A Memetic Pandemic: COVID-19 Memes As Tactical Risk Communication

ABSTRACT

Tactical risk memes operated outside institutions like the World Health Organization (WHO) and CDC (Center for Disease Control and Prevention) to tactically sharing important risk and crisis communication. They made us laugh but also gave us instructions for how to stay safe during a global pandemic. This article examines tactical risk memes and provides implications for future public health crises, arguing for the importance and relevance of memes as a form of technical communication.

KEYWORDS:

• Tactical risk communication
• tactical technical communication
• memes
• COVID-19
• Health communication

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank participants from the “Tactical Meming” workshop at the 2022 ATTW virtual conference for engaging with an early version of this article and participating in tactical memetic creation. Thank you as well to Tracy Bridgeford and the anonymous reviewers for providing meaningful and helpful feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Defined by Stephen M. Walt (2011) as the belief held by Americans that our “values, political system, and history are unique and worthy of universal admiration,” but which also includes the idea that we are somehow untouchable by the tragedies that befall other nations. Obviously, this notion is a myth and our settler-colonialist, capitalist approach to life has been proven again and again to be anything but “exceptional” (at least not in a positive way).

2. I still collected memes after November 2020, but many fewer over time. As the 2020 presidential election heated up, US citizens also turned our meming focus on it and COVID-19 memes lost some of their appeal.

3. I do not think that reality hit for many until Italy went on lockdown in early March and citizens took to their phones to report the dire situation there, with over 200 people dying in one night, which at the time felt like (and is, COVID-19 desensitization be damned) a lot.

4. A lot of memetic media made direct references to quarantines and quarantine orders during the early days of the pandemic, but no place in the United States (where the vast majority of CDC memes came from) was ever placed under an actual quarantine. Instead, we were only asked to maintain social distancing and refrain from gathering in large groups.

5. At least if not directly, then perceptively – these memes were circulating during a time when we thought the coronavirus spread primarily through touch.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Derek M. Sparby

Derek M. Sparby (they/he) is an Associate Professor at Illinois State University where they teach courses in digital rhetorics and technical communication. Their research interests lie at the intersection of memes, online aggression, and ethics, and their publications have appeared in enculturation, Computers and Composition, Technical Communication Quarterly, Communication Design Quarterly, and several edited collections. They are the co-editor of Digital Ethics: Rhetoric and Responsibility in Online Aggression and the author of Memetic Rhetorics: Toward an Ethical Toolkit for Meming.