Meme. The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins coined the word in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene to describe ideas or beliefs that move among people the way a virus does. By itself the term doesn’t necessarily suggest truth or falsity, though it often carries with it a whiff of the sinister. And it’s become a popular term in political discourse, especially on the left — a meme of its own, if you will.
There are philosophers and others who question whether the term is precise enough to use in academic study, but regardless of that, it’s a useful way of thinking about how ideas get spread.
Memes have always been with us, but as the media fragments from a small number of widely consumed outlets to many more finely targeted ones, they can proliferate much more rapidly — and paradoxically with narrower reach.
As protests in Madison over the union rights of public employees enter their third week, the memes are proliferating like wildfire. And the place where the sparks get lit, often as not, is Facebook.
The Social Network may have disappointed at the Oscars, winning Best Adapted Screenplay, but losing Best Picture to The King’s Speech. But when it comes time to look back on this era in the history of the media, the modern-day docudrama scored by industrial musicians Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross may be a lot more relevant than the heartwarming period piece that gets some of its history wrong.
Months ago there was a celebrity’s death — I forget whose now — but when I first learned about it because a Facebook friend had posted it, it hit me: Thirty years ago we got our news from Walter Cronkite. A decade ago the rise of blogging combined with evolving legacy news sources, both in their traditional forms (the nightly news and the morning paper) and online, created a weird mix in our information diet.
Now, thanks to Facebook, Twitter and other social networks, we are all Walter Cronkite. Or our Facebook friends and Twitter feeds are.
It was on Facebook last week that I first learned of the infamous “David Koch” prank call by BuffaloBeast writer Ian Murphy. Murphy’s stunt, posing as one of the billionaire oilmen whose contributions helped elect Scott Walker and whose group Americans for Prosperity is behind hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of ads to shore up support Walker’s anti-union budget repair bill in the face of public opposition— swept the Internet in minutes and quickly leaped to the mainstream media. And it reinforced what has been for Walker’s opponents a dominant meme: That the GOP governor is ultimately serving the interests of the wealthy at the expense of everyone else.
Elements of the meme have gotten distorted. I wrote last week how a budget-repair bill issue that warrants scrutiny — authorizing the administration to single-handedly sell off state-owned utilities to private buyers without bids — had been further yoked to Koch Industries in the mind of Walker critics and elements of the media.
Incidentally: Apologies to the Journal Sentinel’s Thomas Content are due here. He first broke the story about the provision on Feb. 14, a week before it turned up in the blogs or on WTMJ Channel 4. (I managed to miss it at the time.) Content’s original story also had no Koch reference; that speculation was promoted by partisan bloggers. I still contend that the Koch connection on this item is a stretch: There’s still simply no evidence that the Kochs are interested on that particular item.
But they’re convenient symbols for a real collection of issues about wealth and power in our society. And the absence of evidence hasn’t kept the power-plant/Koch connection from gaining substantial legs, including even making the NBC Nightly News.
Another meme that spread quickly: David Cay Johnston, a former New York Times reporter who just might be the nation’s foremost expert on the tax system, and who brings a populist sensibility to the subject, wrote a smart piece parsing the issue of whether public workers should “contribute” more to their pensions. Johnston’s well-taken point was that by definition, pensions are deferred compensation:
Because the “contributions” consist of money that employees chose to take as deferred wages – as pensions when they retire – rather than take immediately in cash. The same is true with the health care plan. If this were not so a serious crime would be taking place, the gift of public funds rather than payment for services.
Thus, state workers are not being asked to simply “contribute more” to Wisconsin’s retirement system (or as the argument goes, “pay their fair share” of retirement costs as do employees in Wisconsin’ s private sector who still have pensions and health insurance). They are being asked to accept a cut in their salaries so that the state of Wisconsin can use the money to fill the hole left by tax cuts and reduced audits of corporations in Wisconsin.
Johnston is absolutely accurate. The problem came in a headline that Forbes.com (yes, again, that Forbes) put on a blog post by Rick Ungar: “Taxpayers Actually Contribute Nothing To Public Employee Pensions.”
Umm, not quite. Taxpayers do contribute — but it’s in the form of compensation for services rendered. But Ungar’s piece, with that exact wording, took off on Facebook and Twitter elsewhere with even more alacrity.
The conflation, of course, gave cover to Walker supporters like JS columnist Patrick McIlheran to dismiss the legitimate issue that Johnston rose.
One more meme. In scattered places online has emerged the notion that the late former Milwaukee mayor and Socialist hero, Frank Zeidler, would be backing Walker over the pro-union protesters. McIlheran gets some credit for this notion, writing in the early stages of the unveiling of Walker’s bill that “Zeidler [believed] that government employees ought not to unionize.”
Uh, no.
Zeidler opposed strikes by public employees, which have been illegal in Wisconsin since the 1970s. But UW-Madison historian Will Jones, who’s at work on a book about the history of public employee unions, told me in an interview Monday that Zeidler himself negotiated willingly with public employee unions even before the practice was formally legalized in 1959. For all his reservations about the right to strike on the part of public employees, says Jones, “he did not support removing their right to collective bargaining. And he saw their unions as legitimate, which this law clearly does not.”
But perhaps nothing more clearly shows the way Facebook and its counterparts have made us all Walter Cronkite than the story of Marc Seals, a UW system professor, one-time Republican and former critic of teachers unions.
Last week Seals posted an essay on his Facebook page explaining his change of heart and why he opposed Walker’s bill. He titled it, “I want my party back.”
I first learned about it when a grad school classmate in Seattle posted a link to her Facebook page.
I read the essay, but I also spotted comments Seals had posted below it. It turns out that he’d submitted it to a local newspaper, which made him cut it to 500 words for publication. He did so, but because he felt that had cut the heart out of his argument, decided to post the uncut version.
That in itself is testimony of the new populism possible with the rise of digital media: Twenty years ago, Seals would probably have had to cut the essay by just as much. Then if he wanted anyone else to see it in full, he would have had to mail it around to friends.
Now, with a few keystrokes, it was visible to an audience of potentially millions.
I contacted Seals to find out what sort of reception it was getting and asked him to track responses.
Here’s what he wrote back to me on Monday:
“Okay. This has been a surreal few days. I’ve never had anything go viral before.
“I have gotten several dozen Facebook friend requests from people that I do not know. (I’m not accepting friend requests from strangers, by the way.) I’ve gotten about fifty emails or Facebook messages.
“The messages and friend requests have been from all over Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Texas, Nevada, Washington state, Oregon, Finland…. Finland! Most of them have been positive. Only a few have been nasty. I have not (and will not) had the time to respond meaningfully to most of them.
“The Facebook note jumped to email then to Twitter. It has been posted on several blogs. Dane101.com posted it Sunday, and in twenty-four hours 240 people have shared it on Facebook though that site alone. As I’ve said, I wish that there was a way to know how many people have read it in all forms.
“Something about my note clearly struck a chord with a lot of people. I wish that I could find a word for being proud and humbled at the same time.”
And that’s the way it is.
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