If you missed our FORUM on Wednesday, fear not, we have the full recording and 10 highlights available, including this one from İdil Galip:

“I think the moment where I realised something was happening around memetic media was during the 2013 Gezi protests in Turkey, where I saw a lot of people using memes to bypass certain state censorship laws online. That interested me because I thought, a lot of people are getting arrested on Twitter for saying things about the government, but I’m seeing memes that say much worse things and no one’s getting punished for it. So what’s happening? Is this a new kind of language? Does it allow us to kind of speak truth to power? A few theorists and researchers were describing them as democratic tools – bottom-up, grassroots technologies. Memes came from the people. But around 2018, I started seeing brand deals incorporating this early mode of memes. That’s when I realised they’re not really bottom-up technologies anymore – this is becoming a language used by everyone: top-down actors and individuals” – 

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