Max 0:00
Welcome to Democracy Unmuted. Today’s episode is the Memeification of politics. I’m your host Max Rosenzweig here with my Co-Hosts Alex Shoflick (Alex says Hi) and Clare Mayes (Clare says hi). We’re going to take you on a journey about the weird world of memes in politics with a ~little~ help from a former state senator to figure out if memes are an effective vehicle for connecting with the younger electorate. But first, we gotta understand what memes are…
Alex 1:15
Now, you probably are aware of the cultural emergence that is memes. The classic still images with bold characters across the top and bottom of the picture, conveying a sentiment like “Success Kid” where each new version would be used “to designate either success or frustration” according to knowyourmeme.com. These dull, now cringe-worthy depictions were the real homies who sparked a cultural reset and made shockwaves for the future of online communication. Yet, memes today exist in many different formats, not just a lame screen grab with boring text. For each modern internet meme, there is most likely a punchline Esque joke format. No matter if the meme is a video, a bunch of text, or a photo, the meme will follow a format that diverges from its original joke.
Clare 2:16
Moreover, the term meme surprisingly originates from British Ethologist and Evolutionary Biologist Richard Hawkins. Originally, aiming to aid his readers in contextualizing and comprehending Darwinian evolution theory, Hawkins found himself coining a brand new revolutionary term, a meme, in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. Likewise, in his book, Hawkins utilized the concept of the gene pool and replication to break down this unheard-of cultural phenomenon. Described as an “information packet with attitude” that propagates leaping from brain to brain, memes virtually can take on any concept that gets altered and passed on to other individuals in order to carry a theme or phenomenon. And according to that core concept of memes, many iconic ideas throughout history are considered memes such as “Survival of the fittest” mutating to the survival of the “sickest,” “twittest” or our favorite “Survival of the littest.” Some anthropologists even claim that the idea of god is a meme because of the vast amount of religions and spiritual beliefs that have changed and spread over time. Languages too have been flagged as memes due to the myriad of speech across this planet all being used to simply communicate.
Max 3:20
But so what? How did we get here? How did we go from a 70s evolutionary theory to “real women vote for Trump?” Let’s face it, memes are everywhere you look, but the most current and relevant uses are on the internet. Nowadays, users all over the world have been forging and constructing memes of their own, often ones that pertain to our current, painful pandemic crisis as well as America’s unstable political landscape. Users are able to take control of this, sometimes multimedia, a form of expression and truly explain how they are feeling with a collective fervor.
Alex 3:56
Similarly, as we’ve seen the recent memes that have blown up about the 2020 presidential election and the never-ending counting of mail-in ballots, the simplistic 2008 meme “Old economy steve” showed a 70s yearbook photo of a white boy along with statements like “Graduates from college… gets hired” or “‘At my first job I only made 15K a year.’ ‘In 1979 that was the equivalent of 49K a year” that ultimately highlighted the sentiments of frustration that millennials had towards baby boomers and the intergenerational conflict that occurred following the 2008 recession.
Clare 4:39
Memes aren’t just a spunky popularized form of expression, that even politicians use. They are ironically modern relics. To this day, memes continue to be perfectly wrapped up time capsules that have helped and will help historians, and curious folk like you, get a good picture of what was happening then.
Max 4:52
Now to discuss how he uses memes in politics, welcome our guest Matt Little @littlesenator on TikTok. With his 170 thousand followers, he has learned the ins and outs of engaging people in politics through a meme medium.
Matt Little 5:27
So my name is Matt little. I’m the former mayor of Lakeville, current state senator of District 58 in Minnesota. I’m an outgoing senator at this point we didn’t get it done in reelection, but hey, we’ll be back. I’m also a lawyer. Next, we asked him about his Tik Tok fame. Let’s talk Tik Tok. I mean a lot of people know me as a little senator.
It’s kind of funny like our branding on little senator was by what’s the right word? by circumstances I guess is born out of circumstances because all day or like the at symbol Matt little and at Senator Little was already taken by this pretty dormant.
No longer elected person in like, I think it was Alabama, this guy had taken all that the at Senator Little branding. And so just by
circumstances, I went with a little senator. And I was like, well, this is funny, and it’ll get the point across and the branding has been so effective that on the Senate floor, people will sometimes accidentally, like start referring, like, at our little senator instead of Senator Little, and they have to stop themselves and correct themselves. So the branding has been good. And it’s, you know, it fits our like punchy,
somewhat quirky brand. That’s awesome. jumping out that we were curious how Senator Little got his start on social media? Um, the Tik Tok account specifically, yeah, I mean, I were looking at it seems like that’s your biggest following. And they have like, 15,000 on Twitter as well. Yeah, I think in Minnesota for the longest time I was known for my Twitter, even though I don’t have a huge following its reaches pretty good regionally.
You know, it’s harder and harder to get people to click the Follow button on, you know, Facebook, Twitter, and even Instagram in some ways.
But the support is what I call stickier, right. Like once someone follows you on those three more traditional platforms now they’ll stay there. Tik Tok, man, Tik Tok. they’ll follow you and unfollow you and follow you and unfollow you. It’s
it’s less, it’s less static. But yeah, definitely our biggest one. It’s now what we’re known for. And I joined in like, February of this year. And wow, that’s like an explosion. That’s very big. Yeah. Yeah. It’s weird. So I joined in February. What makes it even weirder is I didn’t even start using it. I just joined.
And then I don’t think I made a video for a month, I didn’t even like open the app for a month, to be honest with you, because I didn’t know what it was. And I, at the time, I just didn’t really care. And we had every other things going on. And so I just, I let it be and then,
you know, I think it was like maybe late February, early March, we started making videos
more seriously and kind of figured out what it was then we had a big hit. And yeah, my goal was, by the end of May to have 2000 followers, and here we are in November with like, ridiculous. That’s awesome. For shifting gears a little bit. We asked senator Liddell, what demographic his team was shooting to reach with this tic tocs. Yeah, definitely. I mean, it’s definitely under 25 we’ve gathered.
But we’ve had to, you know, read outside studies to gather that because,
you know, the Tik Tok analytics only show you a few things, which are your top three countries, they show you your
the split between self reported male and female.
And then, you know, it shows you some analytics on the videos, and views and what time your followers are most active. But other than that, we don’t really know.
We have a lot of anecdotal evidence that it’s young people. And, you know, the, the metadata says that too. And then, you know, some of its local, but a lot of its national and I actually have I have followings in the UK. And I also have like, a, like a South American following as well. It’s Yeah, it’s like all over the world a little bit. It’s cool. Yeah, it’s been pretty cool. Do you think that I’ll call them memes, but you know, tech talks or tweets or whatever? Do you think that’s like an effective way to talk about politics? Or do you think it’s a little like cute and kind of short of like, actually hitting home at some important issues? Yeah, I think,
you know, it’s really the same question that people ask me about Twitter, probably five, six years ago, because we use Twitter means to talk about policy for a long time. And now we’ve gotten a little more serious on Twitter.
Matt Little 9:48
But you’re just trying to engage people that aren’t normally engaged in political dialogue in a way that they are consuming media, right. There’s a reason that Dude from Denver, who goes to school in Michigan is asking me questions about politics related to social media. Because it is effective, right? And, and so the problem is right, like, you have to have some of the confidence in yourself, you also have to have some people in your life or on your team that will check you, and make sure you’re not doing anything. You know, off. And I’ve been pretty good at that. But there’s probably going to be a point in my political career where I’m going to need help with that. And so, it’s, it’s riskier, you know, to be cute, or quirky or a little bit weird or non traditional, it’s riskier, but it’s, it’s really important that, you know, when you’re doing the job that the Senate or whatever position, you’re in that you’re also, you know, a serious policymaker, right, like, I wouldn’t be able to do this if I if I was just an empty suit, and capital, because then it would just confirm that I’m an empty suit. But the fact is that I’m I get a lot I’ve gotten a lot done and and, and so it’s, it’s kind of a good balance that way. Yeah.
Alex 11:12
Whistle while you work kind of motto type of thing. Yeah.I like that.
Max 11:16
We brought up a recent example of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, and her use of Twitch, a video game streaming site. She’s gotten some pushback for her streams in the past, “Do your job! Why aren’t you working right now?” Etc. We were curious to hear senator littles take on this and if he’d received any of those same criticisms himself,
Matt Little 11:36
Oh, definitely. You know, I’m a little bitter about that. Because our team had identified twitches, our next thing we were gonna do, and she took it right at the election. We were gonna save it for next time. But seems
Alex 11:49
like you’re already like ahead of it. Like you guys really put some serious thought into, like how you’re going to be reaching people.
Matt Little 11:54
Yeah, so we Yeah, that was our next iteration of, you know, using mass media. Free mass media, I should say, to reach people. And so we’ve, we’ve actually had that idea in the hopper for over a year, because I do like to game. You know, I, you know, I tried to keep up with some of them, but like, you know, we’re gonna try that. But we’re going to save it for next time, because we like to space ideas out and we still are running Tik Tok. But I would say yeah, that’s definitely a criticism. If you look in the comments, people were like, you know, you lost your election, because you made too many Tik Toks. And then campaign, like, you get that all the time. But you know, those are people that don’t just don’t get it.
Alex 12:38
You’re very gracious, like we’re reading comments, sections, people saying that I always felt like your answers are very, like polite, but to the point that like, it worked, like people know about you that wouldn’t have if it weren’t for your tech talk.
Matt Little 12:50
Yeah. And if I’m, again, right, it’s that whole juxtaposition, right? Like, I can’t do this type of thing. If I wasn’t a good legislator. It just, it wouldn’t work. It would hurt me. But the fact is, like, I do Tik Tok, but I also work harder than anybody else in the state. Anyway,
Alex 13:06
I looked at your legislation record, and I was reading through it, it made me dizzy, like, I was scrolling down all the bills that you were not even just a co author that you were the main author for. And I was like, wow, this is dizzy.
Matt Little 13:17
Yeah, we go to town. And yeah, and you know, we get a lot of stuff through even though I was the number one target and they wouldn’t give me hearings and all sorts of stuff. But all sorts of games, we still got stuff done. And so I think, you know, that’s that’s an important part that I try to tell people and pretty much anybody in the in the political circles in Minnesota will tell you like, you can’t outwork me. I did knock more doors than anybody else, any other candidate in the entire state of Minnesota. And that’s just a fact. And everybody here knows that. And so, when I get those critiques, I just try and like, let people know. That’s awesome. Work me.
Clare 13:51
Wrapping up. We asked her a little What if we only consumed political news through memes and social media? No, CNN, no Fox News, only social media? What would happen? Is that a good idea?
Matt Little 14:02
Some of them are good foot in the door. Maybe it’s an issue. That’s that’s not like a mainstream issue. A little more obscure to me. I
Alex 14:11
mean, you’ve reiterated the point it seems very interesting to me that that it’s a very, very effective way to get a new generation of people interested in politics.
Matt Little 14:18
Yeah. And you’ll see you can also see in some of my comments, people will like Well, I don’t know where you stand and I don’t know you never do issues and we’ve done issue videos they just don’t do very well.
Alex 14:31
Interesting. Yeah, we know it’s more it’s more about making fun of like politics as a whole than it is about any particular issue politics
Matt Little 14:38
well in like we pepper stuff in there, right like so. I I always kind of had an equation on Twitter I had an equation on tik tok. I have no clue what the radical bounces but I you know, I on Twitter, I used to do so many jokes, and then something serious, right? Because my whole thing is to get you bought in that one. What I’m saying something serious now. It really does matter. Yeah, so that’s part of it, but also to get you to stay for the jokes, but also the real stuff. And so it’s an intro to what I think matters. And so even on the Tik Tok videos, there is policy peppered in there. But people refuse to see it. And then, you know, a lot of the people responding to folks like that will say, well, like you can actually Google him, you can do what you’ve done and look at my legislation. That’s really what I’m trying to do is introduce myself and my personality and my style, and then try and tap into the stuff that actually, especially
Alex 15:36
I learned, at least when I was taking a course on like speech writing, they would tell you that, you know, people are laughing, and then you hit them with the important stuff while you know, in between the jokes. They don’t even have the time realize what they’ve taken in. But they it sits it like is instilled. You know, that’s actually that’s, that’s very clever that you have that strategy. I didn’t even think of it that way.
Matt Little 15:55
No, no, don’t tell anybody.
Clare 16:03
As we just heard, there’s a lot of hard work and nuance that goes into utilizing social media and memes in politics. Memes are an effective way to make an initial impression on younger voters, drawing in Gen Z-ers, millennial cusps, and young folk alike and encouraging them to engage and educate themselves on political issues.
Alex 16:20
While social media can be a good tool for politicians to reach younger voters, I think we’ve come to realize engaging with them on these platforms doesn’t always translate to political action. Mobilizing Gen Z voters is a tricky issue because while these memes increase our awareness they provide no course of action to remediate the sometimes intense emotions they leave us with. One thing that’s certain is that social media presence by politicians can help humanize politics and the issues that affect our world today. It is our hope that as memes evolve the integrity of their content can improve and be used to stir broad and meaningful change.
Max 17:06
Thanks so much to Senator Little for talking with us for this episode of Democracy Unmuted. Senator Matt Little can be found on Instagram, Twitter, or TikTok @LittleSenator. This episode has been brought to you by Clare Mayes, Alex Shoflick, me Max Rosenzweig, and our lovely, radio-instructor professional T Hetzel. Thanks for choosing us, we’ll see you soon!
