2 weeks Ago
With Donald Trump's return to the White House, I've been reminded of a viral social media moment from just before his first rise to power in 2016. After waiting in line to vote that year, nearly 12,000 people joined a second queue, at a cemetery in upstate New York, to visit the grave of famed women's suffragist Susan B Anthony and place their "I Voted" stickers on her headstone. The event keyed into a recurring theme of women's rights in Clinton's campaign and quickly garnered national media attention.
An unplanned Facebook livestream by a local news station accrued over 7 million views in a matter of hours. The livestream captivated me: people reinterpreting and repurposing campaign rhetoric in real time, based on their own personal histories and identities. It reflected a potent cultural force.
Today, presidential discourse online is increasingly shaped not by politicians themselves, but by everyday people. Through social media, Americans project our own ideas onto the nation's political future, which are always rooted in our contested perspectives on its past. Institutions and individuals interpret political contests in ways that are deeply informed by memory work, how people revise accounts of the past to serve present-day narrative needs.
People do memory work when they create media adaptations of historic events -- from Shakespeare to Hamilton; build monuments to honour historical figures; or even just tell our day-to-day, personal stories. Memory work has the power to perpetuate present visions of history into the future. Sometimes this means overemphasising or obscuring some aspects of the original events.
Memory and identity work have been around since long before the internet, but social media can intensify them. Connecting people from different locations and cultures through vast digital networks prompts countless competing narratives of the same events. During that 2016 livestream at Anthony's gravesite, the same sequence played out thousands of times: Participants passed their phones to a waiting attendant, stepped up to Anthony's headstone, and posed for a photo before hustling away to make room for the next group.
But the Facebook users tuning in over the course of the 13-hour stream interpreted this sameness in vastly different ways. This phenomenon has only gained steam in the eight years since. The 2020 presidential election produced controversy as Democrats took to social media to celebrate Joe Biden's win, while Republicans crowdsourced the #StopTheSteal movement by sharing accounts of alleged election interference.
Similarly, misinformation about the Covid-19 vaccine spread, in part on social media through longstanding partisan anti-vaccination narratives and internet conspiracy theories, which made pandemic vaccination a divisive political issue. Or take the "coconut tree" meme that emerged from Kamala Harris' campaign during the 2024 election cycle. In the days after Joe Biden announced his withdrawal from the race, it appeared everywhere, from TikTok and the nightly news to specialty summer cocktail menus and a new Ben & Jerry's ice cream flavour.
Emerging from a speech Ms Harris gave at the swearing-in ceremony for the White House Initiative on Advancing Educational Equity, Excellence, and Economic Opportunity for Hispanics in May 2023, the video captured Harris saying, "You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you." Ms Harris' remarks emphasised the importance of context: In this case, why offering Hispanic students more support demanded offering their community as a whole more support. But the coconut tree meme became a social media spectacle because Americans used platforms like TikTok to customise it to align with their own points of view, remixing the original speech with new political interpretations and aesthetics.
They shared it in comedic edits poking fun at Harris' laughing, humorous delivery while also tying it to other online trends, like the Charli XCX "brat summer". This was memory work that enriched the significance of the original speech while also diluting, or forgetting, some of its meaning. Because Ms Harris' remarks were popularised as an internet meme -- a genre known for its decontextualisation, which separates messages from their original context and recycles them for new narrative purposes -- her message about context became a disembodied artifact of the internet spin cycle.
Social media has become fundamental to the ways that Americans understand and make sense of political events in the present and propel their memories into the future. Just as social media memory work helps us to preserve the political past, it also dictates what we forget. Even though the past will always remain a contested topic, understanding and critically evaluating our memory work can also help us to see the present more clearly.
As we enter Mr Trump's second presidency, with his nostalgia-laden promise to "make America great again," and the damage his administration has already done to national archives and records of American history, it's more important than ever for us to remember that our narratives can also be tools of resistance and subversion. Despite their many problems, I believe that social media and the internet can still be vital tools for expression, connection, and documentation. We have the power and creativity to produce our own stories, preserving important histories and voices of today as the substance of future memories.
©Zócalo Public Square. Chelsea Butkowski is an assistant professor of data, media, and identity in the School of Communication at American University in Washington, DC. Butkowski's research examines how people use digital media technologies to perform and make sense of their identities during times of crisis and political transition.
This was written for Zócalo Public Square..
