*Corresponding author: hedipudjos@gmail.com The Reception of Memes as Political Information in the Media Hedi Pudjo Santosa *1 , Sri Budi Lestari 1 , Primada Qurrota Ayun 1 1 Department of Communication, Universitas Diponegoro, Central Java, Indonesia Abstract. Lately memes have been using as viral marketing for products in advertising or satire in political campaigns in Indonesia. In 2013 Richard Dawkins, the author of The Selfish Gene (1976), characterized that memes on the internet as a human creativity. The pictures in the meme are tailored to the user's feelings and become the feeling of society. Meme cannot be said to be the ideal journalistic formula because most of them do not use the 5W + 1H journalism rule. Ironically though meme is not information that contains accuracy, relevance, and completeness of journalism, but at the same time it is in great demand even highly trusted, as they are easily accepted as information. While information that does not contain accuracy, often called hoax news. In Indonesia meme experiencing a surge in volume during the last 2014 presidential election; there are so many memes about Jokowi and Prabowo circulating on the Internet at the time, and later also many outstanding memes that contain the image in the form of satire, silly and even funny. Meme phenomenon related closely with the ease of dissemination of information through the media, especially online media. Bauckhage (2011: 42), meme usually develops through comments, imitations, parodies, or even media coverage. Meanwhile, according to Shifman (2013: 362), meme phrases are generally applied to describe propaganda. In Indonesia, meme is dominated by political news and satire especially during the 2014 presidential election. Keywords: Reception, Meme, Political information, New Media 1 Introduction The fast development of technology in this era has made information easier to be spread and accessed. Morissan explained that in regard of freedom of media when delivering news there has to be information which represents various sides and responds to numerous interests and need [1]. However, there’s a shift in journalistic work nowadays that in delivering information the fundamental formula of 5w+1h often ignored. Every information product of media shall prioritize accuracy and relevancy of the news. Accuracy is the conformity of the delivered news and the sources of the news. Aside of both aspects completeness of the news is also a crucial factor of information [2]. In the last couple of years there’s a new trend of information through weird and funny pictures with sarcastic meaning used to express someone’s feelings in cyber world. Some of Indonesian netizens identify this information through pictures as meme (read: meem). A meme usually circulates in internet through one’s social media to another and it can be really popular because aside of way of joking, it also can be used as strategy by a professional public relations marketing. Not only that because lately meme can also be used as a means of political campaign for viral marketing both for product commercial and as a satire in political campaign. In 2013, Richard Dawkins, the author of The Selfish Gene (1976), characterized internet meme as human creativity and because of that, the pictures that used reflect the feeling of the users. It’s also because of the same reason why meme cannot be included as the ideal works of journalism because it doesn’t contain proper format. Ironically, despite the absence of accuracy, relevancy and competency of its elements, it attracts huge interest from the audience as reliable source due to its understandable nature. However, information without accuracy could be pointed as hoax. As quoted from the statement of Masyarakat Anti Hoax Indonesia (Indonesia Anti Hoax Community) chairman in a press conference in celebrating “Masyarakat Anti Fitnah Yojomase” on January 14th 2017: “...(a lot of) people are divided because of (believing) in hoax news and it can accelerate into physical violence. Hoax within information or news are going rampant as one of the effects of mass development in cyber technology. Almost everyone can access any information they want from their smartphones. Afterwards, it was also mentioned that approximately 130 million of Indonesian people accessed internet through their mobile devices, but in contrast the cultural literacy is the second lowest in the world. Hence, the https://doi.org/10.1051/e3sconf/201873 , (2018) E3S Web of Conferences 73 ICENIS 2018 1 1 40 40 14 14 © The Authors, published by EDP Sciences. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).