Memetising the pandemic: memes, covid-19 mundanity and political cultures

ABSTRACT

It was late February 2020 when part of Northern Italy entered the first Covid-19 lockdown of the West. While stories of people fleeing quarantined areas soon made national headlines, the international news was suddenly reporting of coronavirus patients connected to Italy all around the world. Against this background, Italian social media started thriving with Covid-19 humour. On 9 March the lockdown turned nationwide and became one of the strictest in Europe. This article addresses everyday memes of quarantined Italy as an instance of mundane memetics at a time of crisis. It investigates the leading discourses emerging from these memes to provide insight into the political culture that surfaces at the intersection between the ordinary of everyday social media uses and the extraordinary of crisis events. We combined digital methods and netnographic techniques to generate and analyse a dataset of over 9,000 Covid-19 memetic instances produced on Twitter by Italian publics during the first national lockdown. Our findings show that in early everyday pandemic memes the political stake did not manifest itself in the explicitness of values, attitudes, and knowledge tightly packaged in a purposeful and self-aware political culture. It rather surfaced in the form of a mundane political culture – one that was primarily performative, irrespective of any future political action, and marked by populist values.

KEYWORD:

• Memes

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 We selected keyword queries (i.e., ‘COVID19italia’, ‘codogno’, ‘coronavirusita’, ‘coronavirusitalia’, ‘coronavirusitalianews’, ‘coronaviruslombardia’, ‘coronavirusnontitem’, ‘coronaviruspiemonte’, ‘covid19ita’) based on pandemic hashtags trending in Italy on 20 February 2020.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Maria Francesca Murru

Maria Francesca Murru (PhD, Catholic University of Milan, Italy) is lecturer of Sociology of Culture and Communication at the University of Bergamo. Research interests include digital public spheres, mediated citizenship, and local journalism.

Stefania Vicari

Stefania Vicari is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Sociology at the University of Sheffield. Her research interests include the general areas of digital participatory cultures, digital health and digital methods. Her works have appeared in a number of journals including Media, Culture and Society, New Media and Society, Poetics, Social Media + Society, Social Movement Studies and Current Sociology.