Making amends with memes

Making amends with memes 2When it comes to media literacy, Brazil provides a unique case study.We consider ourselves the world champions of meme production.We take our in-jokes to the next level, and we are lavish in selfdeprecating humor.Despite social ills and inequalities, we take the popular proverb seriously when it says that laughing is the best medicine.We are proud of our humor and internet culture has only intensified it.Although there are no numbers to prove it, most Brazilian people believe that Brazil is one of the most prolific countries to create and share internet memes, especially the ones that replicate a genre of humor we generally define as "zuera", absolute mockery.But at the same time, while we know how to laugh and to make others laugh, sometimes it feels like there is an increasing amount of Brazilian people who use humor not to amuse but to trample.And an even greater number of people who have difficulty grasping all the complex layers of meaning that humor sews.The result is the use of humor to support extremist speech or falsehoods and a huge group of people who are uncritically in tune with these perspectives.There are many hypotheses for this phenomenon.One of them is that it is the effect of a recent wave of politicization of emerging sections of the Brazilian population.But the fact is that sometimes one can find oneself in trouble when trying to distinguish what is and what is not a joke, ultimately leading to a profound difficulty in distinguishing fiction from reality.It is not that art imitates life, it is that Brazilians are so used to creating ridiculous situations to face the harshness of reality, that reality often seems ridiculous to us and we end up anesthetized instead of politically mobilized.The boundaries between what is and what is not a joke have been tested daily by public authorities and extremist groups.When it comes to conservative and extremist messages, it has been common for intentions to be disguised, which Whitney Phillips and Ryan Milner call ambivalence, followed by an immediate retraction that appeals to the classic excuse that "it was just a joke".It is a well-recognized rhetorical strategy for conservative groups to hide behind a veil of play.So it becomes urgent to become critically equipped on how to demystify mischievous uses of play, particularly when considering how to respond to disinformation.Following Tandoc, Jr. and colleagues, we can think of disinformation on two different levels.They argue that it is possible to analyze stories based either on their facticity level or their mischievous intention.These two vectors, they say, allow us to differentiate disinformation from merely humorous messages such as those from satirical websites like The Onion or its Brazilian equivalent Sensacionalista [Sensationalist].That is, there are essentially two ways (or two endeavors) to distinguish information from disinformation, and subsequently joke from not-joke: the first is looking at the format and content-level (facticity) of the message, the second is looking at its stance (the intention).This dichotomy between intention and facticity is what this text is about.