Meme Culture in Vietnam: A Form of Political Activism?

On my last blog post, I posed a question regarding the role Facebook plays in shaping modern Vietnamese political identity. Emily had kindly sent me an interesting article exploring this question (thanks Emily!).

Specifically, the author, Patrick Sharbaugh, explores meme culture, which he argues allows the Vietnamese people to circumvent state-controlled media when making public political opinions. He contrasts the lack of public response to the Vietnamese government banning The Hunger Games with the internet’s response to the same government office banning a Vietnamese film a year later. Censorship was widely discussed because of the memes that popped up mocking the banning of the Vietnamese film.

Sharbaugh’s ending argument about the power of memes is particularly interesting to me: “They’re chang­ing minds. And they’re doing it so pre­cisely because they are juve­nile and short-lived and ephemeral and yes, often silly. That’s the whole point.” Memes pervade our daily lives by their easy-to-consume nature and, in their pervasiveness, can subtly shift our views.

He counters the Vietnamese political culture with Western political culture, claiming that the meme culture is uniquely Vietnamese. I wonder if this is true though. While Western activists obviously can be louder and more explicit in their political opinions, I find a good amount of political memes while browsing on Facebook. Of course, the political election definitely increases the amount of memes, but I find that my many friends engage themselves with politics and reinforce their political views via Facebook. In any case, I think it would be interesting to explore how Vietnamese politics are navigated by the masses versus how Western politics are.