election season consisted of a short video of
Corbyn walking down a flight of steps towards the House of Commons a few days after
the election, during which he claps his hands and says ‘we’re back and we’re ready for it
all over again’. One enterprising twitter user, @officialwinemom, tweeted the video with
the caption ‘when you walk back into the sesh after throwing up’ (‘sesh’ being short for
‘session’, British youth slang for an evening of heavy drinking), and received no fewer
than 115,000 retweets at the time of writing.
Dean	 259
While such practices may seem frivolous, the circulation of digital visual media can
play a crucial role in political community formation. To capture these dynamics in detail
would of course require a level of detailed empirical analysis that goes beyond the scope
of this article, but a few points are worth making. First, meme-making is extremely common,
to such an extent that the quick-fire mocking-up of a meme or gif is an increasingly
normalised mode of response to a political news story, development, comment piece and
so on. Second, visual media such as memes and gifs serve what, following Althusser
(2014), we might call an interpellative function, that is they ‘hail’ the viewer into identifying
with them, either by agreeing with the political sentiments expressed therein, or by
finding them funny (or not). This in turn means that the circulation of digital visual media
often serves to shore up political identities, affiliations and the antagonisms associated
with them. A good example of this relates to the widespread circulation of a composite
image of 9 white men who expressed a range of right-wing and/or pro-Brexit views on the
British Broadcasting Corporation’s (BBC) Question Time programme just prior to the
2017 election. Dubbed the ‘wall of gammon’on account of the somewhat ruddy complexion
of the men featured, the meme soon became ubiquitous among young left-wing twitter
users, with ‘gammon’ even becoming a widely used shorthand for older white male
Brexit voter (see Figure 2). The ‘gammon’meme testifies to a number of broader features.
These are: First, the capacity of memes to consolidate peoples’ political allegiance (by
seeing themselves as opposed to everything the ‘wall of gammon’ represents); second,
memes’ capacity to mock opponents and thus perhaps entrench political antagonisms
(indeed several Brexit supporters have argued that ‘gammon’ is a slur akin to racism) and
third, the capacity for memes to shape the broader political discourse (given that ‘gammon’
has now permeated the broader lexicon).
More generally, as Tim Highfield (2016: 41) puts it, ‘irreverent and playful practices,
from memes and image macros to parody and satire, are recurring elements of social
media activity in general, including political coverage’. Overall, then, there is considerable
evidence that digital visual media such as memes and gifs are in many respects an
Figure 1.  ‘Obi Wan Corbyn’ (Originally Posted by @DylanStrain, 04/08/15).
260	 Political Studies Review 17(3)
unremarkable part of the everyday vernacular of politics for large numbers of politically
engaged citizens, and their playful character renders them profoundly affective insofar
as they can be sources of pleasure, fun, connection or anger and irritation, depending on
the context. Irrespective of whether one thinks the ‘memeification’ of British politics is
a positive development, one should not underestimate its significance.
Re-Orienting the Study of Digital Politics
If we accepted that the ‘memeification’ of politics is a development that requires scholarly
attention, the question arises of what kinds of conceptual and methodological tools
we can turn to in order to capture these processes. This section turns to relevant literature
in media and communication studies to try draw out a range of methodological
approaches which may be of use to political scientists seeking to better understand the
memeification of politics, and indeed the texture of everyday digitally mediated political
engagement more broadly. That being said, media and communication studies are of
course not a homogeneous field. Indeed, there are four bodies of literature germane to
our analysis here.
Figure 2.  The ‘Wall of Gammon’ (Originally Posted by @bendavis_86, 08/06/17).
Dean	 261
The first is what we might call the ‘mainstream’ political communications literature.
While wide ranging, this literature is concerned with mapping the changing character of
political and civic information, focussing on interactions between ‘traditional’ and digital
media, and the impact of these interactions on political discourses and institutions. While
some of this work emphasises the continued hold of political elites (Stomer and-Galley,
2014), and some highlights the capacity of new media to weaken traditional media’s grip
on political agenda-setting (Meraz, 2009, 2011); most of this literature stresses the hybrid,
intertwined character of traditional and new media (Chadwick, 2017). The work of
Andrew Chadwick looms particularly large here: eschewing overblown claims about the
revolutionary character of digital media, Chadwick has in collaboration with James
Dennis (Chadwick and Dennis, 2017), highlighted the delicate interplay between the
‘horizontal’ and hierarchical or professionalised organisational logics within campaign
groups such as 38 Degrees. Elsewhere, in collaboration with Jennifer Stromer-Galley
(Chadwick and Stromer-Galley, 2016), Chadwick has highlighted the capacity of political
parties – including, but not limited to, the British Labour Party – to ‘renew themselves
from the outside in. Citizens are breathing new life into the party form, remaking parties
in their own changed participatory image, and doing so via digital means’ (Chadwick and
Stromer-Galley, 2016: 285).
A second broad body of literature concerns a range of innovative techniques and methodologies
deployed within media studies and Internet science aimed at tracing broad
patterns of online interaction and engagement. Such approaches can include, for example,
the application of the sociological traditional of social network analysis to online networks
(Scott, 2017), semantic analysis of large volumes of social media content
(Bontcheva and Rout, 2014; Maynard et al., 2017), and/or sentiment analysis of online
networks, focussing on the online circulation of feelings and opinions (Pozzi et al., 2017).
Such work is helpful insofar as it stresses the ways in which the more textured, located
online practices outlined above reflect, and are situated within, large yet shifting and
dynamic networks of interaction and exchange. Indeed, while my interest here is on finegrained
interpretation of visual media, such an enterprise need not be at odds with largerscale,
macro analysis. In a recent contribution to Information, Communication and
Society, Pearce et al. (2018) offer an innovative, very large n, analysis of how visual
media circulate across different social media platforms, an approach they christen ‘visual
cross platform analysis’ (VCPA). And while most large n social media analyses within
Internet science tend to be somewhat removed from political concerns (although Maynard
et al. (2017) is an exception), there is considerable scope for political scientists to ape the
methods and approaches found in media studies and Internet science to produce broad
aggregate mappings of online political behaviour (and to some extent this project is being
taken up: see, for example, Usherwood and Wright (2017)).
A third body of communication studies literature is more overtly pertinent to political
concerns, namely the work on the role of social media platforms amid more radical and
dramatic periods of resistance and revolution. This was particularly the case during the
various uprisings of 2010–2011 including, but not limited to, Occupy, the Spanish
Indignados, the Arab revolutions, and the UK student movement. While some of the more
technologically determinist accounts of these movements are overplayed, there is broad
agreement that social media facilitated the decentralised, networked modes of organisation
characteristic of many of these movements (Castells, 2012; Gerbaudo, 2012;
Papacharissi, 2015). As Bennett and Segerberg (2013: 2) put it, these movements were
characterised by a shift from collective to connective action, the latter characterised by
262	 Political Studies Review 17(3)
fluid, horizontal, inclusive and ‘easily personalised’ ‘action frames’. And as the title of
Zizi Papacharissi’s (2015) Affective Publics suggests, these works all, to varying degrees,
stress the affective dimensions of digital politics, that is the feelings and sensations that
sustain digitally mediated participation. Papacharissi’s work in particular provides a vivid
sense of what it means to place feelings and sentiments centre stage in the analysis of
digital politics (in stark contrast to the political science literature and, to a lesser extent,
in the ‘mainstream’ political communications literature). That said, a possible limitation
of the work of Papacharissi and others (at least for the purpose of the problem under
investigation here), is that, in anchoring their discussions of digital politics in major
events such as the Occupy movement and the 2011 Arab uprisings, they tend to, as David
Karpf (2017: 198) puts it, ‘focus attention on major events as they occur’, at the expense
of the protean and the everyday.
Therefore, perhaps more useful for us is a range of recent analyses of contemporary
digital politics which are more ethnographic in their focus. Recent years have seen extensive
use of sustained qualitative analyses of how citizens in a variety of fora participate in
digitally mediated political spaces. Ariadne Vromen et al. (2015: 83), for example, have
conducted a number of studies that aim to capture the nature of what they call ‘everyday
political talk’, via focus groups and other qualitative methods that examine ‘how civically
active young people understand their own engagement’.
A number of other recent studies also stress the importance of deep, immersive analyses
that seek to capture not so much that impact of digital spaces on politics, but rather the
shared cultural norms and practices that constitute different types of politicised online
spaces. Jessica Beyer (2014) book Expect Us, for example, offers a comparative ethnography
of four online spaces (Anonymous, Pirate Bay, World of Warcraft and IGN.com).
While she concedes these sites ‘do not fit easily into conceptions of civil discourse’
(Beyer, 2014: 2), she nonetheless argues that politics is ‘being transformed in these unexpected,
darker and more anonymous corners of the internet’(Beyer, 2014: 2). Against this
backdrop, Beyer traces, first, the specific norms, assumptions and practices that constitute
these four online spaces and, second, the conditions under which they mobilise politically.
While her specific argument is that, perhaps counter-intuitively, online anonymity
facilitates and encourages (rather than hinders) political mobilisation, the broader ethos
of her approach, driven by a hermeneutic curiosity towards the cultural norms of these
often exclusive and toxic online spaces, is highly instructive. Indeed, this toxicity is even
more apparent in the work of Adrienne Massanari (2015, 2017) who, like Beyer, conducted
an immersive ethnographic study of Reddit (a large, open-sourced news and discussion
site); drawing on actor-network theory, Massanari’s analysis offers an extremely
rich, textured account of the ways in which the Reddit’s cultural norms interact with its
algorithms to sustained particular kinds of political and affective sensibilities. In particular,
she discusses how Reddit plays host to a range of what she calls ‘toxic technocultures’,
in which certain kinds of ‘geek’masculinity feed into broader cultural and political
mobilisations against feminism and anti-racism (Massanari, 2017).
While the politicised online spaces that Beyer and, especially, Massanari analyse are
in many respects deeply concerning, their analyses are nonetheless highly instructive. For
one, they provide rich, fine-grained depictions of the everyday cultural norms and practices
that sustain politicised online communities. As such, they offer an indication of what
it might look like to undertake an analysis unencumbered by the squeamishness of digital
media that currently besets much political science. A possible rejoinder, of course, is to
suggest that these are merely niche online spaces, divorced from mainstream politics and
Dean	 263
society. However, as Beyer argues, one should not underestimate the capacity for niche
online spaces to play a role in shaping the broader ideological contours of politics and
society at large. Indeed, Angela Nagle (2017) even goes so far as to argue that the sustained
waging of an online culture-war against feminism, anti-racism and progressive
politics helped pave the way for Trump’s election victory. Thus, even if one retains a
purely ‘electoral’ focus, one can ill afford to ignore the role of politicised online communities
in shaping the contours of politics more broadly. The broader point, however, is that
if one aspires to understand contemporary modes of political engagement, then political
scientists would do well to learn methodological lessons from the likes of Beyer and
Massanari, and set out producing a more diverse mapping of the practices, norms and
discourses that characterise a broad range of different politicised online spaces.
The Pleasures and Passions of Socially Mediated Politics:
Towards a Research Agenda
My argument so far has been that we, as political analysts, would benefit from a thicker,
more textured sense of the ways in which politically engaged citizens inhabit a range of
online spaces, and engage in, for instance, the everyday production and exchange of
forms of visual media such as memes and gifs. In so doing, I want to call attention to
concrete, located forms of politicised visual media production, consumption and
exchange. This is not because larger scale analyses of the dynamics of online networks
are unimportant. It is, rather, because analyses of social media within political science
tend to reflect our discipline’s emphasis on aggregate analyses of voting preferences and
public opinion. Consequently, there is value in redressing the balance such that we pay a
little more attention to the personal, the situated and the affective. As Henry Jenkins et al.
(2002) put it in a 2002 ‘Manifesto for the New Cultural Studies’,
We are interested in the everyday, the intimate, the immediate … we engage with popular culture
as the culture that ‘sticks to the skin’, that becomes so much a part of us that it becomes difficult
to examine it from a distance (Jenkins et al., 2002: 3).
The increasing visibility of socially mediated visual culture in contemporary politics
requires, I argue, a similar sensibility in political science, that is, an approach perhaps in
some ways reminiscent of classical phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty [1945] 2002), that
is, one that digs down into the analysis of how politics is experienced in an embodied way
by citizens in their day-to-day lives.
As indicated, to address these issues poses significant methodological challenges, and
may require the adoption of a range of concepts, methods and approaches to which many
political scientists are unused. This might include, following Beyer and Massanari, deep,
immersive digital ethnographies to understand logics of discussion, exchange, debate,
dissent and community formation online. It might also entail greater literacy in tools from
the study of visual cultures, that is the ability to ‘decode’ the polysemic meanings of
politically charged visual images that circulate online. But it could also entail research
methods perhaps more familiar to political scientists, such as semi-structured interviews
about activists’ use of social media (as per Vromen et al., 2015) and, as indicated, there is
likely to be considerable analytic mileage in seeking to combine fine-grained analysis of
localised social media use with the production of large n analyses of politicised online
networks.
264	 Political Studies Review 17(3)
There are a number of other questions that could fruitfully be pursued as part of an
attempt to get to grips more fully with the contours of digitally mediated politics. One
concerns the historicity of the developments described above. While much discourse
about social media tends to (over)-emphasise its novelty, a different tack would be to situated
the frivolous and satirical political practices described here within a broader history
of using visual media for the purposes of political satire. As such, it may well be that (in
the UK context at least) the ‘memeification’ of politics represents not a radical break but,
rather, a re-working of a tradition of politicised visual humour that includes, but is not
limited to, Spitting Image, Yes Minister and the work of the likes of Chris Morris,Armando
Iannucci and Charlie Brooker (Brassett and Sutton, 2017; Fielding, 2014). A further avenue
of enquiry relates to the relationship between online and offline participation. While
I have argued strongly in favour of taking digital politics seriously, one should be wary of
a crude technological determinism. Instead, one needs to be sensitive to the ways in which
online forms of engagement and participation are circumscribed by conditions offline
(and vice versa). For instance, the ubiquity of digitally mediated participation on the
young British left is partly made possible by the presence of large numbers of young
activists linked to Momentum and the wider Labour Party (Young, 2018). Indeed, the
much documented failure of Activate – an attempt to launch a grassroots network of digitally
savvy young Conservatives – is, arguably, testament to the need for effective online
participation to be underpinned by a meaningful groundswell of offline mobilisation.
Finally, I want to respond to a possible objection, namely that in stressing the pleasure
and humour of digitally mediated engagement I am ‘naively advancing a dubious kind of
populism’, as Leisbet Van Zoonen (2005: 147) put it in her description of the sceptical
responses that greeted her affirmative account of the relation between politics or pop
culture. My point, however, is not that we should by definition offer a positive normative
evaluation of the practices under discussion. And while admitting that only a relatively
small percentage of the electorate engages in the production and circulation of politicised
visual media, there can be little doubt that these kinds of practices constitute a significant
part of contemporary modes of political engagement, and play a not insignificant role in
shaping the contours of wider political discourses and antagonisms. Whether we ‘like’
them or not, political scientists can thus ill afford to bypass these kinds of everyday citizen
engagements if we are serious about properly coming to terms with the texture and
character of political participation in a digital age.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication
of this article: The research for this paper was funded by Leverhulme Research Grant RPG-2015-252,
Exploring Left-wing Populism in an Age of Anti-Politics.
ORCID iD
Jonathan Dean https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1028-0566
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Author Biography
Jonathan Dean is Associate Professor of Politics at the University of Leeds. His research focuses on left politics
(broadly conceived), including the politics of Corbynism, gender/feminism and left politics, left politics and
media/culture, and current debates in critical theory. He has recently published work in Politics and Gender,
Capital and Class, Renewal and British Journal of Politics and International Relations.