Lievrouw

The most interesting part of Lievrouw's chapters written about culture jamming to me were those discussing memes and their place in the culture jamming world. While I do tend to agree that memes and their various forms were originally used for purposes of activism using new media forms, I think that at this point memes have become something that are not at all looked at as "activist" media. When I am scrolling through facebook and see a meme, more often than not I click it due to its humor and do not read into it any further than that. This unfortunately happened because of the overloading of the internet with memes and associated graphics. Websites like I Can Haz Cheezburger have taken memes, which could be used for political and social activism, and turned them into something silly and meaningless (that isn't to say they aren't entertaining). For the activists this is a problem, because it means they either have to try to continue using things like memes to promote and spread their ideals, or they have to move on to new methods of promotion. It is possibly that the activists could continue to use memes as a tool, however because memes have become mostly humor based, the activist writing the meme would have to be very good at subtly getting across his/her message without losing the interest of the reader. For readers on facebook and other social media websites, the draw in many of these is humor, and if there is an obvious political undercurrent, they are often skipped (unless the person reading them is very politically oriented, which most young people are not) because of the lack of humor seen in most political activist movements (in my opinion, the humor mostly used by young people is in how stupid politics and politicians are in the first place, and this only helps spread the ideal that politics need changing, but not how or why).